Italy

Tourists, armchair travelers, and historians will all delight in this fluid narrative that can be read straight through, dipped into over time, or used as a reference guide to each period in Sicily's fascinating tale....

The brilliance of the Renaissance laid the foundation of the modern world....

Naples '44 is an unflinching autobiographical account of a year in Naples after the armistice and Allied landings in Sorrento in 1943. Working as a British counterintelligence officer under the Allied occupation, Lewis documents the rich pageant of life in the city and its surrounding areas....

Rome - as a city, as an empire, as an enduring idea - is in many ways the origin of everything Robert Hughes has spent his life writing about with such dazzling irreverence and exacting rigour....

It is hard to find an island on the map more central than Sicily. Located at the crossroads between Europe and Africa, and between the eastern and western Mediterranean, Sicily has rarely been governed as an independent, unified state....

The Roman army was the greatest fighting machine the ancient world produced. The Roman Empire depended on soldiers not just to win its wars, defend its frontiers and control the seas but also to act as the engine of the state....

A sweeping 400-year history of the Florentines who gave birth to the Renaissance, by the author of The Medici and The Borgias....

The Borgia family have become a byword for evil. Corruption, incest, ruthless megalomania, avarice, and vicious cruelty - all have been associated with their name. And yet, paradoxically, this family lived when the Renaissance was coming into its full flowering in Italy....

While staying closely aligned with Hitler, Mussolini remained carefully neutral until the summer of 1940....

A dark tale of violence, ideals and a country at war, in Blood and Power, historian John Foot draws on decades of research to chart the turbulent years between 1915 and 1945, and beyond....

This audio consists of a series of personal writings by Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor AD 161-180, setting forth his ideas on Stoic philosophy....

In The Darkening Age, Catherine Nixey tells the little-known story of how a militant religion deliberately tried to extinguish the teachings of the Classical world, ushering in unquestioning adherence to the 'one true faith'....

Beginning with Rodrigo Borgia, Chamberlin charts this intelligent but ruthless man's passage to the top. He uncovers how, as Pope Alexander VI, he directed his family to carve out a Borgia kingdom in the heart of Italy....

Did you know that the Balkan Peninsula is often referred to as the “powder keg of Europe?” It was a term devised in the early 20th century to describe the unstable political situation in the region just before it exploded into a conflict known as the First World War....

In 1946, Italy became a democratic Republic, thereby entering the family of modern Western nations. But deep within Italy there lurked a forgotten curse: three major criminal brotherhoods, whose methods had been honed over a century of experience....

A colourful history (50 years in the making) of the Mediterranean's largest and most turbulent island from much-loved historian John Julius Norwich....

John Hooper's marvelously entertaining and perceptive new book is ideal for anyone seeking to understand contemporary Italy and the unique character of the Italians....

Sicily has always acted as a gateway between Europe and the rest of the world. Fought over by the Phoenicians and Greeks, the Romans, Goths and Byzantines, Arabs and Normans, Germans, and the Spanish and the French for thousands of years, Sicily became a unique melting pot....

Set in the court of Urbino in 1507, Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier presents an invaluable look at court life and culture during the Renaissance. Over four nights of dialogue, the book explores the key question, ‘What should a courtier be like?’ Listen for more....

The name Borgia is synonymous with the corruption, nepotism and greed that were rife in Renaissance Italy....

Since its formation in 1861, Italy has struggled to develop an effective political system and a secure sense of national identity. Christopher Duggan's acclaimed introduction charts the country's history from the fall of the Roman Empire in the West to the present day....