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More AAR Titles

Philip Guston: Roma

This volume reunites a selection of paintings from the Roma series, completed during Guston's residency at the American Academy in Rome in 1970-71.

By Dore Ashton, Peter Miller, Philip Guston
Hatje Cantz (April 30, 2011)
224 pages
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Since Philip Guston's death in 1980, his late figurative paintings and drawings have steadily reaped the acclaim they deserve--acclaim that was largely denied them during Guston's lifetime (Hilton Kramer infamously reviewed Guston as a "mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum" in a damning 1970 New York Times article). This volume reunites a selection of paintings from the Roma series, completed during Guston's residency at the American Academy in Rome in 1970-71. From early in his career, Guston had taken inspiration from Italian art, and his 1973 painting "Pantheon" features a list of Italian painters: de Chirico, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Giotto and Tiepolo. Italian cinema (especially Fellini) and classical sculpture were also dear to his heart. The Roma works consolidate this dialogue with Italian art and culture. Diary entries published alongside the reproductions recount exchanges at the American Academy, pilgrimages to Venice, Arezzo, Sicily and Orvieto, and observations of the international cultural community in Rome.

About the Author
  • Dore Ashton, Peter Miller, Philip Guston
Poets in a Landscape

An entirely sui generis amalgam of travel writing, biography, criticism, and pure poetry—altogether an unexcelled introduction to the world of the classics.

By Gilbert Highet and Michael C.J. Putnam, FAAR’64, RAAR’70
NYRB Classics
296 pages
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Gilbert Highet was a legendary teacher at Columbia University, admired both for his scholarship and his charisma as a lecturer. Poets in a Landscape is his delightful exploration of Latin literature and the Italian landscape. As Highet writes in his introduction, “I have endeavored to recall some of the greatest Roman poets by describing the places where they lived, recreating their characters and evoking the essence of their work.” The poets are Catullus, Vergil, Propertius, Horace, Tibullus, Ovid, and Juvenal. Highet brings them life, setting them in their historical context and locating them in the physical world, while also offering crisp modern translations of the poets’ finest work. The result is an entirely sui generis amalgam of travel writing, biography, criticism, and pure poetry—altogether an unexcelled introduction to the world of the classics.

About the Author
  • Gilbert Highet

    Gilbert Highet (1906-1978) was born in Glasgow, Scotland, to a middle-class family. He showed an early facility with Latin and Greek, reading Homer, Virgil, and Aeschylus for pleasure by the time he was sixteen. He attended Glasgow University, and later Oxford’s Balliol College, sweeping up most of the available prizes and scholarships along the way. In 1937 Highet joined the faculty of Columbia University, becoming a full professor at thirty-one. He taught at Columbia until 1972 (with the exception of a period during WWII, when he was stationed as an officer in Washington, D.C. and later assisted in the return of looted goods in Europe), becoming a legend for his animated and inspiring lectures. A very public intellectual, Highet served on the boards of Horizon magazine (1958–77) and the Book-of-the-Month Club (1954–78), was chief literary critic for Harper’s (1952–54), and hosted a cultural affairs radio program, People, Places, and Books (1952–59), that was broadcast on more than three hundred stations in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. Highet wrote, translated, or edited some twenty books, of which The Classical Tradition (1949) and The Art of Teaching (1950) remain the best known. He was married to Helen MacInnes, a successful writer of espionage novels, from 1932 until his death from cancer in 1978.

  • Michael C.J. Putnam, FAAR’64, RAAR’70

    Michael C.J. Putnam is MacMillan professor emeritus of classics and comparative literature, Brown University. Among his recent books are Poetic Interplay: Catullus and Horace and Jacopo Sannazaro: The Latin Poetry. In May 2009 he was awarded the Centennial Medal by the American Academy in Rome. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society.

Biscotti: Recipes from the Kitchen of the American Academy in Rome

From the innovative kitchen of the American Academy in Rome come fifty authentic, simple recipes for Italian bite-sized cookies, or biscotti.

Mona Talbott, Mirella Misenti, and Annie Schlechter (Photographer)
The Little Book Room
135 pages
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They are divided into five categories—Milk and Wine; Nuts; Honey, Citrus, and Spice; Meringue; and Chocolate. Some are dry and not too sweet—traditional Italian biscotti that are eaten for breakfast with caffè latte or dipped into a glass of vino dolce—others recall medieval and Renaissance kitchens and the influence of the spice trade. Whether chocolate, lemon, pistachio, or simply butter, flour, and sugar, each memorable cookie is infused with the history and conviviality of la cucina romana, Chez Panisse, American childhoods, and international friendships.

