Two book presentations were held at Palazzo Rucellai this last fall. On October 14, Prof. Stefano U. Baldassarri (Prof. of Italian Literature, The International Studies Institute) and Prof. Michael Knapton (Prof. of Modern History, Università di Udine) presented Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), a volume of collected essays in honor of the late British historian Philip Jones, edited by John E. Law and Bernadette Paton. The event was part of the Medici conference (The Medici in the Fifteenth Century: “Signori” of Florence?) sponsored by Villa I Tatti (The Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies) and the Monash University Prato Centre (October 12-14, 2011). On October 21, Prof. Baldassarri and his colleague Marco Pellegrini (Prof. of Modern History, Università di Bergamo) presented a new edition of Bernardo Rucellai’s De bello italico. Around 1510 Bernardo, son of Giovanni Rucellai, wrote a most interesting account of Charles VIII’s military campaign in Italy in 1494 and his conquest of the Kingdom of Naples. It is this narrative by Bernardo Rucellai that Prof. Daniela Coppini (Università di Firenze) edited and, in 2011, so brilliantly translated from Latin into Italian for Florence University Press.

Stefano U. Baldassarri, Ph.D.
Professor of Italian Literature at ISI Florence