At the turn of the 16th century, Italy was a turbulent territory made up of independent states, each at war with or intriguing against its neighbor. There were the proud, cultivated, and degenerate Sforzas in Milan, and in Rome, the corrupt Spanish family of the Borgia whose head, Rodrigo, ascended to St Peter's throne as Pope Alexander VI. In Florence, a golden age of culture and sophistication ended with the death of the greatest of the Medici family,...

Florence, 1480: Guid'Antonio Vespucci is back in town. One man. One clue. One last chance to save the Republic. Florentine investigator Guid'Antonio Vespucci returns to Italy from a government mission to find his dreams of peace shattered. Marauding Turks have abducted a young girl and sold her into slavery. Equally disturbing, a revered painting of the Virgin Mary is weeping in Guid'Antonio's family church. Are the tears manmade or a sign of...

In true stories as vivid as the colors in which they painted, Jim Weiss brings to life Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Donatello, and other captivating characters. You will meet great artists and inventors who define the term "Renaissance man." You will watch fierce Pope Julius II drive out invaders while supervising the painting of the Sistine Chapel, and dine in the palace of Lorenzo de Medici, swordsman, statesman and patron of the...

Born in Australia, Shirley Hazzard first moved to Naples as a young woman in the 1950s to take up a job with the United Nations. It was the beginning of a long love affair with the city. The Ancient Shore collects the best of Hazzard's writings on Naples, along with a classic New Yorker essay by her late husband, Francis Steegmuller. For the pair, both insatiable readers, the Naples of Pliny, Gibbon, and Auden is constantly alive to them in the present. With...

An acclaimed columnist and editor for Italy's largest circulation daily newspaper shares his mission to identify a core Italian identity and explore how that identity has evolved since the global pandemic.

Walk a day in a Roman's sandals. What was it like to live in one of the ancient world's most powerful and bustling cities - one that was eight times more densely populated than modern day New York? In this entertaining and enlightening guide, bestselling historian Philip Matyszak introduces us to the people who lived and worked there. In each hour of the day we meet a new character - from emperor to slave girl, gladiator to astrologer, medicine woman...

"This book brings to vivid life the most concentrated surge of creativity in the history of civilization. Launching the Renaissance, the small city of Florence spawned a vibrant cultural and political life that offered unique opportunities for audacious risk taking and reversals to a panoply of memorable individuals"--

A glittering, evocative, fascinating, story-filled portrait of Venice, the ultimate city, embracing facts and romance, history and artists, carnival masks and leper colonies, wars and sieges, and scandals and seductions.

How did a small, isolated city--with a population that never exceeded 100,000, even in its heyday--come to transform western civilization? Anthropologist Meredith Small examines the unique Venetian social structure that was key to their explosion of creativity and invention that ranged from the material to social. Whether it was boats or money, medicine or face cream, opera, semicolons, tiramisu or child-labor laws, these all originated in Venice...

"'Sicily,' said Goethe, 'is the key to everything.' The birthplace of Archimedes, Georgio de Chirico, and Muhammad al-Idrisi, it is the largest island in the Mediterranean. The stepping-stone between Europe and Africa, the gateway between the East and the West, the link between the Latin world and the Greek, at once a stronghold, clearing-house and observation-point, it has been fought over and occupied in turn by all the great powers that have striven...