Joseph Luzzi, the first American-born child in his Italian family, holds a doctorate from Yale and is a professor of Italian at Bard. He is the author of ROMANTIC EUROPE AND THE GHOST OF ITALY, which won the Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies from the Modern Language Association, and A CINEMA OF POETRY: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film. An active critic, his essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Bookforum and The Times Literary Supplement. He is the author of the audio courses In Michelangelo’s Shadow: The Mystery of Modern Italy, The Blessed Lens: A History of Italian Film and The Art of Reading. His honors include an essay award from the Dante Society of America, a teaching prize from Yale, and a fellowship from the National Humanities Center. Luzzi lectures widely on Italy, literature, art and film.

Books by Joseph Luzzi

My Two Italies

by Joseph Luzzi - Memoir, Nonfiction

The child of Italian immigrants and an award-winning scholar of Italian literature, in MY TWO ITALIES Joseph Luzzi straddles these two perspectives to link his family’s dramatic story to Italy’s north-south divide, its quest for a unifying language, and its passion for art, food and family. With topics ranging from the pervasive force of Dante’s poetry to the meteoric rise of Silvio Berlusconi, Luzzi presents the Italians in all their glory and squalor, relating the problems that plague Italy today to the country’s ancient roots.