The notorious adventurer and seducer Giacomo Casanova tells of his travels - on the run from the authorities of his native Venice - around northern Europe, poking fun at the ruling classes he encounters there, before focusing on a pivotal incident that occurs in Warsaw. Insulted by a Polish count over an Italian ballerina, Casanova finds himself forced to challenge his rival to a duel, and the sequence of events and their aftermath are described with gusto by the narrator. 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.

5) To what extent do events occurring during regeneration re semble those seen in development? Questions like these remain open, particularly in relation to the mammalian central nervous system and to the effects of lesions or disease. The first chapters of this volume are concerned primarily with normal and abnormal development of the nervous system. New concepts have emerged over the past few years as a result of experiments made on the development of the higher nervous system in mammals. Thus, the principles of cell death, competition, selective retraction of specific processes, and the effects of abnormalities on the development of the rest of the system have now been extensively investigated. In addition, considerable information is available about biochemical changes during normal and abnormal development in the human. At the other end of the scale, in invertebrates it is now possible to follow cell lineage and to define the origin and fate of a sin gle neuron of known function together with its processes. While an understanding of development is clearly important for studying basic mechanisms of repair and regeneration, one cannot expect the processes to be identical or even comparable in the two situations. For example, cell migration, guidance by radial glial fibers, selective cell death, and the critical periods for competition, sprouting, and retraction observed in the visual system can hardly playa part in repair."

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 impoverished present, Leopardi rejected both the easy allure of Catholic faith and the unbridled optimism proposed by science and the Enlightenment. His unflinching pessimism and existential resolve, here brilliantly rendered in verse by prize-winning translator J.G. Nichols, make him one of the most fascinating and best-loved Italian poets.

Found in the Codex Atlanticus of Leonardo da Vinci's writings and drawings, `The Prophecies' are a collection of enigmatic divinatory pronouncements, some punning and playful, others dire and ominous. While the author's intentions behind these utterances are unclear, they clearly attest to the artist's fevered and troubled imagination and offer a glimpse into a world very similar to that depicted in his lost painting The Battle of Anghiari. 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.

A verse translation by a prize-winning translator with facing Italian text

Dante's dramatic journey through the circles of hell in search of redemption--and his encounter with devils, monsters, and the souls of some of the greatest sinners who ever walked on earth--is one of the cornerstones of Western literature, the summit of medieval thinking, and arguably the highest poetic achievement of all time. "Inferno," the first part of Dante's "Divine Comedy," is presented here in a verse translation together with the original text facing, extensive notes, illustrations, and a critical apparatus focusing on the author's life and works.

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 of his most personal thoughts and emotions and a literary masterpiece dealing with universal issues, Secretum - Petrarch's best-known work in Latin - is a fascinating and pioneering example of the autobiographical genre.

At the end of an industrious political career in conflictriven Italy, the Florentine diplomat Niccolo Machiavelli composed his masterpiece The Prince, a classic study of power and politics, and a manual of ruthlessness for any ambitious ruler. 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.

Dante is known to most readers outside Italy for his gritty descriptions of the Inferno, but there is another, gentler side to his poetry, which found expression throughout his career in verses that made him, together with his friend Guido Cavalcanti, the leading love poet of his generation. From the ballads and rime of his youth to the heart-rending lyrics written on the death of Beatrice and the more sober, philosophical canzoni of his later years, this volume provides the only English edition of the great Florentine's complete love poems, in brilliant verse translations by Dante specialists J.G. Nichols and Anthony Mortimer.

In the summer of 1348, the plague ravages Florence, and ten young Florentines take refuge in the countryside, where they entertain themselves with tales of love, death and corruption, featuring a host of colourful characters, from lascivious clergymen and mad kings to devious lovers and false miracle-makers. Named after the Greek for ten days, Boccaccio's book of stories draws on ancient mythology, contemporary events and everyday life, leaving an indelible mark on the works of future writers such as Chaucer and Shakespeare. 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.

Of unknown date, and surviving in a tenth-century manuscript, Beowulf is the tale of a young Geatish hero and his struggle with three deadly foes, beginning with the dread monster Grendel, who has been devouring warriors in the hall of the Danish King in their sleep. 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 translation by multi-award-winning translator J.G. Nichols.

Describing Dante's second stage in his arduous journey to redemption, Purgatory features a host of unforgettable scenes and characters, and arguably some of the best poetry to be found in the Divine Comedy. The gloom, torments and evils of Hell have been left behind, but Dante's ascent of Mount Purgatory towards Paradise remains fraught with obstacles, not least the burden of his own mortality and his human passions. 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.

