Italian gardens vary widely according to their historical date and geographic location. This collection approaches Italian gardens of all periods, from the middle ages to modern times, and it ranges widely throughout the peninsula, from Genoa to Sicily, the Veneto to Liguria, and Ferrara to Florence. The authors are a distinguished group of Italian, American, English and German scholars, with different backgrounds in art history, literature, architecture, planning, and cultural history. The explorations of the subject from these different perspectives illuminate not only their own...

Political exiles were a prominent feature of political life during the Renaissance, often a source of intense concern to the states from which they were banished, and a ready instrument for governments wishing to intervene in the affairs of their rivals and enemies. This book provides the first systematic analysis of the role of exiles in the political life of fifteenth-century Italy. It also provides fresh perspectives on the nature and power of governments during this period, and on ideas about the legitimacy of political authority and political action.

History has been unkind to the House of Savoy during the Thirty Years' War, viewing it as a powerless puppet of Richelieu and Olivares. By contrast, this book examines the varied and powerful dynastic aspirations of Savoy through the career of its leading ambassador, Alessandro Scaglia (1592-1641). Scaglia was a court clan member who used diplomatic service, his expertise in the high arts, and his cosmopolitan network of friends to further Savoy's interests and those of his family.

Between the twelfth and the eighteenth centuries Italians frequently joined "confraternities" that made them symbolic brothers and sisters to one another. These kin groups launched extensive charitable programs, directed civic and religious rituals, and socialized members in class and gender roles. These essays examine how medieval religious and political values shaped early ritual kinship, how sixteenth-century social change and religious reform transformed confraternities, and how these altered groups became key agents in achieving the more rigid social order of the seventeenth and...

This volume of essays offers a series of new insights into the "age of the Enlightenment," not only in Italy but throughout Europe. In its political reforms, intended to attack feudalism and the Church and to modernize the economic and judicial systems, Naples was influenced by European culture. But Naples also exercised a strong influence on European culture: the discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and the musical culture of the city, had great importance in shaping the modern, enlightened culture of Europe.

This book deals with the crucial relationship between war and state formation in early modern Europe. Through his participation in the Nine Years War (1688-97) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14), Victor Amadeus II, Duke of Savoy, acquired a reputation for unrivaled "Machiavellian" diplomacy on the international stage. This book puts that diplomacy in context, and considers how the duke raised men and money (at home and abroad), the administrative changes forced by war, the resulting domestic pressures, and how these were dealt with.

This study shows how theater was an important feature of convent life from the early fifteenth century, probably in all of Catholic Europe and its colonies. For this study, mainly devoted to Tuscany, the author has found an extensive corpus of theatrical works of convent provenance, which argues for the widespread practice of theater in the convents. She traces its chief characteristics--what the nuns' own writings tell us about their literacy and that of their audiences, and how their lives and work intersect with secular society and literary culture.

This book relates the history of Italian railways and their relation with the Italian state from the 1840s, when the first lines were constructed, until nationalization in 1905. The effects of railway legislation are assessed, and various socio-economic indicators for the Italian regions are analyzed. It is shown that railways contributed little to the economic unification of Italy, and that any positive effects were felt mostly in the twentieth century. During the nineteenth century and the process of unification, it is argued that railways had a pernicious and divisive influence on Italian...

This work is a self-contained treatise on the research conducted on squares by Pfister, Hilbert, Hurwitz, and others. Many classical and modern results and quadratic forms are brought together in this book, and the treatment requires only a basic knowledge of rings, fields, polynomials, and matrices. The author deals with many different approaches to the study of squares, from the classical works of the late nineteenth century, to areas of current research.

The topics covered in this volume include time series methods, semiparametric methods, seasonality, financial economics, model solution techniques, economic development, and labor economics. All the contributions were commissioned to be presented at the plenary sessions of the Sixth World Congress of the Econometric Society in Barcelona.