Venice An Odyssey

An evocative and fascinating portrait of Venice, Italy-the ultimate city where there are stories on every street and in every doorway, nook and cranny. What is it about Venice? The city empowers creativity, and is a place of art, artisans, and artistry, with a rich cultural and intellectual history. It's also been facing major challenges-including a fragile ecosystem, significant depopulation and political volatility-leading to fears that the city will become an inauthentic museum for tourists. Neal Robbins examines this Italian city, reflecting on the changes he has seen since he first encountered it in the late 1970s-living with a Venetian family while he was a high school student-to quite recently, when, after nearly 50 years and a career as international journalist, he returned to see how the city has endured and changed. Drawing on his journalism background, Robbins brings deep research, curiosity, and keen insights to his personal experiences of the city, delivering a multi-dimensional profile of this enchanting place. Taking the reader down the city's streets, into its churches and cafes, and onboard boats traveling through its canals and out into its vital lagoon, Robbins shares the city's history, symbols, politics, and struggles, as well as its sounds, smells, animals, and many of its remarkable denizens. He draws upon exclusive interviews with Venetians from all walks of life-artisans, historians, a bank employee, authors, parents, a psychologist, an oceanographer, a funeral director, a nobleman and a former pop star-to share multiple personal interpretations of Venice as it was, as it is and what it can be. Readers will come away with a rich understanding and appreciation of Venice's history and culture, the challenges it faces, and what it shows us all about the future.

An evocative and fascinating portrait of Venice, Italy-the ultimate city where there are stories on every street and in every doorway, nook and cranny. What is it about Venice? The city empowers creativity, and is a place of art, artisans, and artistry, with a rich cultural and intellectual history. It's also been facing major challenges-including a fragile ecosystem, significant depopulation and political volatility-leading to fears that the city will become an inauthentic museum for tourists. Neal Robbins examines this Italian city, reflecting on the changes he has seen since he first encountered it in the late 1970s-living with a Venetian family while he was a high school student-to quite recently, when, after nearly 50 years and a career as international journalist, he returned to see how the city has endured and changed. Drawing on his journalism background, Robbins brings deep research, curiosity, and keen insights to his personal experiences of the city, delivering a multi-dimensional profile of this enchanting place. Taking the reader down the city's streets, into its churches and cafes, and onboard boats traveling through its canals and out into its vital lagoon, Robbins shares the city's history, symbols, politics, and struggles, as well as its sounds, smells, animals, and many of its remarkable denizens. He draws upon exclusive interviews with Venetians from all walks of life-artisans, historians, a bank employee, authors, parents, a psychologist, an oceanographer, a funeral director, a nobleman and a former pop star-to share multiple personal interpretations of Venice as it was, as it is and what it can be. Readers will come away with a rich understanding and appreciation of Venice's history and culture, the challenges it faces, and what it shows us all about the future.

Fresh from his triumphs in the Trojan War, Odysseus, King of Ithaca, wants nothing more than to return home to his family. Instead, he offends the sea god, Poseidon, who dooms him to years of shipwreck and wandering. Battling man-eating monsters, violent storms, and the supernatural seductions of sirens and sorceresses, Odysseus will need all his strength and cunning--and a little help from Mount Olympus--to make his way home and seize his kingdom from the schemers who seek to wed his queen and usurp his throne. Award-winning graphic artist Gareth Hinds masterfully reinterprets a story of heroism, adventure, and high action that has been told and retold for more than 2,500 years--though never quite like this. With bold imagery and an ear tuned to the music of Homer’s epic poem, Gareth Hinds reinterprets the ancient classic as it’s never been told before.

On a visit to Venice with her father, Vendela experiences the richness and beauty of the city and its palaces, gondolas and statues. Color illustrations throughout.

The book is based up a trip among the "pearls of Dalmatica"; a region with a remarkable history and unspoiled beauty.

