From Giotto-s artistic revolution at the dawn of the fourteenth century to the scientific discoveries of Galileo in the early seventeenth, this book explores the cultural developments of one of the most remarkable and vibrant periods of history-the Italian Renaissance. What makes the period all the more amazing is that this flowering of the visual arts, literature, and philosophy occurred against a backdrop of political turbulence involving civic factionalism, repeated foreign invasions, and war.
The fifteen chapters move briskly from the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West through the growth of the Italian city-states, where, in the crucible of pandemic disease and social unrest, a new approach to learning known as humanism was forged, political and religious certainties challenged. Traversing the entire Italian Peninsula- Florence, Rome, Milan, Venice, Naples and Sicily-this book examines the rich regional diversity of Renaissance cultural experience and considers men-s and
