Recommendations from our site
“In The Pursuit of Italy, David Gilmour tries to show not only that Italy is still an incomplete work, but that Italians aren’t necessarily better off under a single flag. After all, for centuries the peninsula thrived in trade and arts within a fragmented system of cities and states. The competition between self-governing Italian city-states (Florence, Milan, Ferrara, Mantua, etc.) from the Middle Ages onwards fostered the surge of Italian arts, philosophy and science. Early modern Italy is considered by many the cradle of modern Western political thought and civic freedom. Of course, there was a limit to the military and economic power that a single comune could reach.” Read more...
Alan Rhode, Novelist
