Kategoria BISAC: History >> Europe - Italy

• Captures Florence's transformation from a medieval commune into an aristocratic republic, territorial state, and monarchy
• Weaves together intellectual, cultural, social, economic, religious, and political developments
• Academically rigorous yet accessible and appealing to the general reader
• Likely to become the standard work on Renaissance Florence for years to come

Italy, like the rest of Europe, owes a lot to the 'Columbian exchange'. As a result of this process, in addition to potatoes, Europe acquired maize, tomatoes and most types of beans. All are basic elements of European diet and cookery today. The international importance of the potato today as the world's most cultivated vegetable highlights its place in the Columbian exchange.

While the history of the potato in the United States, Ireland, Britain and other parts of northern Europe is quite well known, little is known about the slow rise and eventual fall of the potato in Italy. This...

In the seventeenth century, Florence was the splendid capital of the Medici Grand Dukedom of Tuscany. Meanwhile, the Jews in its tiny Ghetto struggled to earn a living by any possible means, especially loan-sharking, rag-picking and second-hand dealing. They were viewed as an uncanny people with rare supernatural powers, and Benedetto Blanis--a businessman and aspiring scholar from a distinguished Ghetto dynasty--sought to parlay his alleged mastery of astrology, alchemy and Kabbalah into a grand position at the Medici Court. He won the patronage of Don Giovanni dei Medici, a scion of the...

At the end of the First World War, countries across Europe participated in an unprecedented ritual in which a single, anonymous body was buried to symbolize the overwhelming trauma of the battlefields. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier explores the creation and reception of this symbolic national burial as an emblem for modern mourning.

Bringing together literature, newspaper accounts, wartime correspondence, and popular culture, The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier examines how the Unknown Soldier was imagined in diverse national contexts and used by radically opposed...

The most passionate advocates of Italy's unification in the nineteenth century possessed an almost limitless faith in the benefits of civic association. They also shared a common concern: once Italian unification was achieved and various freedoms were established, would ordinary Italians naturally become responsible, progressive citizens - especially after centuries of foreign rule, regional division, and economic decline? Most unification advocates doubted that their fellow citizens could form a modern, progressive civil society on their own, or that a vibrant association life would...

One of the world's most influential cultural critics, Antonio Gramsci's writings on the interconnection between culture and politics fundamentally changed the way that scholars view both. Among the first to argue that art is not the product of -men of genius- but rather particular historical and social contexts, Gramsci remains one of the most widely read theorists of modern culture.

Antonio Gramsci was a founding member of the Italian Communist Party and spent most of his adult life imprisoned by Benito Mussolini. After his death and the subsequent publication of his...

Dark Age Liguria surveys the history of the Liguria region from c. 400 to c. 1050 AD, to provide a detailed case study of what happened here as Roman imperial rule ended. The book pulls together all the surviving evidence, written, archaeological, artistic and ecological, to propose that, in contrast with later periods, Ligurians looked north as much as they gazed out to sea. Genoese history under Byzantines, Lombards, Carolingians and Ottonians is compared with that of other coastal settlements, including Albenga, Noli, Perti and Savona and the less-studied but fascinating inland...