Since its formation in 1861, Italy has struggled to develop an effective political system and a secure sense of national identity. This introduction charts the country's history from the fall of the Roman Empire in the west to the present day and surveys the difficulties Italy has faced during the last two centuries in forging a nation state. The author weaves together political, economic, social and cultural history, and stresses the alternation...

"Elisabetta, Marco, and Sandro grow up as the best of friends despite their differences. Elisabetta is a feisty beauty who dreams of becoming a novelist; Marco the brash and athletic son in a family of professional cyclists; and Sandro a Jewish mathematics prodigy, kind-hearted and thoughtful, the son of a lawyer and a doctor. Their friendship blossoms to love, with both Sandro and Marco hoping to win Elisabetta's heart. But in the autumn of 1937,...

Jack and Annie travel 500 years back in time to Florence, Italy, and spend a day helping Leonardo da Vinci in the hope of learning another secret of happiness.

"Francesca Felizzi knows she wields an immense power over men. Her patrons see only a carefree courtesan, and they pay handsomely for the privilege of her time. Francesca never saw him coming, the man who cracked her heart open and ruined her for the job. But he's shown her what a gaudy facade she's built, and she doesn't know how to tear it down without taking her beloved daughters with her. The wrong move could plunge all of them into the sort of...

"For fans of My Brilliant Friend and Mexican Gothic, Julia Fine's Maddalena and the Dark is a novel set in 18th-century Venice at a prestigious music school, about two girls drawn together by a dangerous wager..."-- Provided by publisher.

"Dazzling, passionate, a masterwork that ranks with Puzo's best." -Nicholas Pileggi, author of Wiseguys "One of his most satisfying works….A thoroughly entertaining posthumous present from one of the masters of popular fiction." -Booklist Mario Puzo's final masterwork. A sweeping epic saga of corruption, greed, treachery, and sin, The Family is the ultimate crowning achievement of the #1 New York Times bestselling novelist who gave the world...

"SHORT-LISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else. How to be both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child...

"This epic travel adventure from The Great Courses and Smithsonian's travel arm, Smithsonian Journeys, delivers a feast of cultural and historical riches."--From container.

In 1327, finding his sensitive mission at an Italian abbey further complicated by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William of Baskerville turns detective.

"It is the autumn of 1943, and life is becoming increasingly perilous for Italian Jews like the Mazin family. With Nazi Germany now occupying most of her beloved homeland, and the threat of imprisonment and deportation growing ever more certain, Antonina Mazin has but one hope to survive--to leave Venice and her beloved parents and hide in the countryside with a man she has only just met. Nico Gerardi was studying for the priesthood until circumstances...