This book is a treasure house of Italian philosophy. Narrating and explaining the history of Italian philosophers from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, the author identifies the specificity, peculiarity, originality, and novelty of Italian philosophical thought in the men and women of the Renaissance. The vast intellectual output of the Renaissance can be traced back to a single philosophical stream beginning in Florence and fed by numerous converging human factors. This work offers historians and philosophers a vast survey and penetrating analysis of an intellectual tradition which has heretofore remained virtually unknown to the Anglophonic world of scholarship.

In A History of Earliest Italy, first published in 1984, Professor Pallottino illumines the wide variety of peoples, languages, and traditions of culture and trade that constituted the pre-Roman Italic world. Since the written sources are fragmentary, archaeology provides the central reservoir for evidence of the societies and institutions of the varied peoples of early Italy. This incisive and immensely readable account unfolds from the Bronze Age to the unification of the Italian peninsula and Sicily by Rome following the flourishing Archaic period. It examines the relationships among the peoples of the peninsula and the influence of Mycenae and Greece in trade and colonisation. In telling the story of the early stages of the eternal dialogue between national vocation and local diversity in Italy, Professor Pallottino demonstrates that it is no less deserving of our attention than its contemporary Greek and later imperial Roman counterparts.

In 1537 Francesco Guicciardini, adviser and confidant to three popes, governor of several central Italian states, ambassador, administrator, military captain--and persona non grata with the ruling Medici after the siege of Florence--retired to his villa to write a history of his times. His Storia d'Italia became the classic history of Italy--both a brilliant portrayal of the Renaissance and a penetrating vision into the tragedy and comedy of human history in general. Sidney Alexander's readable translation and abridgment of Guicciardini's four-volume work earned the prestigious 1970 P.E.N. Club translation award. His perceptive introduction and notes add much to the understanding of Guicciardini's masterpiece.