A “Brief History of Italy?” Isn’t that impossible? Well, sort of, so we’ve kept it very general to provide the reader with merely a survey. Though Italy is really a new nation only coming into being in 1861, the geographical area we now refer to as Italy has had a long, rich, and diverse history. This survey will take you through pre-Roman times with the Greeks and Etruscans to the Roma…
Ippolito II d’Este was born in 1509 into a Ferrara ruled by his father, Duke Al-fonso I d’Este. His mother was Lucrezia Borgia, the daughter of Pope Alexander VI, who had orchestrated the marriage in the hope of tying his lineage to an established Italian family. The Este had been ruling over Ferrara, Modena and Reggio since the thirteen century and had increasingly extended their territori…
At least since the historiographical renewal brought about, among others, by the works of Franco Venturi (1973), the events of the century leading to the R isorgimento and the R isorgimento itself have been placed in the context of cultural exchanges involving European and extra-European intellectuals, trav-ellers, politicians and revolutionaries. In this historiographical…