Margaret Plant presents a wide-ranging cultural history of the city from the fall of the Republic in 1797, until 1997, showing how it has changed and adapted and how perceptions of it have shaped its reality.

The first exploration of how Mussolini employed population settlement inside the nation and across the empire to strengthen Italian sovereignty.

The sudden and unexpected death of John Paul I in the papal apartments on the evening of September 28, 1978 — after a pontificate of a little more than a month — has given rise over the decades to myriad suspicions, assumptions, and conspiracy theories. After so many unsubstantiated claims and unconfirmed rumors, we now know what happened in the last hours of the life of “the smiling pope.” Finally, here is an accurate account, backed by in-depth research and previously unpublished documentation, revealed by Stefania Falasca, the vice-postulator for John Paul I’s cause of canonization, in The September Pope: The Final Days of John Paul I. This compelling story — completely anchored in the facts, including medical reports, first-person testimonies, and archival investigations — is clear and accessible, and exposes the truth about the seemingly inexhaustible rumors that sprang up around this supposed Vatican secret.

Richard Bosworth's overview of Italy's role in European and world politics from 1860 to 1960 is lively and iconclastic. Based on a combination of primary research and secondary material he examines Italian diplomacy, military power, commerce, culture, tourism and ideology. His account challenges many aspects of current Italian historiography and offers an original vision of the place of Italy in modern history.

In this elegant book Richard Bosworth explores Venice—not the glorious Venice of the Venetian Republic, but from the fall of the Republic in 1797 and the Risorgimento up through the present day. Bosworth looks at the glamour and squalor of the belle époque and the dark underbelly of modernization, the two world wars, and the far-reaching oppressions of the fascist regime, through to the “Disneylandification” of Venice and the tourist boom, the worldwide attention of the biennale and film festival, and current threats of subsidence and flooding posed by global warming. He draws out major themes—the increasingly anachronistic but deeply embedded Catholic Church, the two faces of modernization, consumerism versus culture. Bosworth interrogates not just Venice’s history but its meanings, and how the city’s past has been co-opted to suit present and sometimes ulterior aims. Venice, he shows, is a city where its histories as well as its waters ripple on the surface.

This book explores the day-to-day 'lived experience' of fascism in Venice during the 1930s, charting the attempts of the fascist regime to infiltrate and reshape Venetians' everyday lives and their responses to the intrusions of the fascist state.

Following in the footsteps of other illustrious Italian gastronomic successes - from pizza to pasta, from mozzarella to Parmesan and mortadella - Prosecco is the most recent "e;made in Italy"e; product to have colonized the world. But what is its history, and how did it come to be a global phenomenon? Luigi Bolzon retraces the origins of Prosecco's immense popularity back to the story of the Italian emigrants who left their country in the second half of the nineteenth century and the experiences of those who, knowingly or not, were most instrumental in cementing Prosecco's reputation in the UK and worldwide. Peppered with anecdotes and containing a rich tapestry of direct testimonies from the protagonists of Prosecco's ascent in the world of wines, Bolzon's book delves deep into the Italian soul to offer an insightful look behind the production and the continuing success of Britain's most loved bubbly.

This book offers a detailed examination of the literary influences behind the experimental music of five twentieth-century Italian composers: Luigi Dallapiccola, Bruno Maderna, Luciano Berio, Giacomo Manzoni and Armando Gentilucci.

Norbert Huse and Wolfgang Wolters provide the first contemporary single-volume survey of the three arts of Venice -- painting, sculpture, and architecture. They offer an important counterbalance to the traditional orientation toward painting as the city's preeminent art by focusing on architecture as the essential Venetian artistic medium. In the process, they define the distinctly Venetian terms by which the city and culture should be understood. Huse and Wolters begin their study with 1460, when Venice was one of the key powers of Italy, and end their discussion with the death of Tintoretto in 1594, a period of waning international power. Wolfgang Wolters outlines the city's development and present a typological survey of Venetian architecture. A review of sculptors and their works follows. Norbert Huse opens the next section, on painting, by describing the changed situation of painters at the end of the fifteenth century. He explores the different forms and functions of Venetian paintings in three distinct periods. With over three hundred illustrations and an exhaustive bibliography, this volume successfully fills a gap in art historical scholarship. -- From publisher's description.