Time in the Eternal City is a major contribution to the study of time and its numerous aspects in late medieval and Renaissance Rome.

A surprising history of interfaith collaboration in the Roman Ghetto, where for three centuries Jewish and Christian butchers worked together to provision the city despite the proscriptions of Church law. For Rome’s Jewish population, confined to a ghetto between 1555 and 1870, efforts to secure kosher meat were fraught with challenges. The city’s papal authorities viewed kashrut—the Jewish dietary laws—with suspicion, and it was widely believed that kosher meat would contaminate any Christian who consumed it. Supplying kosher provisions entailed circumventing canon law and the institutions that regulated the butchering and sale of meat throughout the city. Kenneth Stow finds that Jewish butchers collaborated extensively with their Christian counterparts to ensure a supply of kosher meat, regardless of the laws that prohibited such interactions. Jewish butchers sold nonkosher portions of slaughtered animals daily to Christians outside the ghetto, which in turn ensured the affordability of kosher meat. At the same time, Christian butchers also found it profitable to work with Jews, as this enabled them to sell good meat otherwise unavailable at attractive prices. These relationships could be warm and almost intimate, but they could also be rife with anger, deception, and even litigation. Nonetheless, without this close cooperation—and the willingness of authorities to turn a blind eye to it—meat-eating in the ghetto would have been nearly impossible. Only the rise of the secular state in the late nineteenth century brought fundamental change, putting an end to canon law and allowing the kosher meat market to flourish. A rich social history of food in early modern Rome, Feeding the Eternal City is also a compelling narrative of Jewish life and religious acculturation in the capital of Catholicism.

Living in 2040 in an age of harsh austerity, Ethan Thomas works for a sinister organisation that enforces the ‘Sleep Code’ – laws which regulate sleep in order to fulfil the United Kingdom’s need for economic growth. A strong belief in the justice of his work drives Ethan to fanatically pursue sleep criminals and his own lazy colleagues to the detriment of his personal relationships. Ethan’s conscientiousness leads his superiors to assign him to a new project where he will be responsible for identifying a group of subversives working to undermine the Sleep Code. Delving into a world of secretive intelligence agencies and groups with ambiguous loyalties, Ethan works night and day to fulfil his duty. But when he develops a problematic sleep disorder, Ethan finds himself increasingly compromised personally and professionally. Experiencing the same situations that he has previously investigated, he witness the corrupt ways that the law is enforced. Now Ethan must decide whether he can maintain his integrity and his belief in the system he defends.

From the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of The Alice Network and The Diamond Eye comes a historical saga about obsession, betrayal, and destiny. Sabina may be Empress of Rome, but she still stands poised on a knife’s edge. She must keep the peace between two deadly enemies: her husband Hadrian, Rome’s brilliant and sinister Emperor; and battered warrior Vix, her first love. But Sabina is guardian of a deadly secret: Vix’s beautiful son Antinous has become the Emperor’s latest obsession. Empress and Emperor, father and son will spin in a deadly dance of passion, betrayal, conspiracy, and war. As tragedy sends Hadrian spiraling into madness, Vix and Sabina form a last desperate pact to save the Empire. But ultimately, the fate of Rome lies with an untried girl, a spirited redhead who may just be the next Lady of the Eternal City....

Between the catastrophic flood of the Tiber River in 1557 and the death of the “engineering pope” Sixtus V in 1590, the city of Rome was transformed by intense activity involving building construction and engineering projects of all kinds. Using hundreds of archival documents and primary sources, Engineering the Eternal City explores the processes and people involved in these infrastructure projects—sewers, bridge repair, flood prevention, aqueduct construction, the building of new, straight streets, and even the relocation of immensely heavy ancient Egyptian obelisks that Roman emperors had carried to the city centuries before. This portrait of an early modern Rome examines the many conflicts, failures, and successes that shaped the city, as decision-makers tried to control not only Rome’s structures and infrastructures but also the people who lived there. Taking up visual images of the city created during the same period—most importantly in maps and urban representations, this book shows how in a time before the development of modern professionalism and modern bureaucracies, there was far more wide-ranging conversation among people of various backgrounds on issues of engineering and infrastructure than there is in our own times. Physicians, civic leaders, jurists, cardinals, popes, and clerics engaged with painters, sculptors, architects, printers, and other practitioners as they discussed, argued, and completed the projects that remade Rome.

