Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis

By Ugo Foscolo

Saddened by the subjugation of Italy under Napoleon, disillusioned with life and racked with loneliness and ennui, university student Jacopo Ortis finds comfort only in the company of his friends and in his love for Teresa. But when his studies call him back to Padua and he is separated from her, Ja…

The Divine Comedy: 700th Anniversary Edition (English Only / 1 Volume)

By Dante Alighieri

Dante’s dramatic journey down the circles of Hell, up the mountain of Purgatory and through the spheres of Heaven in search of redemption – and his encounter with devils, monsters and the souls of sinners and saints – is one of the cornerstones of Western literature, the summit of medieval thinking…

The Divine Comedy in Three Volumes

By Dante Alighieri

Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise are presented here in a new verse translation by acclaimed poet and prize-winning translator J.G. Nichols, together with the original text facing, extensive notes, illustrations by Gustave Doré and a critical apparatus focusing on the author’s life and works. Inferno…

Loveless Love

By Luigi Pirandello

First English translation of Pirandello’s first published work, originally published in Italian in 1894. In ‘The Wave’, a young man falls dangerously in love with the tenant downstairs, who is engaged to be married; in ‘The Signorina’, a flirtatious young woman is caught between her feelings and her…

Beowulf: New Translation

The most important Old English poem, and the first known major poem written in a European vernacular, Beowulf is a unique and compelling mix of sixth-century historical events, Christian commentary, Germanic myth and Anglo-Saxon culture. The poem is presented here in a dual-text format with a new tr…

Life in the Country

By Giovanni Verga

Published in 1880, one year before Verga’s influential novel The Malavoglias, Life in the Country first marked his stylistic shift towards the verismo school of Italian realism. The collection’s centrepiece, ‘Rustic Honour’ (‘Cavalleria rusticana’) – which was famously adapted into a play by the aut…

Prophecies

By Leonardo da Vinci

This volume also contains a further selection of Leonardo da Vinci’s fragmentary writings, in the form of fables and aphorisms. Taken together, these pieces provide an invaluable insight into the thought processes of one of the Renaissance’s most productive minds. Prophecies is part of Alma 101-Page…

The Duel

By Casanova

A rollicking autobiographical account by one of the most iconic figures of eighteenth-century Europe, The Duel is presented here with an extract about the same event from Casanova’s memoirs, written fifteen years later. The notorious adventurer and seducer Giacomo Casanova tells of his travels – on…

A Perfect Hoax

By Italo Svevo

Travelling salesman Enrico Gaia decides to play a trick on the conceited ageing littérateur Mario Samigli: he dupes him into thinking that a representative of a prestigious Viennese publishing house wants to commission a German translation of a long-forgotten novel Samigli had written and published…

Canti

By Giacomo Leopardi

First published in 1831, and here presented in a dual-language edition with annotations and additional reading material, Leopardi’s poetical masterpiece is an unsurpassed anatomy of man’s unhappiness on earth. Trapped between an admiration for the classical past and a disappointment in the impoveris…

The Prince

By Niccolò Machiavelli

Controversial in his own time, The Prince made Machiavelli’s name a byword for manipulative scheming, and had an impact on such major figures as Napoleon and Frederick the Great. It contains principles as true today as when they were first written almost five centuries ago. This edition contains not…

Sepulchres and Other Poems

By Ugo Foscolo

Expressing the author’s political, civic and sentimental concerns, these poems will surprise the English reader with their immediacy and intimacy. “On Sepulchres”, Foscolo’s masterpiece, as well as being one of the pinnacles of European neoclassical literature, is still one of the most widely studie…

Secretum

By Francesco Petrarch

By writing what he called a ‘secret book’ – taking the shape of a conversation between himself and St Augustine – Petrarch aimed to compose a cathartic text which would alleviate his spiritual crisis and help him make further inroads towards knowledge and fulfilment. At once an intimate repository o…

Rime (Dual-language edition)

By Dante Alighieri

This collection of Dante Alighieri’s lyrics charts his poetic evolution and displays the ground on which his Vita nuova and Divine Comedy developed. Inspired in his early poems by troubadour love poetry, Dante would later come to master all the genres of the time, such as the canzone, the sonnet and…

Purgatory: Dual-Language Edition

By Dante Alighieri

Purgatory is presented here in a new verse translation by acclaimed poet and prize-winning translator J.G. Nichols. Also included are the original Italian text, extensive notes and a critical apparatus focusing on Dante’s life and works. Describing Dante’s second stage in his arduous journey to rede…

Paradise: Dual-Language Edition

By Dante Alighieri

Containing some of Dante’s finest poetry, Dante’s Paradise is an enduring vision of grace and a powerful allegory for the struggle for redemption. This dual-text edition completes J.G. Nichols’s masterful verse translation of The Divine Comedy. In the third and final part of The Divine Comedy, Dante…

Moral Fables

By Giacomo Leopardi

Alongside his monumental Notebooks and the poems collected in Canti, which make him one of Italy’s greatest and best-loved poets, Giacomo Leopardi penned a number of fictional pieces, mostly in the form of gently humorous dialogues, in which he dealt with philosophical ideas and many of the metaphys…

Inferno: Dual-Language Edition

By Dante Alighieri

Inferno, the first part of Dante’s Comedy, is presented here in a new verse translation by acclaimed poet and prize-winning translator J.G. Nichols, together with the original text facing, extensive notes, illustrations and a critical apparatus focusing on the author’s life and works. Dante’s dramat…

Decameron

By Boccaccio

J.G. Nichols’s new translation stays as faithful to the original as possible while being written in a clear and eminently modern English, capturing the timeless humour of one of the great classics of world literature. In the summer of 1348, the plague ravages Florence, and ten young Florentines take…