Mediterranean

The Mediterranean tradition, as we use the term, covers the Italian peninsula and Southern France — the Latin Mediterranean — from prehistory through the present. It overlaps with Hellenic at the eastern edge and with Iberian at the western, but its centre is the long arc from Rome through the medieval city-states, the Renaissance, the Baroque, the Risorgimento, and modern Italian and Provençal life.

What the tradition produced is unusually well-documented and unusually consequential. Roman law, which structured European legal thinking for a millennium and still structures the civil-law tradition. The Latin language, which carried scholarship and liturgy across the entire Western Church into the eighteenth century. The Italian Renaissance, which we tend to treat as a single event but which was actually four or five overlapping local renaissances in Florence, Venice, Rome, Milan, and Naples. The musical traditions of opera, polyphony, and the troubadour song. The vernacular literature of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio.

We cover Roman and late-antique Italy, the medieval city-states, the multiple Italian Renaissances, the Baroque, the unification period, and the contemporary cultural life of Italy and Southern France.