A Renaissance Courtesy-Book: Galateo of Manners & Behaviours

Five centuries old and still painfully relevant, this is the book everyone pretends they don't need but everyone secretly reads. Giovanni Della Casa was a diplomat and papal nuncio who, around 1558, sat down to instruct his young nephew-a Florentine of noble birth-on how not to make an ass of himself in polite company. What emerged was something far more entertaining than a mere etiquette manual: a cranky, theatrical, frequently exasperated monologue about the countless ways human beings humiliate themselves daily. Through discussions of dress codes, conversational tact, eating habits, hairstyles, and the delicate art of the joke, Della Casa paints a portrait of a world where vulgarity and embarrassment lurk behind every social interaction. Though he wrote for Renaissance Italy, his observations cut across centuries. We still obsess over these same anxieties, still buy books about grace and poise, still lie awake dreading the dinner party where we'll say the wrong thing. This is the original-self-help book that somehow made it into the canon, as relevant now as it was when it circulated as widely as Machiavelli's Prince.