Part love story, part instruction manual, part spiritual journey, Dante’s “little book,” the Vita Nuova, has had a profound and far-reaching influence on global culture and is considered by many to be the perfect expression of the medieval ideal of courtly love, as well as an essential precursor to Dante’s sublime poetic apotheosis, the Divine Comedy.

Now Joseph Luzzi, celebrated author of books about Italian literature and culture and a lifelong lover and teacher of Dante’s poetry, gives us a version of the Vita Nuova that is fresh, contemporary, and approachable—as vital and vivid as Dante’s original Tuscan dialect—rendered in a voice that will entice a new generation of readers to swoon over one of the most heartbreaking stories of unfulfilled love in all of world literature.