Best-selling journalist, historian and author Paul Badde embarks on an exciting quest to discover the truth behind the Holy Face of Manoppello, a relic recently rediscovered and rumored to be the ""veil of Veronica"".Vatican correspondent for German newspaper Die Welt, journalist Paul Badde was intrigued when he heard of a mysterious image in a remote Italian village-an image of a man's face on byssus cloth. Byssus, or sea silk, is a rare and delicate fabric woven from a s...

The Shocking Secrets of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ArtworkThe recent cleaning of the Sistine Chapel frescoes removed layer after layer of centuries of accumulated tarnish and darkness. The Sistine Secrets endeavors to remove the centuries of prejudice, censorship, and ignorance that blind us to the truth about one of the world's most famous and beloved art treasures.Some images that appeared in the print edition of this book are unavailable in the electronic edition due ...

The bestselling author of Brunelleschi's Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling captures the excitement and spirit of the Renaissance in this chronicle of the life and work of "the king of the world's booksellers" and the technological disruption that forever changed the ways knowledge spread.The Renaissance in Florence conjures images of beautiful frescoes and elegant buildings—the dazzling handiwork of the city's skilled artists and archit...

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...

This instant New York Times bestseller reveals the secrets embedded in Leonardo Da Vinci's best-known Christian piece The Last Supper.Milan, 1497: Leonardo is completing The Last Supper. Pope Alexander VI is determined to execute him after realizing that the painting contains clues to a baffling—and blasphemous—message that he is driven to decode. The Holy Grail and the Eucharistic Bread are missing, there is no meat on the table, and the apostles, shockin...

**From the national bestselling author of How the Irish Saved Civilization—a fascinating look at how medieval thinkers created the origins of modern intellectual movements.“Intoxicating.... Cahill's command of rich historical detail makes medieval cities and their colorful characters come to alive.” —The Los Angeles TimesAfter the long period of decline known as the Dark Ages, medieval Europe experienced a rebirth of scholarship, ...

The New York Times bestselling author of How the Irish Saved Civilization reveals how the innovations of the Renaissance and the Reformation changed the Western world. • “Cahill is our king of popular historians.” —The Dallas Morning NewsThis was an age in which whole continents and peoples were discovered. It was an era of sublime artistic and scientific adventure, but also of newly powerful princes and armies—and of unprecedented courag...

A true, never-before-told story—discovered in a secret Vatican archive—of sex, poison, and lesbian initiation rites in a nineteenth-century convent.In 1858, a German princess, recently inducted into the convent of Sant’Ambrogio in Rome, wrote a frantic letter to her cousin, a confidant of the Pope, claiming that she was being abused and feared for her life. What the subsequent investigation by the Church’s Inquisition uncovered were the extraordinary secrets of San...

**Soon to be a major motion picture from Steven Spielberg.A National Book Award Finalist**The extraordinary story of how the vatican's imprisonment of a six-year-old Jewish boy in 1858 helped to bring about the collapse of the popes' worldly power in Italy.Bologna: nightfall, June 1858. A knock sounds at the door of the Jewish merchant Momolo Mortara. Two officers of the Inquisition bust inside and seize Mortara's six-year-old son, Edgardo. As the boy is wr...

The Meditation Prayer on Mary Immaculate is one of Padre Pio’s few published writings, penned before he was forbidden by the Church to publish or to engage in correspondence—this for fear a cult would arise around him. Here we encounter a profound spiritual penetration into the mystery of Mary’s unique and sublime role in our salvation. Though brief, it can be read over and over with great benefit since it is –just as the title suggests—both a meditation and a prayer on the meaning of Mary...

"Ingrid D. Rowland brings before us today the pieces of an extraordinary sixteenth-century life . . . This is intellectual biography at its best." —Peter N. Miller, The New RepublicGiordano Bruno is one of the great figures of early modern Europe, and one of the least understood. Ingrid D. Rowland's pathbreaking life of Bruno establishes him once and for all as a peer of Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Galileo, a thinker whose vision of the world prefigures ours...

The small village of Rennes-le-Chateau has been the center of an enigma ever since a century ago a local village priest, Berenger Sauniere, spent millions of dollars on decorating the church and surrounding buildings. For decades – despite claims to the contrary by some authors – no-one has been able to explain where Sauniere got the money to pay for the extravagant building works, which have attracted millions of visitors to this small hilltop village – or why he constructed them! The his...