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Giulio Busi,
Uno. Il battito invisibile

Giulio Busi, Uno. Il battito invisibile, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2022, 156 p.

The One is awe, incompleteness, mystery. At times, in great misfortune or profound joy, by chance or after searching for a long time, we realize that we are part of a whole that towers over us, envelops us and, at the same time, eludes our understanding. We feel it, the whole, without
being able to distinguish it exactly. Although we are not allowed to measure it with reason, we almost seem to touch it, so close, so intimate is it.
Old biblical stories, dreams of mystics, Indian wisdom, anxieties of Greek philosophers, poetry of the twentieth century. These are the branches of an immense and secret river, which this book goes up gradually, step by step. In search of the One, its radiance, its faint, deep, invisible beat.

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Indovinare il mondo:
Le cento porte del destino

Giulio Busi, Indvinare il mondo: Le cento porte del destino,
Il Mulino, Bologna, 
. 

A journey into the world of divination and premonition. From the Sumerian texts to the Indian epics, to the Hebrew Bible up to the literature of the twentieth century and the daily life of today. Methods, experiences, hypotheses on the interweaving of space-time dimensions.

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Jewish Studies

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Giulio Busi,
Gesù, il re ribelle. Una storia ebraica

Gesù, il re ribelle. Una storia ebraica, Milano, Mondadori, 2023 ("Le Scie"), 146 p.), ISBN 978-8804777410

Who, really, is Jesus? We know what he became after his death, over two thousand years of Christian faith. But how do contemporaries regard him? What do they think when they hear him speak and as they see him act? Just before the end, he speaks enigmatic words about himself, "I know where I come from, and where I am going. You, on the other hand, do not know where I come from and where I am going" (Jn. 8:14). Can this message from a Jewish "king" also illuminate the origin and goal of our lives? Through a dense and passionate dialogue with the Gospels, Giulio Busi profiles a rebellious Jesus, quite different from the image of the good shepherd, meek and mild, transmitted by much of the Christian tradition. He is the Jesus of controversy and invective. And, at the same time, the visionary Jesus who subverts and transcends all limits of space and time, constantly moving between the "here" of suffering and oppression and the "there" of peace and spiritual life. Outlined clearly in these pages is, in particular, a "Jewish history" of the teacher of Nazareth. For him, in fact, Jews are never "them" but "us." And if his rebellion is also directed against the Jewish religious elite, it is still the rebellion of a Jew, proud of his belonging, who knows how to interpret the Torah in an extraordinarily refined, yet free, new, creative way. In the end, Jesus is a proscribed king, on whom an arrest order hangs. An itinerant rabbi hunted down and forced into hiding. When he goes up to Jerusalem for the last Passover, he knows he will be betrayed, captured, beaten, killed. His people stray, deny. Only one group of women does not leave him in his darkest hour. And only one woman seeks her master and first finds him, at dawn, in a garden, beyond death. Judaism rejected the powerless kingdom personified by Jesus. Christianity transformed the wandering mission of the early Jewish disciples, without family or possessions, without baggage or weapons, into a solid, well-constructed reality capable of lasting for millennia. But Jesus' rebellion still continues.

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Giulio Busi,
Heavenly Palaces in Judaism 

Heavenly Palaces: A Historical Travel Guide, Castiglione delle Stiviere, FPBP, 2020, 216 p. Printed and distributed worldwide by Amazon.

A new introduction to heavenly journeys in Jewish mysticism from late antiquity to early middle ages. The book investigates with particular attention the points of contact between the Hekhalot literature and other cultural traditions, including the texts of the Sabians of Harran and Daoist cosmology.

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Giulio Busi,
Città di luce: La mistica ebraica dei palazzi celesti 

Città di luce: La mistica ebraica dei palazzi celesti, Torino, Einaudi, CLXXI, 235 pages, 12 color plates

The first ever Italian translation of the Hekhalot literature. With an extensive introduction about heavenly journeys in Jewish mysticism from late antiquity to early middle ages. For the first time, the parallels with the symbolism of the seven celestial palaces in the tradition of the Sabaeans of Harran are examined.

