Confronting a Bronzino portrait in an English country house, a young American heiress comes face to face with her own predicament. For Milly Theale, who seems to have the world before her and at her feet, is fatally ill. Eager for life, eager for love, she embarks on her European adventure, warming to the admiration of her new friends Kate Croy and Merton Densher. But Merton and Kate are secretly engaged, and come to see in this angel with a thumping...

It is the story of Sterne's fictional travel through both countries, particularly France. Sterne made two trips within the continent, in 1762-64 and 1765-66, but the book is not about his errands, but those of parson Yorick's (a character in "Tristram Shandy"). With a less acid and outrageous humor than in his previous work, Sterne anyway mixes the picaresque with an ironic and, frequently, hilarious philosophical irony. Yorick begins by trying to...

Romola is set in Renaissance Florence during the turbulent years following the expulsion of the powerful Medici family during which the zealous religious reformer Savonarola rose to control the city. At its heart is Romola, the devoted daughter of a blind scholar, married to the clever but ultimately treacherous Tito whose duplicity in both love and politics threatens to destroy everything she values, and she must break away to find her own path in...

The Charterhouse of Parma chronicles the exploits of Fabrizio del Dongo, an ardent young aristocrat who joins Napoleon's army just before the Battle of Waterloo. Yet perhaps the novel's most unforgettable characters are the hero's beautiful aunt, the alluring Duchess of Sanseverina, and her lover, Count Mosca, who plot to further Fabrizio's political career at the treacherous court of Parma in a sweeping story that illuminates an entire epoch of European...

"These three stories, set during the summer of 1940, draw on Italo Calvino's memories of his own adolescence during the Second World War, too young to be forced to fight in Mussolini's army but old enough to be conscripted into the Italian youth brigades. The callow narrator of these tales observes the mounting unease of a city girding itself for war, the looting of an occupied French town, and nighttime revels during a blackout. Appearing here in...

Each summer in the ancient hill town of Siena, Italy, there erupts one of the most extraordinary, exciting and dangerous horse races in the world--the Palio. This is the story of Giorgi Terni, a boy of the Maremma Marshes, who rode a half-Arabian cart horse in the Palio.

An Italian-American major, part of American occupation forces in Sicily during World War II, tries to reform the town in his charge by being decent to people. His efforts are epitomized by his efforts to replace the 700-year-old bell melted down for bullets by the fascists.

Judah Ben-Hur lives as a rich Jewish prince and merchant in Jerusalem at the beginning of the 1st century. His old friend Messala arrives as commanding officer of the Roman legions. They become bitter enemies. Because of an unfortunate accident, Ben-Hur is sent to slave in the mines while his family is sent to leprosy caves. As Messala is dying from being crushed in a chariot race, he reveals where Ben-Hur's family is. On the road to find them, Ben-Hur...