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The Florentine
Lisa Kaborycha has a PhD in history from the University of California, Berkeley, and is author of "A Short History of Renaissance Italy". A resident of Florence since 2007, she teaches courses at the University of New Haven in Prato and The British Institute in Florence.
This past week, the study abroad experience of most American college students in Florence came to an abrupt end as, with tearful hugs for their homestay moms and waving arrivederci ...
It’s back-to-school time in Florence, and like every semester, between 3,000 and 5,000 American college students will flood the city, coming to study abroad here. Shedding light on this phenomenon ...
The irony of my job is not lost on me. As I go to work each day, I make my way on stony streets where it seems, at times, that you can still hear the Guelfs and Ghibellines hurling abuses, and sometimes even projectiles, at one another. From time to
The Medici sent gifts to friends, agents, diplomats and rulers all over Europe, and the objects they sent were highly coveted. Sometimes too highly coveted. In a letter thanking his Medici employers for gifts to his wife, an Italian engineer temporarily working at the German court writes: My wife thanks
There were the Grand Duke and Duchess with all their children, the youngest at his wet nurse's breast, happily suckling away. A courtier, describing a ballet held at the Medici court to the Duchess of Mantua. February 12, 1619 When Cosimo II and Maria Magdalena went
There is never any shortage of gruesome crimes to occupy the public's imagination. To be termed a ‘crime of the century', however, a murder must have special qualities that make it stand out: a celebrity is involved, the murder is carried out in a particularly grisly manner, the
I have heard you would like to try some cheeses from Pesaro, so I am sending you these as a sample. Let me know if you like them and I'll send more... When Vladimir Putin calls George Bush, does he ask how the twins are doing? Did
As far as news from Poland, I regret to inform your highness that things are going very unhappily for us there...all of Lithuania and Prussia are lost to us as well... We tend to think of our modern world as the first great information age, but already during