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Cibo e identità culturale e religione

Busi G., Greco S., Lambrugo C., Curatola G., Albanese M. (eds.) (2016), Cibo e identità culturale e religione tra antico e contemporaneo. Ebraismo, tradizione classica, Islam e India. Milano: Comune di Milano-Civico Museo Archeologico. ISBN: 978-88-97568-10-0

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Giulio Busi,
Gershom Scholem e la filologia del disinganno

Gershom Scholem e la filologia del disinganno, prefazione a G. Scholem, Da Berlino a Gerusalemme: Ricordi giovanili, traduzione di Saverio Campanini, a cura di Giulio Busi, Torino, Einaudi, 2018 (I ed. 2004)

A presentation of Scholem's autobiography "From Berlin to Jerusalem", focusing on the German background of the great Kabbalah scholar.

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Giulio Busi, Qabbalah visiva

Qabbalah visiva, Torino, Einaudi, 2005, 503 pages, 8 plates, 141 drawings.

The first comprehensive study ever on the visual lore of the kabbalah. With in-depth analysis of 141 original drawings from Hebrew medieval and early modern manuscripts.

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The Book of Bahir

The Book of Bahir : Flavius Mithridates' Latin translation, the Hebrew text, and an English version, edited by Saverio Campanini ; with a foreword by Giulio Busi

"The Kabbalistic Library of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola" is a joint project carried out by the Institut fuer Judaistik of the Freie Universitaet Berlin (Germany) and the Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento (Firenze, Italy). The Book of Bahir has served for centuries as a concise mystical encyclopedia of kabbalistic lore. Notwithstanding the presence of a few more ancient elements, it looks as if that one or more kabbalists edited the Bahir, as we know it, between the end of the 12th and the beginning of the 13th century. The Book of Bahir was explicitly mentioned by Count della Mirandola in his Conclusiones published in 1486 and represents a crucial source for understanding Pico's thinking. This volume, edited by Saverio Campanini with a foreword by Giulio Busi, offers the critical edition of the Latin translation of the Bahir made by Flavius Mithridates for Giovanni Pico together with a modern English translation and a new critical edition of the Hebrew text of the Bahir.

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Renaissance

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Alberti e i cantieri dell’Umanesimo, a cura di Giulio Busi, LXVIII, 1646 p., Mondadori, Milano
(I Meridiani)

Leon Battista Alberti is one of the great protagonists of Italian Humanism. The new "Meridiano," published by Mondadori and edited by Giulio Busi, presents a wide selection of Alberti's works, in the author's vernacular redactions and, for texts composed in Latin, in Italian translation. After an introduction on Alberti and t Humanism, written by Busi, the reader is provided with the full text of two extensive comic-humorous works, the Intercenals and the Momo. Moral treatises are represented by the Books of the Family, the three books of the Tranquility of the Soul, and the short writing on the Villa. For art treatises, Della pittura, Della statua and L'architettura, Alberti's greatest masterpiece, are included. The Rime and Autobiography complete the volume.

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Giulio Busi, Silvana Greco, Amarsi. Seduzione e desiderio nel Rinascimento, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2022

In the squares and palaces of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the game of seduction is staged. How is Renaissance love expressed, how does it ignite, and what can ever extinguish it? From Botticelli's comely nymphs to Titian's discreet Venuses, from seductive Mars to gentlemen in impeccable black velvet gowns, this book puts before our eyes a glitzy age imbued with amorous flattery. Writers, poets, court records, city chronicles are the gateways from which the paths of desire unfold; moving among paintings, statues, courts, scholars' studios, alcoves, love letters, making our way with swords, flowers, sighs and purses of gold, we are able to capture all that remains of the love of Renaissance women and men, there where the web of society is woven, lived, celebrated, amid carnal transports and calls to virtue. We will go in search of lawful ties and clandestine passions, of love that aims at power and of power that seduces and transforms. In relationships between women and men, in homoerotic ones, between different social classes, courtship strategies are refined and multiplied.

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Giulio Busi
Giulio II. Il papa del Rinascimento, Milano, Mondadori, 2021, 240 pp., ill.

