Described as "the perfect Baroque city," the southeastern Sicilian city of Noto was totally destroyed by an earthquake in 1693 and then rebuilt by ambitious citizens eager to match Italian achievements. The Genesis of Noto traces the complex history of Noto's foundation and growth as a grid-planned Renaissance-Baroque utopia. Described as "the perfect Baroque city," the southeastern Sicilian city of Noto was totally destroyed by an earthquake in 1693 and then rebuilt by ambitious citizens eager to match Italian achievements. The Genesis of Noto traces the complex history of Noto's foundation and growth as a grid-planned Renaissance-Baroque utopia.

Throughout history, varying responses to catastrophe have revealed much about a society's cultural and philosophical character. In Dreadful Visitations , leading scholars of different disciplines examine eighteenth-century responses to natural disaster, showing how human agency played an active role in the creation of destructive circumstances, and how these disasters helped to establish national and moral identities in the Age of Reason. Contributors: David Arnold, Daniel Gordon, Carla Hesse, George Starr, Alan Taylor, Steven Tobriner and Charles Walker.

This collection of twenty-one essays, written by colleagues and former students of the architectural historian Spiro Kostof (1936-1991), presents case studies on Kostof's model of urban forms and fabrics. The essays are remarkably diverse: the range includes pre-Columbian Inca settlements, fourteenth-century Cairo, nineteenth-century New Orleans, and twentieth-century Tokyo. Focusing on individual streets around the world and from different historical periods, the collection is an inviting overview of the street as an urban institution. The theme of the volume is that the street presents itself as the basic structuring device of a city's form and also as the locus of its civilization. Each essay is a detailed investigation of a single urban street with unique historical conditions. The authors' shared concern regarding anthropological, political, and technical aspects of street making coalesce into a critical discourse on urban space. A fitting tribute to Spiro Kostof, this collection will be greatly admired by scholars and general readers alike.

A guide to the fascinating and diverse history and culture of Sicily. The book includes key events, places and artists highlighted in wide-ranging articles presented in four parts: History, Cities, Ancient Sites and Artists. A rich tapestry emerges of an island that has experienced dramatic changes of fortune while becoming a melting-pot of cultural influences from the eastern Mediterranean, North Africa and mainland Italy. It also includes commentary on the monuments and works of art to be seen today, linking Sicily past and present. Follow the stories of Dionysius' castle, the foundation of the cathedral at Monreale, the Sicilian poets who invented the sonnet and the British merchants who made Marsala wine an international brand. Tour the big cities of Catania and Messina, the resorts of Taormina and Cefalù, and the baroque hilltowns of south-eastern Sicily. Explore the ancient sites, among them Segesta, Selinunte and Agrigento. Witness the originality of the island's culture through the profiles of eight artists, sculptors and architects from the Renaissance to the twentieth century including Antonello da Messina, Giacomo Serpotta and Renato Guttuso, as well as Caravaggio, who left some of his last masterpieces on the island. This book complements the author's previous work on Syracuse and Palermo, filling in gaps in the island's story, to form a comprehensive trilogy on Sicily.

This book answers the need for a contextual, long-term and interpretative analysis of risk from original sources. Risk has historically been a way of imagining what could happen in the future based on expert theories and predictions. This book explores this notion of "managing the future" by tracing the conceptual development of risk from its origin in Islamic Koranic theology. It follows its long voyage from mercantile law and navigation in Medieval Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean, to Columbus' arrival to the Indies and the Spanish exploration and colonization in the Americas. It considers the mathematical invention of probability in games of chance, the birth of journalism in Britain with Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, the earthquake of Lisbon in 1755 and the subsequent controversy between apocalyptic believers and enlightened philosophers. Tracking the growth and evolution of risk as a concept across various historical periods and events, Mairal highlights four key features of risk - time, knowledge, relationship and probability - and argues that risk is not based on perception as it is generally presented, but rather on knowledge accrued and developed over a vast historical time frame. A Pre-Modern Cultural History of Risk will be of great interest to students and scholars of risk management.

We can't stop natural disasters but we can stop them being disastrous. One of the world's foremost risk experts tells us how. Year after year, floods wreck people's homes and livelihoods, earthquakes tear communities apart, and tornadoes uproot whole towns. Natural disasters cause destruction and despair. But does it have to be this way? In The Cure for Catastrophe, global risk expert Robert Muir-Wood argues that our natural disasters are in fact human ones: We build in the wrong places and in the wrong way, putting brick buildings in earthquake country, timber ones in fire zones, and coastal cities in the paths of hurricanes. We then blindly trust our flood walls and disaster preparations, and when they fail, catastrophes become even more deadly. No society is immune to the twin dangers of complacency and heedless development. Recognizing how disasters are manufactured gives us the power to act. From the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 to Hurricane Katrina, The Cure for Catastrophe recounts the ingenious ways in which people have fought back against disaster. Muir-Wood shows the power and promise of new predictive technologies, and envisions a future where information and action come together to end the pain and destruction wrought by natural catastrophes. The decisions we make now can save millions of lives in the future. Buzzing with political plots, newfound technologies, and stories of surprising resilience, The Cure for Catastrophe will revolutionize the way we conceive of catastrophes: though natural disasters are inevitable, the death and destruction are optional. As we brace ourselves for deadlier cataclysms, the cure for catastrophe is in our hands.