The War of the Fists is a study of seventeenth-century worker culture in the city of Venice, focusing on the mock battles, or battagliole, which the town's two popular factions waged on public bridges. These "little battles" were partly festive battle, partly sport, and partly thinly veiled plebeian mayhem: they could involve as many as a thousand fighters on each side and attracted crowds of thirty thousand or more. Their importance in the city's plebeian life makes bridge battles an extremely valuable point of entry for exploring structures of Venetian popular culture, a task which Robert Davis attempts at four levels: the social geography of Venetian factionalism; the combat itself, and its relationship to social culture; the festive world which grew up around the encounters; and the response of Venice's patrician state to this largely uncontrollable worker celebration.

The co-author of Paris Out of Hand provides a witty, idiosyncratic tour of Italy in a guidebook that includes eclectic information about Italian history, art, people, landmarks, and other oddities. 20,000 first printing.

Gratuitous sex. Graphic violence. Lies, revenge, and murder. Before there was digital cable or reality television, there was Renaissance Italy and the courts in which Italian magistrates meted justice to the vicious and the villainous, the scabrous and the scandalous. Love and Death in Renaissance Italy retells six piquant episodes from the Italian court just after 1550, as the Renaissance gave way to an era of Catholic reformation. Each of the chapters in this history chronicles a domestic drama around which the lives of ordinary Romans are suddenly and violently altered. You might read the gruesome murder that opens the book—when an Italian noble takes revenge on his wife and her bastard lover as he catches them in delicto flagrante—as straight from the pages of Boccaccio. But this tale, like the other stories Cohen recalls here, is true, and its recounting in this scintillating work is based on assiduous research in court proceedings kept in the state archives in Rome. Love and Death in Renaissance Italy contains stories of a forbidden love for an orphan nun, of brothers who cruelly exact a will from their dying teenage sister, and of a malicious papal prosecutor who not only rapes a band of sisters, but turns their shambling father into a pimp! Cohen retells each cruel episode with a blend of sly wit and warm sympathy and then wraps his tales in ruminations on their lessons, both for the history of their own time and for historians writing today. What results is a book at once poignant and painfully human as well as deliciously entertaining.

Incorporating the latest developments in the study of the period, a team of leading international scholars provides a fresh and dynamic picture of a period of great transformation in the political, cultural, and economic life of the Italian peninsula, which witnessed the rise of autonomous city states in the north, the creation of a powerful kingdom in the south, and the development of the Italian language as a vehicle for literary expression.

Examines the character and history of the Italian people.

Traces the stories of legendary Baroque architects Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini, detailing how their famed artistic achievements were motivated by a fierce side-by-side rivalry and changed the face of seventeenth-century Rome. 75,000 first printing.

A startling new assessment of Renaissance Italy unravels the 1478 plot to assassinate Lorenzo deÆMedici, hatched by one of FlorenceÆs leading families and resulting in an Italian civil war. (HIstory)

A long-time former head art critic for Time presents an authoritative history of the Roman empire that provides coverage of an extensive range of topics from its government and architecture to its influence on culture and politics, sharing complementary personal insights from the author's 1958 visit. Reprint. 40,000 first printing.