Two great sons of Liguria compete for the Renaissance. For Christopher Columbus, the sea is an opportunity for redemption and success. For Giuliano Della Rovere, there is Holy Mother Church.

Very young, Giuliano is thrust onto the scene by his uncle, who ascended to the papal throne as Sixtus IV. His appointment as cardinal comes to him when he is not yet 30, in 1471. He will not rest any longer. Step by step, clash by clash, he grows in power, fame, diplomatic strength. He imposes himself thanks to an innate talent for intrigue, but also to an unwavering faith in the mission of the Church. He holds his own against Alexander VI Borgia, his great, fearsome rival. He participated in four conclaves, and emerged from the one in 1503 as pope Julius II.

The ten years of his pontificate are the most splendid and controversial of the entire Renaissance age. He attracted to himself the supreme artists of the time and involved them in ambitious programs, establishing an often contentious, yet always fruitful relationship with them. With Bramante he designs the immense courtyard of the Belvedere and initiates the construction of the new St. Peter's Basilica. He engages a reluctant Michelangelo, forces him to the immense work of the Sistine vault and commissions him to build his own gigantic funeral monument. He commissions Raphael to decorate the Vatican Stanze. Because he knows that art generates prestige and, together with the iron and fire of war, will be able to make the Church great again.

Of this pontiff, terrible and far-sighted, Giulio Busi also describes with acumen the daily and affective dimension. Behind the warlike and choleric pope we thus discover the religious man of solid culture, the lover of female companionship, the caring father of the beautiful and wise Felice, the man afflicted by loneliness. It is the other side of the myth, the shadow theater that accompanies the lights of an Italy in its heyday. All around revolves the world of Italian courts and the great European powers, thick with plots and betrayals, in which today's allies are transformed, in a flash, into mortal enemies.

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Giulio Busi,
Cristoforo Colombo
Il marinaio dei segreti

Cristoforo Colombo: Il marinaio dei segreti, Milano, Mondadori, 2020, 250 pages, plates

A new biography of a great and highly controversial character. Through a very rich perusal of sources, the human parable of Christopher Columbus is reviewed and analyzed, sine ira et studio.

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The Renaissance speaks Hebrew 

Busi G., Greco S. (eds.) (2019), The Renaissance speaks Hebrew, Silvana Editoriale, Cinisello Balsamo. ISBN: 9788836643547

The Renaissance Speaks Hebrew, curated by Giulio Busi and Silvana Greco, recounts an extraordinary intellectual history. The Renaissance is an age of artistic turmoil and the elegant life of the courts. The Italian peninsula is full of ideas and new creative impulses. The Jews, who have lived in Italy since Roman times, actively participated in this atmosphere. For the first time ever, the MEIS exhibition in Ferrara brings together some of the masterpieces of art in which the Hebrew language occupies a central place and Judaism is a source of inspiration and a symbol of wisdom. But the Renaissance is made of light and shadow. Alongside the encounters and mutual influences, the exhibition itinerary and the essays collected in this catalogue explore conflicts, controversies, and discrimination. There is no Italian Renaissance without Judaism. And we could not imagine Italian Jewry without the Renaissance.

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Il Rinascimento parla ebraico

Busi G., Greco S. (eds.) (2019), Il Rinascimento parla ebraico, Silvana Editoriale, Cinisello Balsamo. ISBN: 9788836642694

Il Rinascimento parla ebraico, a cura di Giulio Busi e Silvana Greco, racconta una straordinaria stagione intellettuale. È il periodo dei fermenti artistici della vita elegante delle corti. La Penisola italiana pullula di idee, di nuovi slanci creativi e gli ebrei, che in Italia vivono dall'età romana, partecipano attivamente a questa atmosfera. Per la prima volta a livello internazionale la mostra del MEIS (Museo nazionale dell'ebraismo italiano e della Shoah) di Ferrara raccoglie alcuni dei capolavori dell' arte in cui la lingua ebraica occupa un posto centrale e l'ebraismo e spunto d'ispirazione e icona di sapienza. Ma non sono solo luci. Accanto agli incontri e agli influssi reciproci, il percorso espositivo e i saggi raccolti nel catalogo esplorano gli scontri, le polemiche, le discriminazioni. Non c'è Rinascimento italiano senza ebraismo. E non riusciremmo a immaginare l' ebraismo italiano senza il Rinascimento.