Narrated with carefully explained techniques and methods, the recipes have been scaled down for the home kitchen, but may be scaled back up for large-batch cooking in an institutional setting.

Biscotti is the first in a series of small hardcover cookbooks, each on a single subject, that will bring together favorite dishes served at the academy’s communal table. Each will feature a single and essential subject in the repertoire of the RSFP’s eco-gastronomic vision.

About the Author
  • Mona Talbott

    Mona Talbott was chosen by Alice Waters to be the Executive Chef of the Rome Sustainable Food Project in 2006. Talbott is a mentor to many cooks starting their careers and is a respected teacher, author, and chef. Her first food-related job was working in large reforestation camps in Canada. After culinary school she was hired by Alice Waters to work at Chez Panisse. She later worked at Eli Zabar’s Vinegar Factory and E.A.T. stores in New York and consulted for Hillary Clinton at her home in Chappaqua, New York. In 1999, Talbott began working as a chef for photographer Annie Leibovitz, and in 2004, was hired by Bette Midler’s New York Restoration Project to design a children’s after-school gardening and cooking program. In 2009, she was selected to be in COCO: 10 World-leading Masters Choose 100 Contemporary Chefs. She has written articles and recipes for The New York Times, Saveur, and Organic Style. Mirella Misenti is the pastry cook at the American Academy in Rome. She has had a lifelong passion for traditional pastries of her native Sicily. In 2007 Misenti joined the Rome Sustainable Food Project cooks, bringing with her a knowledge of dolce Italiano, which helped to define the cuisine at the American Academy in Rome. Annie Schlechter has been working as a photographer since 1998. She lived from September 2009 to June 2010 at the American Academy in Rome. Her clients include The World of Interiors, House Beautiful, The New York Times Magazine, Real Simple, W magazine, Travel & Leisure, and many more.

  • Mirella Misenti

    Mirella Misenti is the pastry cook at the American Academy in Rome. She has had a lifelong passion for traditional pastries of her native Sicily. In 2007 Misenti joined the Rome Sustainable Food Project cooks, bringing with her a knowledge of dolce Italiano, which helped to define the cuisine at the American Academy in Rome.

  • Annie Schlechter (Photographer)

    Annie Schlechter has been working as a photographer since 1998. She lived from September 2009 to June 2010 at the American Academy in Rome. Her clients include The World of Interiors, House Beautiful, The New York Times Magazine, Real Simple, W magazine, Travel & Leisure, and many more.

Zuppe: Soups from the Kitchen of the American Academy in Rome

Zuppe is the second volume in the series of Rome Sustainable Food Project cookbooks.

Mona Talbott
Little Book Room
136 pages
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Zuppe is a logical second volume in the series of Rome Sustainable Food Project cookbooks—soups are a centerpiece at almost every Academy meal, and the preparation that perhaps more than any other showcases the produce provided by farmer Giovanni Bernabei, whose farm provides the Academy’s kitchen with an endless source of fresh, organic vegetables that inspire the inventive seasonal menus. The fifty recipes draw from the four traditional categories of Italian soups: those made with water (aqua cotta), with stock (brodo), with cream (veloute), and soups for the evening meal. The recipes are arranged by seasons.
 
The Rome Sustainable Food Project, a program devoted to providing organic, local and sustainable meals for the American Academy in Rome, has launched a delicious revolution to rethink institutional dining. Headed by chef Mona Talbott, and guided by Alice Waters, the menus have given rise to a new, authentic cuisine, inspired by la cucina romana, Chez Panisse, and the collective experience of those working in the AAR kitchen.

About the Author
  • Mona Talbott

    Mona Talbott was chosen by Alice Waters to be the Executive Chef of the Rome Sustainable Food Project in 2006. Talbott is a mentor to many cooks starting their careers and is a respected teacher, author, and chef. Her first food-related job was working in large reforestation camps in Canada. After culinary school she was hired by Alice Waters to work at Chez Panisse. She later worked at Eli Zabar’s Vinegar Factory and E.A.T. stores in New York and consulted for Hillary Clinton at her home in Chappaqua, New York. In 1999, Talbott began working as a chef for photographer Annie Leibovitz, and in 2004, was hired by Bette Midler’s New York Restoration Project to design a children’s after-school gardening and cooking program. In 2009, she was selected to be in COCO: 10 World-leading Masters Choose 100 Contemporary Chefs. She has written articles and recipes for The New York Times, Saveur, and Organic Style.

