A brutal murder, a nefarious plot, a coded letter. After five hundred years, the most notorious mystery of the Renaissance is finally solved.The Italian Renaissance is remembered as much for intrigue as it is for art, with papal politics and infighting among Italy’s many city-states providing the grist for Machiavelli’s classic work on take-no-prisoners politics, The Prince. The attempted assassination of the Medici brothers in the Duomo in Florence in 147...

Lucien was the most talented of the Bonaparte brothers, who not only can be credited for helping Napoleon seize power, but who also had a promising political career of his own. He was a romantic, an idealist, and an anti-monarchist whose love for Alexandrine, the woman he married in spite of Napoleon's objections, caused him to fall out of favor with his powerful brother.In Napoleon and the Rebel: A Story of Brotherhood, Passion, and Power, authors Simonetta and Arikha draw...

Early in 1495, Leonardo da Vinci began work in Milan on what would become one of history's most influential and beloved works of art--The Last Supper. After a dozen years at the court of Lodovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, Leonardo was at a low point personally and professionally: at 43, in an era when he had almost reached the average life expectancy, he had failed, despite a number of prestigious commissions, to complete anything that truly fulfilled his astonishing promise. His latest f...

The world knows Madame Tussaud as a wax artist extraordinaire, but who was this woman who became one of the most famous sculptresses of all time? From the internationally bestselling author of Nefertiti and Maria comes a “rollicking drama” (Good Housekeeping) that is “intimate and entertaining” (Associated Press).“Both a gripping, fictionalized biography of an intriguing woman and a well-paced, illuminating chronicle of the French...

Throughout the centuries, royal mistresses have been worshiped, feared, envied, and reviled. They set the fashions, encouraged the arts, and, in some cases, ruled nations. Eleanor Herman's Sex with Kings takes us into the throne rooms and bedrooms of Europe's most powerful monarchs. Alive with flamboyant characters, outrageous humor, and stirring poignancy, this glittering tale of passion and politics chronicles five hundred years of scintillating women and the kings who loved them.

The astonishing life of an Italian Renaissance noblewoman who was a wife, mother, leader, and warrior fierce enough to make Machiavelli wince.A strategist to match Machiavelli; a warrior who stood toe to toe with the Borgias; a wife whose three marriages would end in bloodshed and heartbreak; and a mother determined to maintain her family's honor, Caterina Riario Sforza de' Medici was a true Renaissance celebrity, beloved and vilified in equal measure. In this dazzl...

The riveting true story of mother-and-daughter queens Catherine de' Medici and Marguerite de Valois, whose wildly divergent personalities and turbulent relationship changed the shape of their tempestuous and dangerous century.Set in magnificent Renaissance France, this is the story of two remarkable women, a mother and daughter driven into opposition by a terrible betrayal that threatened to destroy the realm. Catherine de' Medici was a ruthless pragmatist and powe...

Eleanor Herman, the talented author of the New York Times bestselling Sex with Kings and Sex with the Queen goes behind the sacred doors of the Catholic Church in Mistress of the Vatican, a scintillating biography of a powerful yet little-known woman whose remarkable story is ripe with secrets, sex, passion, and ambition. For almost four centuries this astonishing story of a woman’s absolute power over the Vatican has been successfully buried—until now.A Secret Female...

Winner of the Cundill History PrizeThe first historical appraisal of the astonishing life and times of a controversial twentieth-century saint.Padre Pio is one of the world's most beloved holy figures, more popular in Italy than the Virgin Mary and even Jesus. His tomb is the most visited Catholic shrine anywhere, drawing more devotees than Lourdes. His miraculous feats included the ability to fly and to be present in two places at once; an...

At the age of nineteen, Yolande of Aragon is sent away from her family, her friends, and everything she knows, to marry the young Duke of Anjou, King Charles VI's first cousin. Their marriage has been arranged to form an alliance between the previously warring kingdoms of Aragon and Anjou, and is politically fraught in a time of great danger and unrest. Yet the union between Yolande and Louis becomes not only a great love story, but also sets in motion events which will change the course o...

"S ome of the most fascinating, intriguing and, yes, brutal episodes of the region's past written in the fast-paced, involving style of an adventure novel" ( Italy Magazine, "Book of the Week").With the perfect fusion of history, art, architecture, superb natural beauty, and weather—not to mention magnificent traditions of food and drink—Tuscany has cast its spell over visitors for centuries. What is it t...

"A thrilling frock-by-frock account . . . energetic and alive with [Weber's] own feminine pleasure at a beautiful dress or an outrageous pouf." — Entertainment Weekly (grade: A)Marie Antoinette has always stood as an icon of supreme style, but surprisingly none of her biographers have paid sustained attention to her clothes. In Queen of Fashion, Caroline Weber shows how Marie Antoinette developed her reputation f...