In ways no guide book can achieve, these twenty absorbing tales by Italian authors ranging from Boccaccio in the Middle Ages to Giacomo Casanova in the eighteenth century, to Pier-Paolo Pasolini in the twentieth and contemporary new writers such as Melania Mazzucco and Igiaba Scego, offer the delight of discovering and exploring one of the world's most unique cities thorough a wide variety of individual lives and epochs. The tales span seven hundred years but rather than being ordered chronologically, old and new appear alongside one another, reflecting the dual identity of Rome - thriving, modern metropolis and ancient city centre that is one of the wonders of the world. The tales are wonderfully varied in style, tone, and subject matter. Casanova sets about seducing the hotelier's daughter only minutes after his arrival, a notorious Spanish prostitute in Renaissance Rome endures a public hiding without flinching, a Danish tourist in her sixties finds an unusual lover, Pope John Paul II uncovers a vast conspiracy against him, a medieval revolutionary demagogue suffers almost the same fate as Mussolini. Each story is illustrated with a black-and-white photograph and there is a map of Rome to help readers locate the important sites which feature in the text. A deep sense of timelessness, of separate destinies entwined across a gulf of centuries, is the cumulative effect of this vivid mosaic of dramatic, comic, and tragic stories set in the Eternal City.

Out of Italy concerns the Italian contribution to life in North-East England since Roman times, with particular attention to the last 250 years. Italian-Swiss stuccoists decorated many of the region's finest historic buildings; a colony of skilled craftsmen from Como specialised in manufacturing optical instruments in Victorian Newcastle; and there have lived among us gifted Italian architects, artists, glass-blowers, mosaic workers, and even, briefly, Giuseppe Garibaldi. In the nineteenth century, numerous Italians from a peasant background found their way here to try their luck as street traders and organ-grinders, chestnut sellers and ice cream makers, and many went on to found their families' fortunes. But with the Second World War, when anti-Italian feeling ran high, the community's resilience was tested to the utmost: even elderly long-settled Italians were interned as 'enemy aliens', while other family members served in the British forces, one even winning the VC. From 1942, thousands of Italian prisoners-of-war filled labour camps in the North-East, and a few eventually settled. Mass emigration from Italy resumed after the war, bringing hundreds of men and women to work among us. Their presence and their skills, like those of their many forerunners, have coloured the life of our region in numerous ways. Over 300 evocative illustrations accompany a lively narrative which details the lives of many individuals and families within the broader context of their times. This is the first book to study Italian immigration in a region of England in such detail and over such a long period of time.

"My problem, my central problem, is I can't sleep. . ." By turns comic and poignant, brutal and beautiful, Sleep follows an insomniac's long journey to the light through a night of tormenting memories and lucid drunken speculation. A sequence of bizarre encounters with other lonely and despicable denizens of the night leads him to recover some meaning to his life: release from his dead mother's incapacity for love, his yearning for 'the first whore', for 'the unknown house', for sleep. . .