Italy in the Middle Ages was unique among the countries of Europe in recreating, in a changed environment, the urban civilization of antiquity - the society, culture, and political formations of city-states. This book examines the origins and nature of this phenomenon from the fall of Rome to the eve of its consummation, the Italian Renaissance.; The explanation is sought in Italy's singular 'double existence' between two contrasted worlds - ancient and medieval. The ancient was characterised by the total predominance of the landed aristocracy in economy and society, enforced through a peculia.

This is the first in-depth analysis of the impact of Italian unification on the hitherto isolated communities of rural Sicily. Traditional explanations of Sicily's instability depict a society trapped by a feudal past. Lucy Riall finds instead that many areas of the island were experiencing a period of rapid modernization, as local government increased their organizational efforts. Beginning with the period prior to the revolution of 1860, Dr Riall shows why successive attempts at political reform failed, and analyses the effects of this failure. She describes the bitter and violent conflict between rival elites and the mounting tide of peasant unrest which together threatened the status quo within the isolated communities of the Sicilian interior. Through an examination of the problems of local government - tax collection, conscription, the organization of policing - and of attempts to suppress peasant disturbances and control crime, she shows that the modernization of the Sicilian countryside both undermined the control of the central government and made the countryside itself more unstable.
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• Title; Contents; A Sicilian Romance;
• Chapter I;
• Chapter II;
• Chapter III;
• Chapter IV;
• Chapter V;
• Chapter VI;
• Chapter VII;
• Chapter VIII;
• Chapter IX;
• Chapter X;
• Chapter XI;
• Chapter XII;
• Chapter XIII;
• Chapter XIV;
• Chapter XV;
• Chapter XVI.

A Sicilian Romance is an early novel by one of the masters of Gothic fiction, Ann Radcliffe. Two young women live in an isolated mansion near the Straits of Messina. Mysterious sights and sounds begin haunting a neglected wing of the house, and their quest to discover the truth behind these mysteries leads them through the labyrinthine landscape of Sicily and into the darkest secrets of its aristoracy.