Early Modern Italian history has traditionally been presented in the context of the absence of a unified Italian state, foreign domination and of relative decline to former wealth and power. This new volume calls on a wealth of recent research to portray the complex history of the early modern Italian states on their own terms. A leading team of historians traces Italian material and cultural bonds of identity and solidarity beyond their common political narrative - from the Reformation through the hopes and frustrations of reform, renewal and restructuring of social and economic power to the...

In this volume, ten leading international historians and archaeologists provide a fresh and dynamic picture of Italy's history from the end of the Roman Western Empire in 476 to the end of the tenth century. Recent archaeological findings, which have so greatly changed our perceptions and understanding of the period, have been fully integrated into the eleven thematic chapters, which provide a fully rounded overview of the entire Italian peninsula in the early middle ages. The chapters consider such themes as regional diversities, rural and urban landscapes, the organisation of public and...

Covering the period from the French Revolution to the end of the 19th Century, this volume sets the events leading to Italian Unification and the creation of an independent Italian state in the broader context of 19th-century European history. Challenging the view that the political failings of the Risorgimento and Italy's economic and social backwardness paved the way for fascism in the 20th century, it emphasizes how similar Italy's social and political development was to that of other modernizing European states in the same period, while explaining why Italy's experience of modernization...

Italy since 1945 sets in context the tremendous changes that Italy has undergone in the last 55 years. In place of the land of pizza, sunshine, and soccer, McCarthy describes a developing nation: an economy that has found its own road to success via the piccole imprese with an increasingly strong stockmarket and more sophisticated banking; a dynamic, traditional, family-centered society; and a political system struggling to modernize after forty years of Christian Democrat rule and Communist opposition. McCarthy also looks at the role of the Church, including Pius XII's wartime activities and...