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Jerusalem Delivered
La Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem delivered) is a verse epic by the late-Renaissance Italian poet Torquato Tasso (1544–95). Written in the eight-line stanzas common to Italian Renaissance poetry, Tasso’s masterpiece is known for the beauty of its language, profound expressions of emotion, and concern for historical accuracy. The subject of the poem is the First Crusade of 1096–99 and the quest by the Frankish knight Godfrey of Bouillon to liberate the sepulcher of Jesus Christ. Tasso was born in Sorrento, in the Kingdom of Naples, and his interest ...
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Geography
Claudius Ptolemaeus (circa 100–circa 170), known as Ptolemy, was an astronomer, mathematician, and geographer of Greek descent who lived and worked in the Egyptian city of Alexandria. In his Geography, Ptolemy gathered all the geographic knowledge possessed by the Greco-Roman world. He used a system of grid lines to plot the latitude and longitude of some 8,000 places on a map that encompassed the known world at the height of the Roman Empire. Ptolemy’s work was lost to Europe in the Middle Ages, but around 1300 Byzantine ...
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Remains of the Antiquities Existing in Puteoli, Cumae, and Baiae
Paolo Antonio Paoli, president of the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy in Rome (1775–98), was a pioneering scholar and historian of the ancient civilizations of the region of Campania in southern Italy. He completed this fundamental work about the Greek and Roman settlements in the area of Pozzuoli, near Naples, in 1768. Avanzi delle antichità esistenti a Pozzuoli Cuma e Baia. Antiquitatum Puteolis Cumis Baiis existentium reliquiae (Remains of the antiquities existing in Puteoli, Cumae, and Baiae) features 69 plates with etched engravings, which are explained in an accompanying text that ...
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The Rubrics of the First Book of Lactantius Firmianus's On the Divine Institutes Against the Pagans Begin …
This very rare work by Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius is one of the first books printed in Italy and the first dated Italian imprint. It was produced by the German typographers Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, who established a printing press in 1465 at the Benedictine abbey of Subiaco, near Rome. According to the colophon, the book was completed “In the year of Our Lord 1465, in the second year of the papacy of Paul II, the thirteenth indiction and the last day but two of the month of October ...
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Design Statement for the Royal Palace of Caserta to their Holy Royal Majesties Carlo, King of the Two Sicilies and of Jerusalem. Infante of Spain, Duke of Parma and of Piacenza, Great Hereditary Prince of Tuscany and of Queen Maria Amalia of Saxony
Luigi Vanvitelli (1700–73) was an Italian architect and engineer, the son of Flemish-born painter Caspar van Wittel. Vanvitelli trained in Rome under the architect Niccolo Salvi, and designed churches and other structures in Rome, and in Ancona, in east-central Italy. He received a commission in 1751 to build a new royal palace at Caserta, just north of Naples for Charles VII, the Bourbon king of Naples and Sicily. Construction of this magnificent building began in 1752. It was one of the largest buildings erected in Europe in the 18th ...
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