The Alchemy of Extremes: The Laboratory of the Eroici Furori of Giordano Bruno (In Italian)

The proceedings of an international conference held in Rome in 2003 and promoted by the European Intellectual Lexicon of the National Research Council, in collaboration with the American Academy in Rome.

I.D. Rowland, Editor
LIBRAweb
176 pages
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Il volume raccoglie gli atti di una Conferenza internazionale, tenuta a Roma nel maggio del 2003 e promossa dall'Istituto del Lessico Intellettuale Europeo del Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, in collaborazione con l'Accademia Americana di Roma. Il titolo della conferenza, ripreso da un volume di Ferruccio Masini pubblicato nel 1967, riporta un'espressione che corrisponde ad una immagine e ad un'idea evocata più volte negli Eroici furori. L'opera, di struttura complessa sia per il linguaggio che per il contenuto filosofico, fu pubblicata a Londra nel 1585; costituita da un commento che vari interlocutori intrecciano su una serie di testi lirici, i dieci dialoghi che la compongono rivelano in apparenza una tematica amorosa, mentre discutono in realtà della salita dell'anima verso l'Uno infinito. In questo senso, l'amore diviene una forza esaltante, un'esperienza travolgente vissuta dal saggio per divenire altro da sé e poter attingere alla divinità. Il commento di Bruno vuole quindi dimostrare come sia possibile raggiungere una immersione nell'unità infinita dell'universo attraverso lo strumento della poesia e attraverso l'uso del furor, che la tradizione platonica riconosceva come carattere peculiare del poeta. I contributi raccolti si occupano tutti di varie problematiche inerenti l'opera ed il contesto in cui essa si pone, dal rapporto con il platonismo e l'aristotelismo alla riflessione sulla magia, che interessa gran parte della produzione filosofica di Bruno, dall'analisi della posizione del filosofo nolano nei confronti della religione allo studio del linguaggio poetico, inserito nella tradizione del petrarchismo ma caratterizzato da una forte carica aggressiva e deformante.

Contents: E. Canone, I. D. Rowland, Preface; L. Albanese, La teologia apofatica negli Eroici furori; S. Bassi, Dagli Eroici furori alle opere magiche di Bruno. Percorsi di lettura; P. R. Blum, La caccia di Atteone: mistero e commedia umana tra lo Spaccio e gli Eroici furori¸A. Bonker-Vallon, Hidden unity and self-consciousness of the subject: the presence of neoplatonic christian tradition in the Heroic Frenzies; E. Canone, The two lights: the final concert of Eroici furori; H. Gatti, The sense of an ending in Bruno's Heroici furori; D. Giovannozzi, «De amore qui hereos dicitur». Echi della dottrina della malattia d'amore negli Eroici furori; A. Maggi, 'L'uomo astratto'. Philosophy and emblematic rhetoric in the Eroici furori; I. D. Rowland, Bruno and Luigi Tansillo; L. Spruit, Bodily arousal, emotion and tranquillity in Bruno's Eroici furori; E. Tarantino, The Eroici furori and Shakespeare; M. Wyatt, Bruno and the 'eroico e generoso animo' Philip Sidney. Abbreviations. Index of names.

About the Author
  • I.D. Rowland, Editor
The “Horace’s Villa” Project 1997-2003 Volume 1. Report on new fieldwork and research Volume 2.

The Horace's Villa Project: 1997-2003 gathers evidence from archaeology, inscriptions, geography and tradition to attempt to answer the question: Is this Horace's villa?

Archaeopress: Oxford
1032 pages
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“Horace’s Villa” is the name given to the site of a Roman country house near the hill town of ‘Licenza’ (Roma), which is located approximately 30 miles from the centre of Rome. The site remains in quotation marks as, although the identification is traditional and possible, it is by no means certain. The “Horace’s Villa” Project, 1997-2003 was initiated with the main goal of adding to the knowledge of the site in terms of time and space. There were two main areas to be investigated, which could be called the ‘meta-archaeological’ and the ‘archaeological’. The former entailed looking afresh at earlier investigations, while the latter offered opportunities to look at new discoveries, such as the baths, entrance, and the rural hinterland. Table of Contents – Volume 1: Introduction, Site History, New Fieldwork, Analysis of Structures and Materials, Miscellaneous Studies, Conclusion. Volume 2: Catalogue of the Principal Textual and Graphical Documentation, Illustrations and Tables, Bibliography, Index.

