Through the Mailly family saga, the city of Paris became the cultural and political center of the nineteenth century, spanning the Napoleonic era, the Restoration, the July Monarchy, the 1848 uprisings, the Second Empire, the Commune, and the Belle Époque.In this context, different approaches and tensions emerge: musical Romanticism, great literature and poetry, art, which sees Impressionism as a fundamental shift for the contemporary era, and science, which, starting with electrica...

The eighteenth century began with the absolutism of the Sun King and the pervasive presence of empires like the English and Russian, and ended with the figures of Napoleon and the independence of the United States of America.This transformation was made possible by three distinct, and almost simultaneous, revolutions: the American, the French, and the Industrial Revolution.These revolutions were based on two solid pillars: the Enlightenment, which owed much of its foundation ...

The great power of human culture and knowledge, expressed in multiple aspects of daily life and speculative reflection, did not seem sufficient to stem the violence of arms and the prevalence of war in a century, the eighth, which saw the peak of the Islamic Caliphate and the Lombard kingdom's expansion, while an intense unifying drive attempted to create a new Empire after centuries of fragmentation.This dichotomy underpinned the triple vicissitudes of various families who, from on...

The seventeenth century was the century of the great scientific revolution, with the inductive and experimental methods developed by Bacon and Galileo, the discoveries of optics, Kepler's laws, Descartes's philosophical system, the ideas of Pascal and Spinoza, and, finally, the great work of Newton.The same century was also pervaded by the destruction and disease caused by the Thirty Years' War, a conflict that tore Europe apart, almost completely annihilating the population of Germ...

Three distinct portraits of tenth-century life unfold chronologically, from the Heian era in Japan, marked by the rise of the Fujiwara clan, to the rebirth of the Holy Roman Empire under Otto I of Saxony, and finally to the Viking spirit of adventure that reached the farthest reaches of northern Iceland and Greenland.Amid these events, several families of middle and lower social standing operate, each with their own desire for greatness and expansion, leveraging the qualities and ta...

The colonization of the Americas, Protestantism, and the Catholic Counter-Reformation are the three pillars of the sixteenth century around which the diverse human experiences of individuals unfold.In Spain, entire families of colonists and explorers found themselves having to deal with the destruction of pre-Columbian civilizations by the conquistadors, and the blunder of Charles V's Universal Empire was not unanimously approved.Few would seek a balance with those population...

The relationship between the Papacy and power that marked the period of the Avignon Papacy and the conditions that would spark the Hundred Years' War form the backdrop to the events of a French family of Norman origin torn between the concreteness of money and the revolutionary ideas of William of Ockham.These divergent paths were the seeds of future great rivalries between France and England, which began to emerge in the fourteenth century.The middle of the century was domin...

The vain attempt to reconcile knowledge, expressed in philosophical, theological, artistic, and scientific forms, with the harshness of history characterizes the history of the twelfth century.On the one hand, there are magnificent examples, such as the Norman cultural renaissance of Sicily under Roger II, up to the great intellectual peaks of Anselm of Aosta, Peter Abelard, and Averroes. On the other, there are the eternal imperial struggles against the Papacy or the emerging commu...

As the eleventh century unfolded, the clash of civilizations became increasingly evident.Starting from the great cultural and enlightened era associated with the studies of Ibn Sina, under the Shiite Islamic dynasty of the Buwayhids, destined to succumb to the blows of the Seljuks, the story moves to Normandy, following the vicissitudes of the battles in France and then in England during the reign of William the Conqueror.The century ended with a blaze of violence, unleashed ...

The fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire due to internal struggles among Charlemagne's heirs and the arrival of Norman history marked the unfolding of events in the ninth century, through a relentless succession of hopes and immediate disillusionments regarding a past that was not destined to repeat itself.At the same time, the individual families belonging to these peoples tended to follow events, following the decisions of others. The Empire crumbled, and with it, the history of...

Servio Italico's choice to break with his family's traditions will give rise to a lineage that, for five generations, will walk alongside the history of the first century.From the defeat of Teutoburg to the conquest of Britain, from the death of Octavian Augustus to the fire of Rome, from the eruption of Vesuvius to the first campaign of Dacia, men and women will find themselves in the presence of the founding idea of the Roman Empire, shaken by novelties and evolutions in an attemp...

The new course of history after the final fall of the Western Roman Empire is revisited through the stories of three sets of twins, set in different places and contexts.Alongside a fleeting desire for restoration emanating from the East, which saw the great splendor of the Justinian era, but also the definitive collapse due to the plague and the endless wars that tore apart what remained of the Empire, the new era was characterized by the consolidation of Frankish power and the inva...