Italy

Acclaimed WWII historian James Holland both narrates and reframes the controversial first months of the Italian Campaign and sets a new standard in the chronicling of war....

The rise and fall of the Venetian empire stands unrivaled for drama, intrigue, and sheer opulent majesty....

"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....

Hardly anyone who was educated was unaware of at least some of the more famous stories of Roman myth and history as told by Titus Livius....

This riveting audiobook narrated by Phyllida Nash traces the history of the city that led the West out of the ruins of the Roman Empire....

From the beginning, Rome was a hotbed of power, overweening ambition, desire, political genius, and corruption....

The Last Assassin dazzlingly charts an epic turn of history through the eyes of an unheralded man. It is a history of a hunt that an emperor wanted to hide, of torture and terror, politics and poetry, of ideas and their consequences, a gripping story of fear, revenge, and survival....

The riveting history of a beautiful queen, a shocking murder, a papal trial - and a reign as triumphant as any in the Middle Ages....

The startling truth behind one of the most notorious dynasties in history is revealed in a remarkable new account by the acclaimed author of The Tudors and A World Undone....

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....

Michelangelo, God's Architect is the first book to tell the full story of Michelangelo's final two decades, when the peerless artist refashioned himself into the master architect of St. Peter’s Basilica and other major buildings....

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....

A powerful church. An acquiescent government. In The Price of Children, investigative journalist Maria Laurino details the shocking story of mothers and children deceived and exploited as directed by the highest levels of the Vatican.

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

Conspiracy, intrigue and faction-fighting as the future of Europe hangs in the balance: Mary Hollingsworth tells the extraordinary story of the papal conclave in 1559 - the longest and bitterest of the 16th century....

In this glittering biography of Caterina Sforza, one of the most prominent women of Renaissance Italy, who was a wife, mother, leader, and warrior with enough fierceness to make Machiavelli himself wince, Elizabeth Lev reexamines her extraordinary life and accomplishments....

No city stirs the imagination more than Venice. From the richly ornamented palaces emerging from the waters of the Grand Canal to the dazzling sites of Piazza San Marco, visitors and residents alike sense they are entering, as fourteenth-century poet Petrarch remarked, “another world.”....

Galileo Galilei began his career as a mathematician. Yet as fate would have it, he became far more than a numbers whiz. Here was a true Renaissance man....

Why does Rome continue to exert a hold on our imagination? City of the Seven Hills, spiritual home of Catholicism, city of the artistic imagination - Rome has inspired, charmed, and tempted empire-builders, dreamers, writers, and travelers across the 27 centuries of its existence....

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....

A true historical “detective story” full of insight about how we look at art―and the artists and eras that produced it....

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....

A fascinating and counterintuitive portrait of the sordid, hidden world behind the dazzling artwork of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, and more....

Edda Mussolini was the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s oldest and favorite child. At 19, she was married to Count Galleazzo Ciano, Il Duce’s Minister for Foreign Affairs during the 1930s, the most turbulent decade in Italy’s fascist history....

A concise, star-studded retelling of Italy's past, from Caesar and Augustus to da Vinci and Michelangelo, tracing the story of a country with prodigious global influence—from a foremost author of historic Italy.