Rising from humble beginnings as a foundling, Castruccio Castracani came to prominence as one of the most powerful and shrewd warlords in Italy. Indeed, Machiavelli argues, so great was his vigour and charisma that - had he not been prevented by his untimely death - he might have surpassed in fame the great generals of antiquity and brought all the territories of Italy under his sole dominion. Written in Machiavelli's characteristically lucid and terse style, Life of Castruccio Castracani is not only a key text in understanding the development of the author's ideas on leadership and good statesmanship that would find fuller expression in The Prince, but also a revealing account of the political ferment and fractious factionalism of fourteenth-century Italy. This edition is accompanied by selected passages from Machiavelli's Florentine Histories and a detailed map with historical notes.

Foscolo ranks among the most famous and enduringly popular poets in Italian literature, and in this collection, the only available in the English language, his most significant poems are collected in J.G. Nichols's lucid verse translation. Expressing the author's political, civic and sentimental concerns, these poems will surprise the English reader with their immediacy and intimacy. Sepulchres, Foscolo's masterpiece, as well as being one of the pinnacles of European neoclassical literature, is still one of the most widely studied poems in Italy. Foscolo's poetry reveals the inner recesses of a passionate, restless and surprisingly modern mind.

In the third and final part of The Divine Comedy, Dante recounts his journey through heaven, after the travails and torments of Hell and the arduous ascent of Mount Purgatory, creating a cosmology of the highest realm of creation which is astonishing in its complexity. In Dante's imagining, Paradise is formed out of concentric spheres surrounding the Earth, beginning with the Moon and ending with the Empyrean. Dante must traverse these ethereal regions guided by his beloved Beatrice, as a means of attaining wisdom, revelation and beatitude. 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.

Travelling salesman Enrico Gaia decides to play a trick on the conceited ageing litterateur 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 at his own expense forty years ago. This leads the old man to reach new heights of self-delusion, spurred on by Gaia's succession of ruses. In this tragicomic study of deception and disappointment, Italo Svevo - who himself was an undiscovered writer until his old age - parodies elements of his own life and offers an insightful psychological portrait of a person who has lost touch with reality.

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 the ballad. At the same time deeply personal - dealing with themes of love, death and exile - and imbued with the poetic and political milieux of the period, Dante's Rime offer a fascinating glimpse into the imagination of arguably the greatest writer of all time.

Saddened with his country's loss of freedom, disillusioned with life and racked with loneliness and ennui, university student Jacopo Ortis can only find some comfort 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, Jacopo's torments become unbearable, and he feels that there is only one way out of his misery - a symbolic gesture against fate, God and all the tyrants of this world. Allegedly based on the real-life tragic story of the Italian student Girolamo Ortis, and suffused with the author's own autobiographical experiences, Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis is a masterly prose work by one of Italy's most celebrated poets, and perhaps the greatest Italian novel of the Romantic movement.

The first-ever translation into English of Lampedusa's correspondence includes recently discovered, previously unpublished letters and unreleased photographs of London by the author of "The Leopard" himself "The Leopard," published posthumously in 1958, was one of the most important works of fiction to appear in the Italian language in the 20th century. Between 1925 and 1930, its author, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, wrote a number of letters to his cousins Casimiro and Lucio Piccolo in which he describes his travels around Europe (London, Paris, Zurich, and Berlin). The letters display much of Lampedusa's distinctive style present in his later work; not only the razor-sharp introspection, but also a wicked sense of humor, playful in its description of the "comedie humaine." United and underpinned by the genre of the novel, Lampedusa's lifetime obsession, some letters also read like excerpts from a Stendhalian travel journal, while others are adventures populated with comic, exaggerated personalities.

Admired for the poetical heights of his Canti, the gentle wit of his prose dialogues and the soul-searching questionings of his Zibaldone (Notebooks), Leopardi was also an acute social commentator and a sharp dissector of the human mind. Thoughts - a collection of philosophical and critical observations put together for publication by Leopardi himself shortly before his death in 1837 - shows a more light-hearted side to Leopardi's personality, and offers both those who are familiar with and those who are new to his works a fresh insight into the thought processes and the worldview of Italy's last great polymath.

Alongside his monumental Zibaldone (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 metaphysical questions that preoccupied his restless spirit. First published in 1827 and here presented in a new translation by J.G. Nichols along with Thoughts, Leopardi's own selected pearls of wisdom and gems of social observation, Moral Fables will enchant both those who are familiar with and those who are new to the works of Italy's last great polymath.

A collection of sixteen sonnets about humans who are transformed into beasts (both real and imaginary), and vice versa, A Modern Bestiary is a new interpretation of the old bestiary tradition, which has fascinated generations of readers and writers alike, from the Middle Ages through to the Modern Age.