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 turbulent backdrop of civic factionalism, foreign invasions, war, and pestilence.

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 women’s lives, their changing social attitudes and beliefs across three centuries. This second edition has been updated throughout; it now contains dozens of color images and timelines, as well as links to the author's new companion book of primary sources, Voices from the Italian Renaissance.

Readers will need no preliminary background on the subject matter, as the story is told in a lively, readable narrative. Interdisciplinary in nature, its characters are merchants, bankers, artists, saints, soldiers of fortune, poets, popes, and courtesans. With brief literary excerpts, first-hand accounts, maps, and illustrations that help bring the era to life, this is an ideal text for students in a college survey course, as well as for the interested general reader or traveler to Italy who is curious to learn more about the extraordinary heritage of the Renaissance.