The Ruin of the Eternal City provides the first systematic analysis of the preservation practices of the popes, civic magistrates, and ordinary citizens of Renaissance Rome. This study offers a new understanding of historic preservation as it occurred during the extraordinary rebuilding of a great European capital city.

Mercenary King Chen Qingyang returned to the city to protect his comrade's sister. the goddess. In the bustling city, Chen Qingyang was like a fish in water, carefree and at ease. And to see how the previous generation's soldiers would use their iron fists and wits to build a business empire...

This guidebook is designed for tourists and scholars who are interested in exploring first-hand the grandeur and magnificence that was ancient Rome through a Humanist, secular, and freethinking lens. Twelve walking tours are designed around districts of the city. Two appendices also describe day trips that are possible from the city center: the ruins of Rome's port city of Ostia and the remains of the emperor Hadrian's splendid villa at Tivoli.

From Elly Griffiths, bestselling crime author writing under her own name, comes a heart-warming tale of family rivalry and long-held secrets. Steeped in local Italian colour, it reveals a family at their worst - and best . 'Witty and light as a tiramisu but with tart insight on sibling rivalry' Nottingham Evening Post Gaby, the youngest of the de Angelis sisters, always knew she was her father Enzo's favourite; so when Enzo dies on the day her own daughter is born, her life is turned upside down. In the emotional aftermath of the funeral, it emerges that her father has asked that his ashes be taken back to his native city, Rome. Suddenly, Gaby and her new family are thrown headlong into the wider de Angelis clan with all of their conflicting ideas and opinions. As the family journeys to Rome to say a final goodbye to Enzo, emotions run high; but none higher than Gaby's, as she comes face to face with the man she once thought she would marry.

The Black Widows of the Eternal City offers, for the first time, a book-length study of an infamous cause célèbre in seventeenth-century Rome, how it resonated then and has continued to resonate: the 1659 investigation and prosecution of Gironima Spana and dozens of Roman widows, who shared a particularly effective poison to murder their husbands. This notorious case has been frequently discussed over 350 years, but the earliest writers concentrated more on fortifying their reading constituency’s shared attitudes than accurately narrating facts. Subsequent authors remained largely content to follow their predecessors or keen to improve upon them. Most recent writers and bloggers were unaware that their earlier sources were generally unconcerned with a correct portrayal of real events. In the present study, Craig A. Monson takes advantage of a recent discovery—the 1,450-page notary’s transcript of the 1659 investigation. It is supplemented here by many ancillary archival sources, unknown to all previous writers. Since the story of Gironima Spana and the would-be widows is partially about what people believed to be true, however, this investigation also juxtaposes some of the “alternative facts” from earlier, sensational accounts with what the notary’s transcript and other, more reliable archival documents reveal. Written in a style that avoids arcane idioms and specialist jargon, the book can potentially speak to students and general readers interested in seventeenth-century social history and gender issues. It rewrites the life story of Gironima Spana (largely unknown until now), who has dominated all earlier accounts, usually in caricatures that reiterate the tropes of witchcraft. It also concentrates on the dozen other widows whose stories could be the most recovered from archival sources and whom Spana had totally eclipsed in earlier accounts. Most were women “of a very ordinary sort” (prostitutes; beggars; wives of butchers, barbers, dyers, lineners, innkeepers), the kinds of women commonly lost to history. The book seeks to explain why some women were hanged (only six, in fact, most of whom may not have directly poisoned anyone), while dozens of others who did poison their husbands escaped the gallows and, in some cases, were not even interrogated. It also reveals what happened to these other alleged perpetrators, whose fates have remained unknown until now. Other purported culprits, about whom less complete pictures emerge, are briefly discussed in an appendix. The study incorporates illustrations of archival manuscripts to demonstrate the challenges of deciphering them and illustrates “scenes of the crime” and other important locations, identified on seventeenth-century, bird’s eye-perspective views of Rome and in modern photographs. It also includes GPS coordinates for any who might wish to revisit the sites.