Status Updates From Italy in the Age of Dante a...

The educated mind of the 13C and early 14C had an infinite capacity for transmuting everyday reality into epic forms.

The author is confusing King of Aragón Pedro III with King Pedro II.

More is to be learnt about 13C Rome from Matthew Paris, resident at St. Alban's in England, than from any native chronicler.

Whereas histories of England normally begin with the Roman occupation of Britain, Italian history is always taken to start with the fall of the Empire.

"Gluttony as a work of art was a demonstration of the power of the governing class and a symbol too of the supreme importance of food in the thought of governments."

"it was not the those earnest, prudent virtues, that homely everyday wisdom, which Weber detected in 'the bourgeosis ethic' which characterised Italian society in the first age of commercial capitalism. A society with such values would have created nothing. Rather it was those ideals of impetuous courage combined with...contempt for wealth as such, which gave the Italian nobility its dynamic."

"The majority of Italians who lived in the 13th and 14th centuries never heard the word 'Italy'. It was a country in which only the literate lived. Consciousness of its meaning arose from three sources: the classics, xenophobia, and exile."