Prominently located on the Arx, the northern summit of the Capitoline hill, S. Maria in Aracoeli is the most significant medieval church of Rome to survive to the present day. Second major church of the Lesser Brothers or fratres minores in the Italian peninsula, and Roman headquarters of the Order, the Aracoeli played a vital role in the interaction between the Franciscans and the papacy, the friars and the laity, and the religious and civic authorities, as reflected in its art and architecture. On the basis of an interdisciplinary approach combining archaeological analysis with the finding of new archival evidence, reinterpretation of documents and literary and epigraphic sources, this book offers a reconstruction of the original church, its monuments and its Benedictine as well as eighth/ninth-century predecessors, which differs radically from earlier hypotheses. This reassessment in turn allows the author to revisit a number of major questions, including the Franciscans’ physical and theoretical appropriation of the past, the adaptation of an ancient site by a ‘modern’ religious order, the use and functions of space, the interaction between friars, laity and artists, and the contribution of the Roman Franciscans to the development of Marian devotion, thus shedding new light on the social, political and religious history of late-medieval Italy and its impact beyond the peninsula, from England to Bohemia and the Holy Land.

An aging man attempts to recover the past and get his life back on track in the process. His deceased mother, Aracoeli, came from a small Spanish town and married an upper class Italian navy ensign. The idyllic years she spends with her only son, Mauel, are shattered when she contracts an incurable disease and becomes a nymphomaniac. Now 43, Manuel is a unattractive, self-loathing, recovering drug addict who works in a dead end job at a small publishing house. He decides to travel back to Spain to search for traces of his mother.

Papers address a major challenge in archaeology: non-intrusive research in pursuit of a deeper understanding of urban areas can be richly informative and cost-effective. Geophysical surveys, UAVs, exposed historic structures and the exhaustive examination of archival records can all play a vital role and their implementation is considered here.

Combining close textual readings with a broad theoretical perspective, Gender, Narrative, and Dissonance in the Modern Italian Novel is a study of the ways in which gender shapes the principal characters and narratives of seven important Italian novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (1827) to Elsa Morante’s Aracoeli (1982). Silvia Valisa’s innovative approach focuses on the tensions between the characters and the gender ideologies that surround them, and the ways in which this dissonance exposes the ideological and epistemological structures of the modern novel. A provocative account of the intersection between gender, narrative, and epistemology that draws on the work of Georg Lukács, Barbara Spackman, and Teresa de Lauretis, this volume offers an intriguing new approach to investigating the nature of fiction.

This volume provides readers interested in urban history with a collection of essays on the evolution of public space in that paradigmatic western city which is Rome. Scholars specialized in different historical periods contributed chapters, in order to find common themes which weave their way through one of the most complex urban histories of western civilization. Divided into five chronological sections (Antiquity, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Baroque, Modern and Contemporary) the volume opens with the issue of how public space was defined in classical Roman law and how ancient city managers organized the maintenance of these spaces, before moving on to explore how this legacy was redefined and reinterpreted during the Middle Ages. The third group of essays examines how the imposition of papal order on feuding families during the Renaissance helped introduce a new urban plan which could satisfy both functional and symbolic needs. The fourth section shows how modern Rome continued to express strong interest in the control and management of public space, the definition of which was necessarily selective in this vastly extensive city. The collection ends with an essay on the contemporary debate for revitalizing Rome's eastern periphery. Through this long-term chronological approach the volume offers a truly unique insight into the urban development of one of Europe’s most important cities, and concludes with a discuss of the challenges public space faces today after having served for so many centuries as a driving force in urban history.

Classica et Mediaevalia is an international periodical, published annually, with articles written by Danish and international scholars. The articles are mainly written in English, but also in French and German. The periodical deals from a philological point of view on Classical Antiquity in general and topics such as history of law and philosophy and the medieval ecclesiastic history. It covers the period from the Greco-Roman Antiquity until the Late Middle Ages. Volume 55 contents include: The Date of Xenophon's PoroiSocratic Apologetics in Xenophon's Symposionberlegungen zur Argumentationsstruktur in Platons ProtagorasTrial by Riddle: The Testing of the Counsellor and the Contest of Kings in the Legend of Amasis and BiasHorace on Tradition and the Individul Talent: Ars Poetica 119-52L'Itinerarium Egeriae: un point de vue littaire INemo Mecenas, nemo modo Cesar. Die Idee der Literaturfrderung in der lateinischen Dichtung des hohen MittelaltersOn the Composition of Herbert Lo