Mirabilia

Margaret Visser

• The Land of Hunger by Piero Camporesi, translated by Tania Croft-Murray and Claire Foley
  Polity, 223 pp, £39.50, December 1995, ISBN 0 7456 0888 4
• Exotic Brew: The Art of Living in the Age of Enlightenment by Piero Camporesi, translated by Christopher Woodall
  Polity, 193 pp, £29.50, July 1994, ISBN 0 7456 0877 9
• The Magic Harvest: Food, Folklore and Society by Piero Camporesi, translated by Joan Krakover Hall
  Polity, 253 pp, £39.50, October 1993, ISBN 0 7456 0835 3

Reading this plethora of recent translations of Piero Camporesi’s work is rather like getting a book out of a library and being forced to read only the passages heavily underlined by a previous borrower, together with all the angry or thrilled exclamations peppering the margins. Camporesi is professor of Italian literature at the University of Bologna. He gleans quotations from many (justly) obscure Italian works from the past and sorts them into subjects: food, blood, hell, insanity, mutilations and mortifications of the body, carnival customs, the way beggars used their calamities – real or fake – to cause people ‘with bad consciences’ to give them money. Out of this matter he puts together his collections of essays, listing examples and quoting relentlessly, both in snippets and at length. A typical result is this litany from The Land of Hunger: