Presents the history of Venice from its origins to its eighteenth century fall.

Even in an age of soaring skyscrapers and cavernous sports stadiums, the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, with its immense, terracotta-tiled cupola, retains a rare power to astonish. This book tells the story of how the cupola was raised, from its conception to its consecration.

A history of the French Revolution, this book gives an account of the first few years of the great Revolution in France, and of the decades that led up to it.

In April 1478, a plot to murder the two heads of the powerful Medici family miscarried dramatically in the cathedral of Florence. A bloodbath followed in reprisal. All Italy was affected as it emerged that the Pope, the King of Naples and the Duke of Urbino were deeply implicated in the plot.

A picture of Italian domestic life on the eve of the Renaissance. Francesco di Marco Datini, the 14th-century Tuscan merchant who forms the subject of the Marchesa Origo's study, has now probably become the most intimately accessible figure of the later-Middle Ages.

Portrays the 'great lawgiver' Justinian as a rampant king of corruption and tyranny, the Empress Theodora as a sorceress and whore, and the general Belisarius as the pliable dupe of his scheming wife Antonina. This book depicts holy Byzantium as a hell of murder and misrule.