Elisabetta, Marco, and Sandro grow up as the best of friends despite their differences. Elisabetta is a feisty beauty who dreams of becoming a novelist; Marco the brash and athletic son in a family of professional cyclists; and Sandro a Jewish mathematics prodigy, kind-hearted and thoughtful, the son of a lawyer and a doctor. Their friendship blossoms to love, with both Sandro and Marco hoping to win Elisabetta's heart. But in the autumn of 1937,...

The author makes the point that in this abridgement he has adhered to Gibbon's style, format, planning, and footnotes, and has made only selective exclusions. The history covers the centuries from Marcus Aurelius to the capture of Constantinople, and concludes with an epilogue dealing with medieval Rome and the dawn of the Renaissance.

"Ancient Rome matters. Its history of empire, conquest, cruelty and excess is something against which we still judge ourselves. Its myths and stories - from Romulus and Remus to the Rape of Lucretia - still strike a chord with us. And its debates about citizenship, security and the rights of the individual still influence our own debates on civil liberty today. SPQR is a new look at Roman history from one of the world's foremost classicists. It explores...

Text and black and white illustrations show how the Romans planned and constructed their cities for the people who lived within them.

"Discourses on Livy", which was first published posthumously in 1531, is Niccolo Machiavelli's analysis of the first ten books of Livy's monumental work of Roman History, which details the expansion of Rome through the end of the Third Samnite War in 293 BC. Machiavelli believed that by examining the exemplary greatness in Roman history, practical lessons could be applied to the politics of the present day. The Italian renaissance was causing people...

In no other city is the past preserved as it is in Rome. Visitors can cross bridges that Cicero and Julius Caesar crossed, explore temples visited by Roman emperors, and walk into churches that have hardly changed since the early days of Christianity. These architectural survivals are all the more remarkable considering the many disasters that have struck the city. Rome has been afflicted by earthquakes, floods, fires, and plagues, but above all it...

From Robert Hughes, one of the greatest art and cultural critics of our time, comes a sprawling, comprehensive, and deeply personal history of Rome—as city, as empire, and, crucially, as an origin of Western art and civilization, two subjects about which Hughes has spent his life writing and thinking.
Starting on a personal note, Hughes takes us to the Rome he first encountered as a hungry twenty-one-year-old fresh from Australia in 1959....

This abridged edition makes the great German scholar's multi-volume work accessible to a larger audience. Rivaling Gibbon, Macaulay, and Burckhardt in its scope and power, it chronicles Roman society and government from the second century BC to the end of the Republic and rise of Julius Caesar - and helped earn Mommsen the 1902 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Based on eyewitness accounts and his own unlimited access to the Emperor Hadrian's Imperial archives, the scholar Suetonius wrote a sweeping account of the lives of twelve of Rome's most powerful emperors. From the empire's most shining examples of ruling competency, such as Julius Caesar and Augustus, to the most depraved and doomed rulers, such as Nero, this ancient and colorful biographical work presents a vivid and accessible picture of these...