Winner, IPPY Silver Award in Architecture Finalist, 2016 Foreword Indies Award in Architecture An intimate journey through the remarkable Venetian urban landscape, this book reveals the architectural features that contribute to the incredulity of the beautiful city from the mysterious sotoporteghi to the complexity of Carlo Scarpa's "immaculate detailing." Evocative photographs complement the personal reveries contributed by 36 notable international architects and architectural writers who have been inspired by the city and share in her wonder. Included are personal reflections from Tadao Ando, James Biber, Mario Botta, Michele De Lucchi, Massimiliano Fuksas, Robert McCarter, Richard Murphy, Witold Rybczynski, Annabelle Selldorf, and Thomas Woltz.

Rick Stein's Far Eastern Odyssey is an ambitious journey, avoiding the beaten track and tourist hot-spots, in search of the authentic food of Southeast Asia. In this accompanying book to the major BBC series, Rick shares his favourite recipes and some well-known classic dishes inspired by the fragrant ingredients and recipes he sampled from local chefs, family-run restaurants, street vendors and market stalls. In Cambodia, Rick learns how to make a national dish Samlor kako, a stir-fried pork and vegetable soup flavoured with an array of spices; in Vietnam he is shown the best recipe for Pho Bo, a Vietnamese beef noodle soup; and in Thailand, Rick tries Geng Leuong Sai Gung Lai Sai Bua, a yellow curry made with prawns and lotus shoots that you won't find outside the country. Rick Stein's Far Eastern Odyssey includes over 150 new recipes from Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Bali each complemented by Rick's colourful anecdotes from the trip and beautiful on-location photography. This is a visually-stunning culinary tribute to Southeast Asian cooking that evokes the magic of bustling markets, the sizzle of oil and the aromatic steam from a Far Eastern kitchen.

The Choice of Odysseus demonstrates how the Odyssey provided Renaissance authors and readers with a poetic ethics—tools for living developed in poetry—to navigate the challenges of their age. As they endured schisms, ruptures, and failures of ideals, readers and poets turned to the Odyssey for narratives of recovery and aftermath. Sarah Van der Laan reconstructs Renaissance readings of the Odyssey from myriad sources. Situating major works by Petrarch, Poliziano, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, Monteverdi, and Milton in these Odyssean contexts, she recovers a powerful Renaissance tradition of Odyssean epic. Renaisance poets adopted the Odyssey as an epic model that supplements and even opposes the Virgilian epic model of conquest and imperial foundation. For Renaissance readers and authors, the Odyssey renders heroic other kinds of lived experience: the necessity of facing the world and its challenges with only human wisdom and reason; the ability to integrate traumatic detours and reversals into a vision of a successful and accomplished self; the recovery of a private life and personal desires painfully suspended for public service. Emphasizing marriage, reconciliation, homecoming, and the return to private life and private desires as suitably heroic matter for epic and powerful conventions for narrative and poetic closure, the Renaissance Odyssey and the epics and operas it inspired confer a uniquely heroic status on experience for men and women alike.

Venice at the end of the 1500s is an unforgiving city. The Doge rules with an iron fist and the Holy Office harbors suspicions about everything and everyone. Even the walls have eyes. The Republic of Venice watches and listens, then passes judgment swiftly and definitively. In a city where everyone is assumed guilty of something, a young stonemason by the name of Michele has been accused of a crime he didn't commit. Afraid for his life, he flees the city aboard a galley carrying gold coin, leaving behind his young wife, Bianca. Banished from his home, Michele embarks on a series of extraordinary adventures as the ship he travels on stops in every port and on every island of the Mediterranean. In order to survive this once na;ve and immature boy must fast become a man, one possessed of cunning, courage and fortitude. Bianca remains alone in the cruel and treacherous Venice. She faces challenges that are, if anything, even more difficult than those of Michele, and will encounter all the terrors and mysteries that the labyrinthine city holds in its blind alleys and narrow passageways. And she, like Michele, will discover in herself a tenacious and indestructible will to survive. Land and sea, East and West, the arrogance of power and the indestructible pride of the poor and dispossessed. Two lives and one all embracing love. As richly imagined as Orhan Pamuk's The White Castle, The Eyes of Venice is a grand and gripping tale of love and adventure that will also appeal to fans of the historical novels of Umberto Eco and Susan Dunant.