Series: Villa I Tatti Series

The act of eating is a basic human need. Yet in all societies, quotidian choices regarding food and its consumption reveal deeply rooted shared cultural conventions. Food goes beyond issues relating to biological needs and nutrition or production and commerce; it also reveals social and cultural criteria that determine what dishes are prepared on what occasions, and it unveils the...

In his description of Ulysses in Canto XXVI of the Inferno, Dante subjected the legendary Greek hero to a thoroughgoing revision. The Homeric Ulysses, after ten years of war and a further ten of fabulous adventures throughout the Mediterranean, returns home to Ithaca and resumes his position as son, father, husband, and king of the island. In contrast, Dante's Ulysses—and...

An accidental encounter with a slim unprepossessing book on ex-votos, taken at random from one of the shelves of the Berenson Library at I Tatti, leads memoirist and novelist Gina Alhadeff to a series of meditations on miracles, sudden appearances and just as sudden disappearances, and the way a faith in saints or the Virgin Mary might inspire images that...