The Italian Renaissance

By J. H. Plumb

FROM CHAPTER 1: “I he face of medieval Europe was scarred with the ruins barbarous Frangipani and their armed retainers, greedy, lawless, destructive; the Forum provided a quarry for churches and rough pasture for the cattle market, and beneath the broken columns of the temple of Castor and Pollux the bullocks awaited their slaughter. The Campagna was littered with the crumbling ruins of its aqueducts; the pavements of those splendid Roman roads were narrowed by the returning wilderness. Elsewhere scraps of walls, the ruins of arena, temple, and triumphal arch, sometimes embedded in the hovels and houses of a town struggling to regain its life or lost forever in the countryside, constantly reminded the man of the Middle Ages of the fleeting life of man, of the unknowable nature of Providence. For him the past was dead, and its relics but morals in stone, a terrible warning of the wickedness that God had punished…”

Boston. Houghton Mifflin Company. 1961. 319p.