Italy

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.

Defeated enemies, as history shows, may become devoted allies. Once Rome had seemed the tyrant of Italy. After the successful outcome of the Social War, writes Harold Mattingly, her Italian neighbours took their places at her side, ready to assist her in the gigantic task of government.

Only ten years ago, Trieste seemed likely to become the Sarajevo of a Third World War. Here J. Garston, a military eye-witness, describes how, thanks to a combination of tact and firmness, an apparently impossible problem was for the time being solved.

Fischer von Erlach flourished in a new era of exhibitionism, Mary Henderson writes, to become the most influential Austrian architect of the Baroque period, shaping the tastes of the Habsburg empire.

F.M. Godfrey describes how, during the fifteenth century, the courtly civilization of Ferrara gave birth to splendid works of art.

E.E.Y. Hales profiles Pope Pius IX (1846-78), who saw the end of the Papacy as a temporal power as the opening of a new era in its world-relationships.

Scholar, humanist, aristocrat, Barbaro achieved distinction in many fields, and served the Venetian Republic well, as Alan Haynes records.