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Giulio Busi,
Michelangelo: Mito e solitudine del Rinascimento

Michelangelo: Mito e solitudine del Rinascimento, Mondadori, Milano, 2017, 422 p.

A new biography of Michelangelo Buonarroti, based on an extensive, first hand analysis of a very large number of documentary sources. Michelangelo's mysticism, his devotion to Girolamo Savonarola, the iconographic sources of his masterpieces, his poetry, his political engagement: all the multiple facets of this extraordinary personality receive a fresh interpretation

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Giulio Busi,
Lorenzo de' Medici: Una vita da Magnifico

Lorenzo de' Medici: Una vita da Magnifico, Milano, Mondadori, 2016, 365 pages, 16 pl.

Lorenzo de' Medici, known as the Magnificent (1449-92), is one of the most representative figures in Italian history. No intellectual, in fact, had as much power in his own hands and no man of government was so aware of his own culture. A good politician and mediocre banker, an excellent poet and a poor strategist, Lorenzo showed physical courage and dexterity on several occasions, but he also had a refined taste for art, and was master of Florence without ever showing it openly. Rich, elegant, cultured, womanizer and ambiguous, capable of generous impulses and, if necessary, of a good dose of cruelty, he impersonated the merits and defects of an unrepeatable age, as well as the culmination of the Medici epic, the family that more than any other promoted the splendour of the Renaissance.

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Giulio Busi - Raphael Ebgi, Pico della Mirandola: Mito, magia, qabbalah


Giulio Busi - Raphael Ebgi, Pico della Mirandola. Mito, magia, qabbalah, Torino, Einaudi, 2014, CV, 450 p., 16 color plates

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) is one of the most important thinkers of the Italian Renaissance. For the first time ever, this book reconstruct Pico’s philosophy and theology focusing on the interweaving of myth, magic and kabbalah - the three highest steps of the ascent to the wisdom according to the Count of Mirandola. From “Kiss” to “Wine”, passing through “Bacchus”, “Muses” and “Venus”, the volume is organized as a dictionary, by headwords, and each entry corresponds to a selection of texts by Pico on the subject. A separate section deals with the "Visual Pico", that is the relationship between the works of the Count of Mirandola and some masterpieces of fifteenth-century art.

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Giulio Busi,
L'enigma dell'ebraico nel Rinascimento

L'enigma dell'ebraico nel Rinascimento, Torino, Aragno, 2007, 274 p.

A study on the impact of Hebrew language on Renaissance culture, from early 15th century Venice to mid-16th century Bologna. Especially focused on art history, with many new insights on Jewish themes in the works of Tura, Mantegna and Carpaccio.

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Travellers and Explorations

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Giulio Busi,
Marco Polo: Viaggio ai confini del Medioevo

Marco Polo: Viaggio ai confini del Medioevo, Milano, Mondadori, 358 p., 8 color pl.

A new biography of Marco Polo, based on a throughout examination of all extant sources.

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Binyamin da Tudela,
Itinerario

Binyamin da Tudela, Itinerario (Sefer massa'ot), a cura di Giulio Busi, Firenze, Giuntina, 2018, 129 pages, plates. 

Reading the account of Binyamin's travels in the sixth decade of the 12th century is a fascinating way to discover the world of the Medieval diaspora, from the Iberian Peninsula to the lands of the Middle East, with some legendary hints even to the Far East. This translation, the first in Italian, originally appeared in 1987, and is now reprinted, with a new introduction. The text is accompanied by extensive notes on place names and historical data provided by Binyamin.

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Contemporary Art

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L’oro della Mirandola. Cancellature per Giovanni Pico

Busi G., Greco S. (eds.) (2014), L’oro della Mirandola. Cancellature per Giovanni Pico. Castiglione delle Stiviere: Fondazione Palazzo Bondoni Pastorio. ISBN 978-88-95-95-490-73-1

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