Readings in
Italian History

Thomas Hodgkin's masterwork, Italy and Her Invaders (8 volumes, 1896), starting in late Roman times, chronicles Italy's travails under invasions by the Visigoths, the Huns, the Vandals, the Ostrogoths, the Byzantines (nominally a restoration of Roman authority), the Lombards, and the Franks. Hodgkin has achieved a tour de force: his detailed account of the often convoluted story is immensely readable, a very scholar­ly work — yet that can be read with pleasure.

[ 5345 pages of print in 203 webpages ]

Otherwise, F. Marion Crawford's book The Rulers of the South (2 volumes, 1901) comes closest to a general history, being an account of Southern Italy from "the earliest time" thru the Greeks and Romans, the Goths, the Byzantines, the Saracens, the Normans, and then into its own up to the end of the 19c. The book is at its best as military history, and tends to focus somewhat on Sicily.

[ 712 pages of print
— 16 webpages, 29 photos, 3 maps, 94 other illustrations ]

Corrado Ricci's Umbria Santa is a series of essays on Umbrian art, or at least on the best-known painters of the region: Giotto, Benozzo Gozzoli, Matteo da Gualdo, Perugino, Pintoricchio, Lo Spagna, Mezzastris, Melanzio and others. The essays are woven together into the spiritual heritage and traditions of Umbria as represented by St. Benedict, St. Francis, and St. Rita of Cascia.

[ 183 pages of print
— 10 webpages, 55 photos ]

Luigi Serra's monograph Aquila is a survey of the art and monuments in L'Aquila, the provincial capital of Abruzzo, from the Roman remains at Amiternum thru the sober splendors of Abruzzese Gothic to the frankly rather weak productions of the late 19c. (I've provided an English translation of the opening chapter on the Roman period.)

[ 142 pages of print
— 18 webpages; 147 photos, 1 engraving ]

Somewhat similarly, Giulio Urbini's Spello, Bevagna, Montefalco covers the architectural monuments of these three small Umbrian towns: almost all Roman or medieval. And this being Italy, yes, that means a fair amount of surpassingly beauti­ful art.

[ 122 pages of print
— 18 webpages, 104 photos, 1 map, 1 other illustration ]

Tommaso Valenti's Curiosità storiche trevane is a series of essays on facets, some of them unusual, of the history of the Umbrian town of Trevi: a miscellany taking the reader thru towers, gates, bandits, weapons, guilds, brides and dowries, the status of local Jews under the Popes, and many other curious topics. (I've provided English and French translations of some of the articles.)

[ 160 pages of print in 24 webpages ]

Francesco Mavarelli's Notizie storiche e Laudi della Compagnia di Disciplinati di S. Maria Nuova e S. Croce nella terra di Fratta is a group of three source texts which have come down to us from a confraternity that ran a hospital in the Umbrian town of Fratta, now Umbertide, as early as the end of the 13c. Two of these texts are Christian devotional poems in medieval Italian, one of them particularly beauti­ful; the third is a dry compendium of the hospital's revenues and expenses. The texts are introduced by a long and detailed historical essay on the confraternity, the hospital, the poems.

[ 59 pages of print in 5 webpages ]

On April 25, 1944, a stray British bomb, meant for the railway station of Umbertide, fell instead on the town's old medieval quarter in the upper valley of the Tiber. It was densely inhabited, and 70 human beings lost their lives.

Voci della Memoria is a moving, impressionistic retelling of the lives of these ordinary folks, micro-history as it were, on the model of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology. A research and writing project of a high-school class at Umbertide's Scuola Media, and one of which its authors can be proud. I am honored to have been permitted to put the work online here.

[ 55 pages of print in 42 webpages ]

Not properly history, but my Gazetteer of Italy — which tends to focus somewhat on the country's old churches — contains very thorough information on Umbria and the city of Rome; good details on the Etruscans (including one entire book); a fair amount on the Lazio; some material on Tuscany and the Marche; and a few stray squibs on places in Emilia-Romagna as well as on the cities of Chioggia, Milan, and L'Aquila.

[ 1549 webpages
— 2500 photos, 284 engravings, 49 plans and maps ]

A great deal of information on Greek and Roman history is to be found in a large section of my site monikered "LacusCurtius". Inevitably, much of it could fairly be called Italian history: see the separate orientation page.

[ 3916 webpages
— 779 photos, 772 drawings & engravings, 259 plans and maps ]

I've put onsite many entries in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica having to do with Italian history, occasionally adding photographs or annotation: they can be found here.

[ 104 webpages ]