Love Italy? New books explore art, depravity, politics and narrow streets

       

Crinkled map of Florence in hand, Dianne Hales traces the route Mona Lisa may have ridden on her wedding day in 1495, the convent where her sister may have been assaulted, and the studio where she likely sat before "Leonardo's attentive gaze." In "Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered (Simon & Schuster, $28), Hales, a tenacious, curiosity-fueled prize-winning journalist, sweeps us up in her fascination with the mysterious woman she learned was, in fact, a real woman. Lisa Gherardini was born in a converted wool shop in 1749 and married the truculent Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo. And that smile? "Consciously or not," Hales writers, "We see in Lisa what we want to see -- mother, lover, daughter, fantasy, soother, seductress." A fascinating read if you're interested in art, family dynasties and dynamics and the customs and habits of daily life in 15th century Italy.

Another take on that smile is Renaissance scholar Alexander Lee's in "The Ugly Renaissance: Sex, Greed, Violence and Depravity in an Age of Beauty" (Doubleday, $29.95). He says the mysterious Mona Lisa smile hides a  world of power politics and anti-semitism during this time of sex, scandal and suffering. "Its cities were filled with depravity and inequality, its streets thronged with prostitutes and perverted priests and its houses played home to seduction, sickness and shady backroom deals and conspiracies of every variety." It's an October release.

“Pisa doesn’t appeal to me,” says John Keahey in "Hidden Tuscany: A Well-Known Region's Unknown Places" (Thomas Dunne Books, $26.99). So Keahey heads for the "narrow streets of western Tuscany villages buried deep in the foothills of imposing mountains," as he combines travelogue with deep history, present-day conversations and mouth-watering descriptions of cheese, pasta, sausage and bread. He also includes off-the-beaten-path literary anecdotes, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley's bizarre cremation ceremony on the beach at Viareggio after he drowned at sea in 1822. Extremely readable.

"The Lost Botticelli," by Paul Stephano (HIP Apollo, $15.95) is a thriller about -- you guessed it -- a lost Botticelli painting. His editors read an early version of the manuscript and wanted more dead bodies and less Renaissance history, according to an online  interview with Stephano. So Stephano delivered up the bodies, and cut the history. Now he says the novel (which the publisher is comparing to "The DaVinci Code") will have to stand on its own. Stephano says he is "quite shy" and his English is not good enough to discuss the book in public. Release date: early September.

U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Wright: 'Nothing Prepares the Brain'

I have a document in my home computer that I've named "Brilliant Lines." These are lines of poetry

I've typed in from favorite collections on my shelves. When Davidson graduate Charles Wright

was named U.S. Poet Laureate last week, I opened that file and was not surprised to see

that almost half the "brilliant lines" are from his collections.

Wright majored in history at Davidson, and he's told interviewers over the years

that he wanted to write fiction in college -- his mother had dated one of William Faulkner's

brothers -- but Wright discovered he was likely the only Southerner who couldn't tell a story.

When Wright was in Italy, he happened on "The Selected Poems of Ezra Pound," and,

as he once told the Paris Review, "I discovered a form that seemed suited to my mental

and emotional inclinations—the lyric poem, a form, or subgenre, I guess, that didn’t depend

on a narrative structure, but on an imagistic one, an associational one. 'Gists

and piths,' as they say, instead of the intricacy of narrative a line."

Here are some lines of Wright's from my "Brilliant Lines" file: 

Nothing prepares the brain 

        for the heavy changes in the heart. 

Nothing prepares the soul for metaphor’s sleight-of-hand.

Nothing prepares the left hand -- luminous twin -- for the sins

    of the right. 

Nothing prepares the absence of pain for the presence of pain. 

Nothing prepares what is for what’s not. 

“Night Rider,” from the collection, “A Short History of the Shadow" 

                                                             …

Psychoanalysts Honor Dr. Lucy Daniels of Raleigh in Florence, Italy

Lucy Daniels

Raleigh's Lucy Daniels, who's 80, will break your heart. Anorexic at 12. A mental patient at 17, complete with electro shock therapy and insulin treatments. A father -- newspaper magnate Jonathan Daniels -- who didn't believe in therapy for his daughter. A bestselling novel ("Caleb, My Son") at 21. Then long years of writer's block. Yet from all this pain came healing. And more. For years as a psychologist and as the founder of the Lucy Daniels Center for Early Childhood and the Lucy Daniels Foundation in Raleigh, Daniels has helped others who are blocked or depressed to find their way into health and healing through writing and art.

On Saturday in Florence, Italy, the International Symposium on Psychoanalysis and Art honored her with its first ever Lifetime Achievement Award at the group's annual symposium.
"Dr. Daniels has been the chief and most articulate advocate of the exploration of the ties between our creativity and its power over our mental health," said one organizer of the symposium.
When I interviewed Daniels in 1997, she told me she is ever on the alert for three things that hamper her writing. "When it gets wooden, when it gets weak and when it gets shallow." When this happens, she said, she knows her unconscious issues are keeping her best writing at bay.
Emotional pain brought her freedom.
"I don't think that pain that's denied -- kept out of awareness -- is less painful than pain you become aware of and go through," she said. "When you keep your pain out of awareness -- by clinging to an impossible marriage, by drinking too much, eating too much -- it's very difficult.
"The difference between keeping it out and facing the pain and the grief and aching with it," she said, "is that in the latter, you go through it and out. In the former, you keep carrying around the burden."