Saints and Cities in Medieval Italy
Every commune had to have one - Diana Webb explains how the cult of a holy man or woman and civic PR went hand-in-hand in medieval Italy.
Italy
Girolamo Savonarola: Florentine Preacher and Patriot?
Girolamo Savonarola held a puritanical sway over Florence in the last decade of the 15th century, ending 60 years of Medici domination.
Power and Politics in Early Modern Italy
A country divided, degenerate and in cultural decline? Robert Oresko examines the changing views historians are developing of Italy between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries and finds a society far more vibrant and complex than tradition suggests.
Reading History: Italian Unification
John A. Davis discusses a range of books tackling the Risorgimento.
'In Place of Strife' - The Guilds and the Law in Renaissance Venice
The trade guilds of Venice, explains Richard Mackenney, were organisations with a surprising amount of political and economic power in the patrician Renaissance city.
Beyond the Brushstrokes
'The Genius of Venice' at the Royal Academy, Winter 1983/4
Cicero as a Political Thinker
As a political thinker Cicero has been all manner of things to all manner of men. In order to understand Cicero's political ideas, however, we need to look at the world of Rome in the first century BC, argues J.B. Morrall.
Itinerant in Italy
Francis Watson looks at British travellers in Italy throughout the ages.
The Jews of Venice
The seventeenth-century Jews regarded Venice as 'the land of promise', where for a few generations they flourished almost free from constraint and prejudice.