From the author of Memory and the Mediterranean, a comprehensive history of the Italian city states from 1450 to 1650. In the fifteenth-century, even before the city-states of the Apennine Peninsula began to coalesce into what would become, several centuries later, a nation, "Italy" exerted enormous influence over all of Europe and throughout the Mediterranean. Its cultural, economic, and political dominance is utterly astonishing and unique in world...