Renaissance Woman

By Ramie Targoff,

Book cover of Renaissance Woman: The Life of Vittoria Colonna

Book description

Ramie Targoff's Renaissance Woman tells of the most remarkable woman of the Italian Renaissance: Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa of Pescara. Vittoria has long been celebrated by scholars of Michelangelo as the artist's best friend - the two of them exchanged beautiful letters, poems, and works of art that bear witness to…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Renaissance Woman as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I loved this book because it’s a biography that reads like a novel and because its subject is a woman who was celebrated in her own time but has been almost totally forgotten since.

In an age when “respectable” women were discouraged from writing and publishing, Vittoria Colonna became one of the most revered poets of the Renaissance, moving in the same circles as popes, princes, writers, and artists.

I love how Targoff brings to life Colonna’s different environments – from the rocky island of Ischia off Naples, where she lived as a newlywed, to the convent where she sought…

From Meredith's list on women’s lives in the Renaissance.

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Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

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Interested in the Renaissance, Italy, and Florence?

The Renaissance 97 books
Italy 417 books
Florence 52 books