This book offers a fresh, original and interdisciplinary interpretation of what the Catholic Reformation meant at local diocesan level in the face of attempts by Rome to regularize worship c. 1550-1700. In the process of protecting the spiritual integrity of their patria, representatives of Italian local history such as Pietro Maria Campi of Piacenza (1569-1649)--who provides the focus of this wide-ranging study--significantly broadened the boundaries of historical study and helped to lay the foundations of Italian national history writing.

This book provides the first full account of the Italian Sobility in the post-unification era, and challenges recent interpretations that have stressed the rapid fusion of old and new elites by highlighting the continuing economic strength, social power and political influence of Italy's most prominent regional aristocracy. In Piedmont, the nobles developed more indirect forms of influence, while remaining a separate and exclusive group with limited social contacts with industrial or managerial elites, until World War I transformed their old way of life.

Numbers and Nationhood explores the rise of statistics as a mode of representation in Italian society during the nineteenth century. Silvana Patriarca examines the ideologies that informed numerical productions, and the role that statistics played in generating a national image of Italy that nevertheless accentuated its internal territorial divisions. This innovative study provides a fresh reading of the historiography of Risorgimento Italy, bringing issues of science, ideology and representation to the fore.

The Renaissance is still often wrongly characterized as a period of religious indifference. Contradicting that viewpoint, this book examines confraternities: lay groups through which Italians of the Renaissance expressed their individual and collective religious beliefs. Intensely local and dominated by artisans and craftsmen, the confraternities shaped the civic religious cult through various activities such as charitable work, public shrines, and processions. This book puts these religious activities into the turbulent social and political context of Renaissance Bologna.

The court of Ercole d'Este was one of the most glittering in Renaissance Italy. The duke was a prolific builder, and the leader in the revival of classical theater, an enthusiastic patron of musicians, and a creator of magnificent court spectacles. Very little survives to testify to Ercole's achievements, largely because of a devastating earthquake in 1570, but extensive archival evidence has been used to reestablish the duke's achievements and the extent to which he was personally involved in his patronage.

This book examines the life of Cardinal Francesco Soderini (1453 1524) from a variety of perspectives and using a range of techniques. It analyses the relationship between Machiavelli, Piero and Francesco Soderini, and reinstates the crucial role played by Rome and contacts with Rome in late fifteenth-century and early sixteenth-century Florentine politics. Soderini's position as one of the chief powerbrokers of papal Rome, in opposition to the Medici, enables a reappraisal of political and ecclesiastical patronage and clientele systems. The cardinal also encouraged cultural, intellectual and...

This book focuses on the behavior of the ruling families of Brescia, a rich and strategically vital city under Venetian rule, during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. The first part of the book conceptualizes the civic leadership of Brescia, with a profile of its origins and a brief history of the process of aristocratization. Further, it examines the relationship between family structure and the local socio-political structures. Size, wealth, education, and marriage ties were all pivotal factors which helped determine the family's position in public life. Its strength rested...

This volume gathers together seventeen original essays that represent the new directions being taken by historians of the Florentine Renaissance. Florence has often been studied in the past for its distinctive urban culture and society, while insufficient attention has been paid to the important Tuscan territorial state that was created by Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. These essays offer new and exemplary approaches toward state-building, political vocabulary, political economy, civic humanism, local history and social patronage.

This volume is the first attempt at a comparative reconstruction of the foreign policy and diplomacy of the major Italian states in the early modern period. The various contributions reveal the instruments and forms of foreign relations in the Italian peninsula. They also reveal through a range of case studies, including Venice, the Papal States, the duchy of Savoy, Florence (later the duchy of Tuscany), Mantua, Modena, and the kingdom of Naples, a new interpretation of the political history of early modern Italy.

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...