Out of Italy

Two Centuries of World Domination and Demise

By: Fernand Braudel, Siân Reynolds - translator

Narrated by: Paul Brion

From the author of Memory and the Mediterranean, a comprehensive history of the Italian city states from 1450 to 1650.

In the fifteenth century, even before the city states of the Apennine Peninsula began to coalesce into what would become, several centuries later, a nation, "Italy" exerted enormous influence over all of Europe and throughout the Mediterranean. Its cultural, economic, and political dominance is utterly astonishing and unique in world history. Viewing the Italy (the many Italies?) of that time through the lens of today allows us to gather a fragmented, multi-faceted, and seemingly contradictory history into a single unifying narrative that speaks to our current reality as much as it does to a specific historical period.

This is what the acclaimed French historian, Fernand Braudel, achieves here. He brings to life the two extraordinary centuries that span the Renaissance, Mannerism, and the Baroque and analyzes the complex interaction between art, science, politics, and commerce during Italy's extraordinary cultural flowering.

©1994 Flammarion, Paris; translation copyright 1991 by Flammarion (P)2022 Tantor

shortened version of other works by Braudel

the book feels very much like a summary of Italian passages (which are numerous) from 2 gargantuan trilogies of his concerning roughly the same period of European history: "Mediterranean during Philipp II" and "civilization and capitalism" .
and it's not a minus - its great both for those being introduced to Braudel and those who read the above mentioned works.
as for Braudel himself he is not that much of a great thinker (his conclusions are either oblique or mundane), but great analyst who went through droves of secondary sources .
all in all great read for anyone interested 8n European history