
Italian Renaissance History
In 1300 there was no Italy to speak of: only a crowd of walled cities, each with its own bells, banners and bankers, each ready to fight its neighbour. Within two centuries those quarrelling cities had produced a cathedral dome nobody thought could be built, paintings that seemed to open like windows, scholars who recovered the voices of the ancient world, and a hard-eyed new way of writing about ...
In 1300 there was no Italy to speak of: only a crowd of walled cities, each with its own bells, banners and bankers, each ready to fight its neighbour. Within two centuries those quarrelling cities had produced a cathedral dome nobody thought could be built, paintings that seemed to open like windows, scholars who recovered the voices of the ancient world, and a hard-eyed new way of writing about ...
