Kategoria BISAC: History >> Europe - Italy

Can the eclectic medieval history of the world's most conquered island be a lesson for our times?

Home to Normans, Byzantines, Arabs, Germans and Jews, 12th-century Sicily was a crossroads of cultures and faiths, the epitome of diversity. Here Europe, Asia and Africa met, with magical results. Bilingualism was the norm, women's rights were defended, and the environment was protected. Literacy among Sicilians soared; it was higher during this ephemeral golden age than it was seven centuries later.

But this book is about more than Sicily. It is a singular, enduring lesson in...

The inhabitants of highland Sardinia proudly declare a long history of resistance to outside authority. Many even celebrate the belief that "not even the Roman Empire reached this far." Yet, since the late nineteenth century, the Italian government has pacified and integrated the mountain districts of the island into the state, often through the use of force.

In Legacies of Violence, Antonio Sorge examines local understandings of this past and the effects that a history of violence exercises on collective representations. This is particularly the case among the shepherds of...

The inhabitants of highland Sardinia proudly declare a long history of resistance to outside authority. Many even celebrate the belief that "not even the Roman Empire reached this far." Yet, since the late nineteenth century, the Italian government has pacified and integrated the mountain districts of the island into the state, often through the use of force.

In Legacies of Violence, Antonio Sorge examines local understandings of this past and the effects that a history of violence exercises on collective representations. This is particularly the case among the shepherds of...

Deeply influenced by Enlightenment writers from Naples and France, Vincenzo Cuoco (1770 1823) was forced into exile for his involvement in the failed Neapolitan revolution of 1799. Living in Milan, he wrote what became one of the nineteenth century s most important treatises on political revolution.

In hisHistorical Essay on the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799, Cuoco synthesized the work of Machiavelli, Vico, and Enlightenment philosophers to offer an explanation for why and how revolutions succeed or fail. A major influence on political thought during the unification of...

Textual Masculinity and the Exchange of Women in Renaissance Venice is a provocative analysis of the pornographic poetry written in patrician poet Domenico Venier s social circle. While Venier and his salon were renowned for elegant love sonnets featuring unattainable female beloveds, among themselves they wrote and circulated poems in Venetian dialect in which women were prostitutes whose defiled bodies were available to all.

Courtney Quaintance analyses poetry, letters, plays, and verse dialogues to show how male writers established, sustained, and publicized their...

Critically acclaimed author John Julius Norwich weaves the turbulent story of Sicily into a spellbinding narrative that places the island at the crossroads of world history.
Sicily, said Goethe, is the key to everything. It is the largest island in the Mediterranean, the stepping-stone between Europe and Africa, the link between the Latin West and the Greek East. Sicily s strategic location has tempted Roman emperors, French princes, and Spanish kings. The subsequent struggles to conquer and keep it have played crucial roles in the rise and fall of the world s most powerful dynasties....