About the Cover Illustration

The figure on the cover of Entity Framework 4.0 in Action is captioned “Limonaro,” or a vendor of lemons. The illustration is taken from a collection of Italian Fine Arts, Prints, and Photographs that includes hand-colored drawings of Italian regional dress costumes from the nineteenth century. Wearing a white linen shirt, blue breeches, and a wide-brimmed straw hat, and carrying a basket of lemons in one hand and a jug of lemonade in the other, the itinerant limonaro was a welcome figure in the streets of Italian towns and villages, especially in the hot summer weather.

The diversity of the drawings in the collection speaks vividly of the uniqueness and individuality of the world’s towns and provinces just 200 years ago. Isolated from each other, people spoke different dialects and languages. In the streets or in the countryside, it was easy to identify where they lived and what their trade or station in life was just by what they were wearing.

Dress codes have changed since then and the diversity by region, so rich at the time, has faded away. It is now often hard to tell the inhabitant of one continent from another. Perhaps, trying to view it optimistically, we have traded a cultural and visual diversity for a more varied personal life. Or a more varied and interesting intellectual and technical life.

We at Manning celebrate the inventiveness, the initiative, and the fun of the computer business with book covers based on the rich diversity of regional life of two centuries ago brought back to life by the pictures from collections such as this one.