This is the first book written about Maria Monaci Gallenga (1880-1944), the enigmatic fashion artist and designer marginalized after decades of fortune and fame. The daughter of Ernesto Monaci, the illustrious philologist and mentor of Luigi Pirandello, Gallenga was the wife of Pietro Gallenga, a medical scientist related to the Gallenga Stuart family. The text outlines Maria Monaci Gallenga’s impact on the world of fashion, contextualizing her work and that of other forgotten fashion designers in the 1920s and 1930s. It sheds light on her cultural impact and idealism as a business entrepreneur in Europe and America promoting Italian art and culture. It also highlights her engagement in social and educational activities after she retired from the world of fashion, and explains the reasons behind her marginalization and disappearance, and the obstacles and constraints she faced during the years of Fascism. The book also considers the influence of the British arts and crafts movement and the vision of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood on her aesthetic vision, and, in turn, investigates Maria Gallenga’s influence on late Pre-Raphaelite paintings (Frank Cadogan Cowper) inspired by her designs and fabrics. The discovery of her fabrics and accessories by the Fendi sisters in the collections of the Tirelli House eventually sparked a new interest in her models, now enhanced by digital media.

Some of my earliest memories of my Father are when I used to run into the garage at our old house, where he had carved himself a little crowded room normally used for storage. It was his half-radio-room-and-half-hangout place. My Father would spend hours during his days off from work in this wonderful “cave.” Here he would put on two, sometimes three, old Marconi Short-Wave Radios tuned to different Commercial Maritime Stations, as well as his Radio/Morse Transreceiver Station, all of them transmitting hundreds of messages using Radio and Morse code, Dits and Dots from all of dozens of Maritime Land Stations that monitor the traffic of Merchant Ships crossing the Strait of Gibraltar. My Father was a consummate Radio and Telegraph Operator who worked with the Moroccan Government, specifically the Ministry of Post, Telegraph, and Telephone. His job was to make contact with Ships crisscrossing the Straits of Gibraltar to help direct their traffic through Moroccan Territorial Waters, and Ports, thousands of ships using mainly Morse code.

According to the former mayor of a small town in Umbria, in a daring escapade carried out on a June night in 1944 in German-occupied Italy, he and a group of fellow partisans rescued some Jews from a concentration camp on a small island in the middle of Lake Trasimeno, thus saving them from deportation to the gas chambers of the Third Reich. But history is always written by the victors, and the son of the Fascist camp commander, who knows what really happened, is determined to make his voice heard before he dies. His political opponents have always shrugged off his testimony and it is only after an enquiry sparked off by the chance discovery of an early Jewish manuscript in the University of Perugia that they are finally forced to face up to the truth.

In the 1930s, hundreds of scientists and scholars fled Hitler’s Germany. Many found safety, but some made the disastrous decision to seek refuge in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The vast majority of these refugee scholars were arrested, murdered, or forced to flee the Soviet Union during the Great Terror. Many of the survivors then found themselves embroiled in the Holocaust. Ensnared between Hitler and Stalin explores the forced migration of these displaced academics from Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union. The book follows the lives of thirty-six scholars through some of the most tumultuous events of the twentieth century. It reveals that not only did they endure the chaos that engulfed central Europe in the decades before Hitler came to power, but they were also caught up in two of the greatest mass murders in history. David Zimmerman examines how those fleeing Hitler in their quests for safe harbour faced hardship and grave danger, including arrest, torture, and execution by the Soviet state. Drawing on German, Russian, and English sources, Ensnared between Hitler and Stalin illustrates the complex paths taken by refugee scholars in flight.

The Giro d'Italia is the cooler, tougher brother of the Tour de France. First staged in 1909, and only pausing for two World Wars, its hundredth edition takes place in 2017. Inspired by L'Auto's improved circulation figures after establishing France's Grand Tour, the Gazzetta dello Sport saw an opportunity to outdo its rival paper, the Corriere della Sera, by organising its own race. From its first years the Giro pushed riders to their limits with brutal climbs, treacherous road conditions, appalling weather and epic distances. Time has changed the Giro to a degree, but it remains as ferociously testing – and as beloved of cycling's romantics – as ever. All the winners are covered: from the first victors Luigi Ganna and Carlo Galetti, to the likes of Alfredo Binda, Costante Girardengo and Gino Bartali, past the legends of Fausto Coppi and Eddy Merckx, on to Bernard Hinault, Miguel Indurain and Marco Pantani, and then right up to today's champions Vincenzo Nibali, Nairo Quintana and Alberto Contador. The history of the Giro is the history of cycling's superstars. The battles for supremacy, the controversies and skulduggery, the fame and the glory, and the iconic stages all feature. In Corsa Rosa, Gallagher skillfully combines history, anecdote and analysis to bring this ultimate test of endurance vividly to life.

Originally published in 1947, “This volume is the last of the series in which I have attempted to write the history of the war while it is actually taking place. It does not appear during the war for the best of reasons; but it is unduly late because of a number of personal mischances and because it covers much more ground than the earlier volumes. The battle-piece it attempts to portray is, in fact, the greatest in the history of the world. Never before have campaigns of the size and scope taken place. In the numbers engaged, in the amount of material used, in distances covered, in the novelty of the tactics and in the almost incredible brutality of some of the methods used, the campaigns of this period from May 1944 to the middle of August 1945 are unique.” Richly illustrated throughout with maps.

[Includes 16 maps and 94 illustrations] "Wars should be fought," an American corps commander noted in his diary during the campaign in Italy, "in better country than this." It was indeed an incredibly difficult place to fight a war. The Italian peninsula is only some 150 miles wide, much of it dominated by some of the world’s most precipitous mountains. Nor was the weather much help. It seemed to those involved that it was always either unendurably hot or bone-chilling cold. Yet American troops fought with remarkable courage and tenacity, and in company with a veritable melange of Allied troop... Despite the forbidding terrain, Allied commanders several times turned it to their advantage, achieving penetrations or breakthroughs over some of the most rugged mountains in the peninsula. To bypass mountainous terrain, the Allies at times resorted to amphibious landings, notably at Anzio...The campaign involved one ponderous attack after another against fortified positions: the Winter Line, the Gustav Line, the Gothic Line... It was also a campaign replete with controversy...Most troublesome of the questions that caused controversy were: Did the American commander, Mark Clark, err in focusing on the capture of Rome rather than conforming with the wishes of his British superior to try to trap retreating German forces? Did Allied commanders conduct the pursuit north of Rome with sufficient vigor? Indeed, should the campaign have been pursued all the way to the Alps when the Allies might have halted at some readily defensible line and awaited the outcome of the decisive campaign in northwestern Europe? Just as the campaign began on a note of covert politico-military maneuvering to achieve surrender of Italian forces, so it ended with intrigue and secret negotiations for a separate surrender of the Germans in Italy.