The heart of the Western humanist tradition, from the divine cosmos to the intensely personal — poets, philosophers and the makers of the Renaissance.
★ Suggested first work to enter the reader: Dante — the Divine Comedy (Inferno first)
The supreme poet of the Italian tongue; the Divine Comedy charts the soul's ascent from Hell to the vision of God and founded a literature.
Father of humanism; his Canzoniere perfected the sonnet and defined the European language of love for centuries.
Poet of cosmic solitude; the Canti turn a modern, clear-eyed pessimism into verse of aching beauty.
Poet of the late Renaissance; Gerusalemme Liberata is the second great Italian epic after Dante — noble, musical and touched by tragedy.
Notary at the court of Frederick II and inventor of the sonnet — the fourteen-line form that would shape European poetry for seven centuries.
The most brilliant poet of the dolce stil novo and Dante's ‘first friend,’ whose philosophical canzone made love a subject of the intellect.
Poet of the Italian Renaissance; his Orlando Furioso is the dazzling summit of chivalric epic.
The Prince stripped politics of illusion and founded modern political realism; the Discourses reveal his deeper republican thought.
Visionary of infinite worlds who paid with his life; his cosmology shattered the closed medieval universe.
In The New Science he founded the philosophy of history and culture, seeing civilizations rise and recur through their own poetic logic.
The Book of the Courtier defined the Renaissance ideal of grace, wit and cultivation for all of Europe.
His swaggering Autobiography is the most vivid first-person portrait of the Renaissance artist alive to his own genius.
‘The Magnificent’ — poet, patron and statesman whose verse and court embodied the Renaissance fusion of art and power.
Father of Italian prose, whose Decameron — a hundred tales told over ten days of plague — founded the European novella.
Author of The Betrothed, the founding novel of modern Italy and its unified literary language.
Master of Verismo; his unsparing tales of Sicilian poverty brought realism to Italian fiction.
Nobel laureate (1934); his revolutionary plays dissolved the line between identity, madness and illusion.
Enchanter of modern fiction; his playful, philosophical fables remade the possibilities of the novel.
Semiotician and novelist; his erudite mysteries turned medieval learning into global bestsellers.
His History of Italy analyzed the wars and betrayals of his age with unmatched, unsentimental realism.
Chancellor of Florence and the first modern historian; his History of the Florentine People founded civic-humanist historiography.
