Italy

Once described as “the first Whig,” the great Christian philosopher of the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas, is here introduced by Maurice Cranston as an exponent of order, justice and government.

Described by Bossuet as “a Protestant in friar's clothing,” Sarpi was an historian who saw that religion might be a cloak for political designs and, as Peter Burke describes, organised his historical writings around this point.

“... At the distance of twenty-five years,” wrote Edward Gibbon, “I can neither forget nor express the strong emotions which agitated my mind as I first ... entered the Eternal City.” By J.J. Saunders .

Ernestro Landi assesses Machiavelli, his theories as well as the life of the historical character. Translated by Maurice Cranston.

In the year that saw the birth of Shakespeare, Galileo Galilei, the revolutionary Italian astronomer and mathematician, was born in Pisa.

Wilhelmina F. Jashemski visists the heart of the Pompeian house: the garden. While some gardens were splendid and spacious, others were crammed into minute courtyards “no larger than a professor's desk,” but rich with flowers and enclosed by painted walls.

Robin Fedden takes us on a visit to snowy Alpine passes where, for three quarters of a century, at the end of the Dark Ages, Saracen forces dominated the chief land routes between Italy and France.

Civil war was always the bane of the Italian city-states. E.R. Chamberlain describes how, at the end of the fourteenth century, it seemed that the whole peninsula might soon be re-united under a single man's control.

L.R. Betcherman describes how, early in the seventeenth century, an English royal favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, despatched his Dutch agent to Italy to form a sumptuous art-collection.

The persecution and execution of Jews in 15th-century Italy highlights the ambiguous attitudes of Renaissance intellectuals towards Jewish people, their beliefs and their historical relationship with Christian theology, as Stephen Bowd explains.