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...

Nel 1519 Caterina de‘ Medici, appena nata, rimane orfana di entrambi i genitori; nel 1527 si ritrova sola, senza alcuna protezione, ostaggio dei nemici della sua famiglia, prigioniera in un convento di monache; nel 1533 sposa Enrico di Valois, uno dei figli del re di Francia, che è innamorato di un’altra donna, molto più anziana di lei; nel 1544, dopo anni di dolorosissima sterilità, riesce a partorire il primo figlio, che viene affidato però all’amante del marito; nel 154...