Italy

Richard O. Collin tells the story of Italy’s parallel police forces, and how they have contended with Mussolini, the Red Brigades – and the Mafia.

The strange story of the death and posthumous life of Italy's Fascist dictator, and the continuing power of the cult of his body over the Italian imagination.

Valery Rees looks at the Florentine scholar Marsilio Ficino and finds a man whose work still speaks to us today.

Raymond E Role explores the evolution of the intramural games that began in the Middle Ages and still flourish in Italy today.

Alfio Bernabei discovers evidence of a plot to kill the Italian dictator in the early 1930s.

Robert Hole examines the often misunderstood careers of Lorenzo the Magnificent and his brother Giuliano, whose power in Renaissance Florence was wielded with great subtlety and skill.

Adrian Seville describes the humble beginnings of the earliest lottery, tracing its development from 16th-century Venice across the Channel to Britain.

Renaissance Venetians developed a sophisticated technology for keeping the city’s vital waterways free from silt and in the process, as Joseph Black explains, created a unique landscape that inspired travellers and painters.

The Sicilian Uprising of January 12th, 1848 was the first of several European revolutions. 

The son of a fisherman's revolt against Spanish taxes on fruit in Naples, on 7 July 1647, was part of a wider challenge to Spanish overlordship throughout the Habsburg domains.