About the Author
  • Documentation by Bernard Frischer, FAAR'76, RAAR'97, Jane Crawford and Monica de Simone

    Bernard Frischer is a leading scholar in the application of digital technologies to humanities research and education. Frischer has overseen many significant projects, including virtual recreations of sites such as the city of Rome in the time of the emperor Constantine the Great. The works of Frischer and his institute have received international acclaim and have been featured on the Discovery Channel, the RAI, German Public Radio, the BBC, in Newsweek, Scientific American, Business Week, Computer Graphics World, Forbes, the New York Times and many other magazines and newspapers around the world (see www.frischerconsulting.com/rome_reborn/press.php#media_coverage). His Rome model was featured at SIGGRAPH 2008, held in August 2008 in the Los Angeles Convention Center. The booth, located at the entrance to the exhibition hall, was one of the largest in the history of the meeting: 110 feet long x 30 feet wide x 20 feet high. Professor Frischer is the author or co-author of six printed books, three e-books and many articles on virtual heritage and on the Classical world and its survival. He is also the editor-in-chief of the Digital Roman Forum web site (http://dlib.etc.ucla.edu/projects/Forum ), which was honored in 2008 by being included on the list of EDSITEMENT, the list of educationally-approved websites selected by the National Endowment for the Humanities. He taught Classics at UCLA from 1976 to 2004. Since then he has been Professor of Art History and Classics at the University of Virginia, where from 2004 to 2009 he also served as Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. He has been a guest professor at the University of Pennsylvania (1993), the University of Bologna (1994), Beijing Normal University (2009), and held the post of Professor-in-Charge of the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome (2001-02). He has been named a Senior Fellow in the Zukunftskolleg of the University of Constance (Germany) for the 2010-11 academic year. Frischer's research career reflects his interest in interdisciplinary approaches, and has included studies in the literature, philosophy, art history and archeology of Greece and Rome. He is the author of several books, including Shifting Paradigms: New Approaches to Horace's Ars Poetica, and The Sculpted Word: Epicureanism and Philosophical Recruitment. Frischer directed the excavations of Horace's Villa, a project sponsored by the American Academy in Rome and the Archeological Superintendency for Lazio of the Italian Ministry of Culture. The findings of this work were the subject of a two-volume report, Horace's Villa Project 1997-2003 (Oxford: 2007), of which Frischer was editor-in-chief. He is founder and director of the Rome Reborn Project, an international initiative based at the University of Virginia, UCLA, and the Politecnico di Milano (for details, see www.romereborn.virginia.edu). The goal of the project is to create 3D digital models illustrating the urban development of ancient Rome from the first settlements in the late Bronze Age (ca. 1,000 BCE) to the early Middle Ages (ca. 550 CE). Rome Reborn 1.0 was premiered by Rome’s Mayor Walter Veltroni at an international press conference Frischer organized in June, 2007. It was published in Google Earth in 2008. Rome Reborn 2.0 was the featured project at SIGGRAPH 2008, the leading industry and scientific conference held in the field of Computer Graphics. His current research includes a new 3D digital model of Hadrian's Villa (Tivoli, Italy). He is also principal investigator of SAVE (Serving and Archiving Virtual Environments), a project sponsored by the National Science Foundation to create a database of 3D digital models of cultural heritage sites, monuments, and landscapes. Over the course of his career, Frischer has raised over $4 million in support of his various research projects. Frischer received his B.A. (Wesleyan University, 1971) and Ph.D. (Heidelberg, 1975) degrees summa cum laude and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa (1970), a Fellow of the Michigan Society of Fellows, a Fellow (1974-76) and Resident (1996) of the American Academy in Rome, and he has won research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (1981, 1996) and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (1997). From 1996 to 2003 he directed the excavations of Horace's Villa sponsored by the American Academy in Rome, and from 1996 to 2004 he was founding director of the UCLA Cultural Virtual Reality Laboratory. The lab was one of the first in the world to use 3D computer modeling to reconstruct cultural heritage sites. In 2005 Bernard Frischer was given the Pioneer Award of the International Society on Virtual Systems and Multimedia. In 2009, he was the recipient of the Tartessus Prize of the Spanish Society for Virtual Archaeology.