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.If This Is a Man / The Truce
City Travel Guides > Books > Italy
by: Primo Levi

January 01, 1991
If you want to understand the holocaust, how and why it happened, then you need to read If This Is A Man. Levi dispenses with his emotional responses and describes what happened with a frightening detachment. Through his eyes, Levi shows us how the Nazi machine sought to rob their victims of all vestiges of their humanity and thereby justify their treatment of the camp victims. This in turn led to the horrible events that we all know so well. Levi, however, does not just aim to show us the horror of the events, but understand them. Thus, amongst the debasement of life in the camps, we see how necessary it becomes to bathe with dirty water - not to clean yourself, but to regain fragments of your own humanity. This book is essential if we are ... Read More:
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.Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford Paperbacks)
City Travel Guides > Books > Italy
by: Michael Baxandall

May 19, 1988
This is the kind of book that History of Art departments throw at you early on in their courses to instil the right respect and awe for the whole academic ritual.

When I first saw this book at Birkbeck College (2003 History of Art MA) I was duly impressed and intimidated into thinking this was somehow a classic. In this work Baxandall is the exemplary academic, slowly building up a case from painstaking research and cleverly interpreted trivia.

This approach is fine and dandy until you reflect that at the end of it the conclusions Baxandall has laboured so hard to arrive at are perhaps a little banal -- i.e. Renaissance painting was influenced by such contemporary phenomenon as religious practices, dancing, and the ability to ... Read More:
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.Venice
City Travel Guides > Books > Italy
by: Jan Morris

October 07, 2004
I decided to read "Venice" in preparation for a week-long stay in the Italian city.

Broken into three sections -- The People, The City, The Lagoon -- "Venice" is not a chronological history of the city but a meandering look at its past, present and future. Nor is it a guidebook, although it does contain a mine of information about what to see and where to go.

I think "The Times" probably described it best when they said it was "a classic love letter to Italy's most iconic city", because it is, indeed, a beautiful missive dripping with exquisite descriptions. I found it an enormously engaging and evocative read by an accomplished writer who really knows how to string a simile or two together.For example: "Venice is a cheek-by-jowl, ... Read More:
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.The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici
City Travel Guides > Books > Italy
by: Christopher Hibbert

September 27, 1979
This book focuses on a fascinating period, but the camera (i.e. Historian Christopher Hibbert) is a polaroid camera, so the image is not particularly sharp and enchanting.
As I read this book I realised that it could have been written by almost anyone in a university history department. It didn't have a disntinctive style or anything particular to say. It just ran through the gamut of the subject in an entirely predicatable way -- the rise of the city state, trade more important than before, new ways of thinking but respect for the ways of the Church, the rise of the 'new man' and the threat this posed to the putative democracy of the city state, the fate of the Medici tied to the varying abilities of different members, an interest in the arts, the gradual ... Read More:
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.Britannia - The Failed State: Tribal Conflicts and the End of Roman Britain: Tribal Conflict and the End of Roman Britain
City Travel Guides > Books > Italy
by: Stuart Laycock

June 06, 2008
A number of commentators in recent years have noted how the human propensity for stories, hard wired into our minds, provides the mechanism by which humans understand the world. Myths are stories we generate to serve as starting points to sharing our understanding of a subject, and sometimes to preserving a particular social or cultural point of view. The mythic Fall of the Roman Empire generates new books and cinema releases on a regular basis. One of greatest mysteries coming out of that fall is the transmutation of the Roman province of Britannia into Anglo-Saxon England despite the doomed heroism of the often reworked figure[s] of Ambrosius/Arthur.


In 1980, a revolution occurred in our stories explaining another popular conundrum, What Killed ... Read More:
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.Florence: The Biography of a City
City Travel Guides > Books > Italy
by: Christopher Hibbert

October 27, 1994
A splendid general account of the history of Florence aimed at the general reader, with particular emphasis on the crucial Renaissance 14th-15th centuries. Well illustrated also. A must for anyone with a non-specialist interest in the city and/or its art and culture.

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.Advanced History Core Text: Fascist Italy (SHP Advanced History Core Texts)
City Travel Guides > Books > Italy
by: John Hite, Chris Hinton

July 29, 1998
has a non biased view and an excellent amount of information in here with many activities for a-level students

however if there was to be a 2nd addition there would need to be some colour and some breaks in the paragraphs because much of chris's excellent views and information aren't poitned out so clearly
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.Rome: The Biography of a City
City Travel Guides > Books > Italy
by: Christopher Hibbert

October 15, 1987
Hibbert's history of Rome, from Romulus to Mussolini, is an excellent introduction to the events that have shaped this incredible city.

This is not a history of the Roman Republic, Empire, Papacy, Renaissance or Risorgimento. Instead the focus remains fixed on the city of Rome itself: its buildings, reputation and inhabitants. Its streets and piazzas have witnessed so many of the crucial moments in these states and movements but Hibbert's work ventures away from the city walls only for a full introduction to events within.

The history adds an additional element to any visit to Rome, not only providing a history of the major landmarks but also helping the visitor imagine the city in lost eras. The only major improvement needed is a better map (or ... Read More:
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.War in Val D'Orcia: An Italian War Diary, 1943-1944
City Travel Guides > Books > Italy
by: Iris Origo

August 04, 2000
A beautiful heartfelt account of two years of war in my native Tuscany: 1943 and 1944, a page of history probably unknown outside Italy.
A crazy dance of events, a dance macabre, I would define it.
A daily war diary written by Marchesa Iris Origo, an English- American lady married to an Italian and living near Siena.
Marchesa Origo gives us an account of facts which happened in Val d'Orcia and were directly or indirectly related to her and her family.
Hardships and tragedies suffered by Italian civilians by the hands of a bloodthirsty German army whose only aim seemed to be the slaughter of harmeless people and a more than crazy fascist horde the "repubblichini"; all together they succeded in murdering hundreds of Italian civilians and foreign "allies" ... Read More:
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.A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics: 1943-1988 (Penguin History)
City Travel Guides > Books > Italy
by: Paul Ginsborg

September 27, 1990
A beautiful heartfelt account of two years of war in my native Tuscany: 1943 and 1944, a page of history probably unknown outside Italy.
A crazy dance of events, a dance macabre, I would define it.
A daily war diary written by Marchesa Iris Origo, an English- American lady married to an Italian and living near Siena.
Marchesa Origo gives us an account of facts which happened in Val d'Orcia and were directly or indirectly related to her and her family.
Hardships and tragedies suffered by Italian civilians by the hands of a bloodthirsty German army whose only aim seemed to be the slaughter of harmeless people and a more than crazy fascist horde the "repubblichini"; all together they succeded in murdering hundreds of Italian civilians and foreign "allies" ... Read More:
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