An insider’s tour of the most creative and inspiring rooms belonging to tastemakers—artists, interior designers, craftspeople, collectors, and aristocrats—in Italy today. Italy has been a source of inspiration for generations of artists and lovers of beauty. In this book, Italians Oberto Gili and Marella Caracciolo Chia take us around the country and into the homes of some of its most stylish habitués. From rural estates in Tuscany and spectacular seaside villas to an eighteenth-century palace in Puglia and city residences in Turin, Milan, Venice, Rome, and Naples, the properties reveal the unique personal visions of the owners and the inescapable appeal of Italian style. The diversity of places echoes the wide range of geographical contexts. Each interior acts as a source of surprise and an impetus for creativity, reflecting the individual tastes and talents of those who live and have lived there—designer Carlo Mollino, couturier Stephan Janson, art and literary scholar Mario Praz, and artists Sandro Chia and Alessandro Twombly. In addition to the houses of artists and craftspeople, rooms of visionary interior designers, such as Camilla Guinness, Roberto Peregalli, and Laura Sartori Rimini, are also included. This book—an intimate glimpse into some of the most beautiful and inaccessible dwellings in Italy today—is perfect for aesthetically minded readers with an interest in interior design, Italy, and the art of fine living.

The palace of Nero is a visionary monument, decorated with monsters, fantastic animals and mythical scenes taken from the Homeric poems to create a colourful and seductive imagery. The part of this sumptuous ostentation of power that survived the damnatio memoriae of the emperor after his death is the pavilion on the Oppian Hill, over which the foundations of the new Baths of Trajan were built.0The volume opens with a portrait of Nero, a prince-artist whose complexity can only be guessed between the lines of a violently hostile biographical tradition. There follow, in order, the vicissitudes of the building, between rediscoveries (in the 15th century) and new condemnations (after the Council of Trent), an investigation into the ?grotesque? style from Raphael to the present day and a final chapter on the links with the imagery of contemporary art. The images that accompany the texts, as in all the volumes in this series, range from 19th-century paintings to maps and archaeological finds and, together with quotations, give the reader an unconventional and yet scholarly overview of the history of this magnificent monument.

Nero's palace, the Domus Aurea (Golden House), is the most influential known building in the history of Roman architecture. It has been incompletely studied and poorly understood ever since its most important sections were excavated in the 1930s. In this book, Larry Ball provides systematic investigation of the Domus Aurea, including a comprehensive analysis of the masonry, the design, and the abundant ancient literary evidence. Highlighting the revolutionary innovations of the Domus Aurea, Ball also outlines their wide-ranging implications for the later development of Roman concrete architecture.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1873.

Between the middle of the 10th century and the middle of the 12th century both the cultural and the national identities of the Poles were formed. They were determined by political decisions made by the rulers from the Piast ruling house and built on a framework consisting of stories focused on the Piasts’ past. In all of this a dynastic tradition supported by the current ruler and his entourage was created and re-created. Tradition was understood as communication, the aim of which was to transmit values which define ways of perceiving the world by those people who accept this tradition as their own – by the Poles. The aim of the work is to seek traces of these traditions and values still alive in Polish culture.

This new edition contains the texts and brand new translations of two key documents of twelfth-century English history. The Dialogus de Scaccario (Dialogue of the Exchequer) is a medieval financial manual written by a royal official, Richard fitzNigel: it describes the sources of royal revenue, details the functions of those collected money for the king, and explains how the exchequer maintained control over the king's money. The Constitutio Domus Regis lists the job titles and allowances of those people whose responsibility was to look after the domestic needs of the king and his court circle. Together the Dialogus and the Constitutio provide a window into the workings and personnel of medieval English government, and the editors offer extensive notes to to guide the reader.