Marco Armiero is Senior Researcher at the Italian National Research Council and Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technologies, Universitat Aut(noma de Barcelona. He has published extensively on-Italian environmental history and edited Views from the South: Environmental Stories from the Mediterranean World. --

In 1500 few Europeans regarded nature as a subject worthy of inquiry. Yet fifty years later the first museums of natural history had appeared in Italy, dedicated to the marvels of nature. Italian patricians, their curiosity fueled by new voyages of exploration and the humanist rediscovery of nature, created vast collections as a means of knowing the world and used this knowledge to their greater glory. Drawing on extensive archives of visitors' books, letters, travel journals, memoirs, and pleas for patronage, Paula Findlen reconstructs the lost social world of Renaissance and Baroque museums. She follows the new study of natural history as it moved out of the universities and into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scientific societies, religious orders, and princely courts. Findlen argues convincingly that natural history as a discipline blurred the border between the ancients and the moderns, between collecting in order to recover ancient wisdom and the development of new textual and experimental scholarship. Her vivid account reveals how the scientific revolution grew from the constant mediation between the old forms of knowledge and the new.

“Modern Italy”may sound like an oxymoron. For Western civilization,Italian culture represents the classical past and the continuity of canonical tradition,while modernity is understood in contrary terms of rupture and rapid innovation. Charting the evolution of a culture renowned for its historical past into the 10 modern era challenges our understanding of both the resilience of tradition and the elasticity of modernity. We have a tendency when imagining Italy to look to a rather distant and definitely premodern setting. The ancient forum, medieval cloisters,baroque piazzas,and papal palaces constitute our ideal itinerary of Italian civilization. The Campo of Siena,Saint Peter’s,all of Venice and San Gimignano satisfy us with their seemingly unbroken panoramas onto historical moments untouched by time;but elsewhere modern intrusions alter and obstruct the view to the landscapes of our expectations. As seasonal tourist or seasoned historian,we edit the encroachments time and change have wrought on our image of Italy. The learning of history is always a complex task,one that in the Italian environment is complicated by the changes wrought everywhere over the past 250 years. Culture on the peninsula continues to evolve with characteristic vibrancy. Italy is not a museum. To think of it as such—as a disorganized yet phenomenally rich museum unchanging in its exhibits—is to misunderstand the nature of the Italian cultural condition and the writing of history itself.

This work explores the question of Vesuvius as an object of study in the early modern science of volcanism from the investigations and opinions of humanists and naturalists in the late Renaissance to the early 18th-century philosophizing on volcanoes and the development of geology later in the century.

The rise of printing had major effects on culture and society in the early modern period, and the presence of this new technology—and the relatively rapid embrace of it among early modern Jews—certainly had an effect on many aspects of Jewish culture. One major change that print seems to have brought to the Jewish communities of Christian Europe, particularly in Italy, was greater interaction between Jews and Christians in the production and dissemination of books. Starting in the early sixteenth century, the locus of production for Jewish books in many places in Italy was in Christian-owned print shops, with Jews and Christians collaborating on the editorial and technical processes of book production. As this Jewish-Christian collaboration often took place under conditions of control by Christians (for example, the involvement of Christian typesetters and printers, expurgation and censorship of Hebrew texts, and state control of Hebrew printing), its study opens up an important set of questions about the role that Christians played in shaping Jewish culture. Presenting new research by an international group of scholars, this book represents a step toward a fuller understanding of Jewish book history. Individual essays focus on a range of issues related to the production and dissemination of Hebrew books as well as their audiences. Topics include the activities of scribes and printers, the creation of new types of literature and the transformation of canonical works in the era of print, the external and internal censorship of Hebrew books, and the reading interests of Jews. An introduction summarizes the state of scholarship in the field and offers an overview of the transition from manuscript to print in this period.

Earth’s fractured geology is visible in its fault lines. It is along these lines that earthquakes occur, sometimes with disastrous effects. These disturbances can significantly influence urban development, as seen in the aftermath of two earthquakes in Messina, Italy, in 1908 and in the Belice Valley, Sicily, in 1968. Following the history of these places before and after their destruction, this book explores plans and developments that preceded the disasters and the urbanism that emerged from the ruins. These stories explore fault lines between “rural” and “urban,” “backwardness” and “development,” and “before” and “after,” shedding light on the role of environmental forces in the history of human habitats.

This book is part of a wider current in environmental history, that explores the links between nature and nation. It uncovers how Italian identity and mountains have constituted one another.

During the early decades of the twentieth century, Italy produced distinctive innovations in both the intellectual and political realms. On the one hand, Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) and Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944) spearheaded a radical rethinking of historicism and philosophical idealism that significantly reoriented Italian culture. On the other hand, the period witnessed the first rumblings of fascism. Assuming opposite sides, Gentile became the semi-official philosopher of fascism while Croce argued for a renewed liberalism based on 'absolute' historicism. In Historicism and Fascism in Modern Italy, David D. Roberts uses the ideological conflict between Croce and Gentile as a basis for a wider discussion of the interplay between politics and ideas in Italy during the early-twentieth century. Roberts examines the connection between fascism and the modern Italian intellectual tradition, arguing that the relationship not only deepens our understanding of fascism and liberalism but also illuminates ongoing dangers and possibilities in the wider Western world. This set of twelve essays by one of the leading scholars in the field represents an authoritative view of the modern Italian intellectual tradition, its relationship with fascism, and its enduring implications for history, politics, and culture in Italy and beyond.

This book explores the cultural dimensions, the expressive potential, and the changing technologies of greenery in the art of the Italian Renaissance and after.