Preface ..............................................
On May 20, 1347, a small band of people
gathered in the streets of Rome. Led by a
man dressed in a full suit of armor, they
marched to the Capitoline Hill, the heart
of the ancient capital. They watched as the
man climbed onto the crumbling founda-
tion of a Roman monument. He spoke and
gestured for hours, stirring the crowd to
cheers. The wretched state of the city, he
declared, was the fault of corrupt and
greedy noble families who cared only for
fighting each other and nothing for the
pride or safety of the common people. The
man pronounced the city overthrown and
the ancient republic restored. Rome would
again become thecaput mundi, the center
of the world.
Cola di Rienzo, the speaker perched
on the ancient stone, was born into the
humble family of a tavern keeper. As a boy
he learned to read Latin and had spent
many hours studying Rome’s history and
writing. The power and glory of Rome fas-
cinated him, but when he looked at the
city of the fourteenth century, he felt only
anger. Medieval Rome was a shambles—a
collection of miserable hovels and danger-
ous neighborhoods, surrounded by the
crumbling temples, monuments, and aq-
ueducts of the past. Wealthy families
warred from their fortified towers, de-
scending into the streets to murder their
rivals and anyone who got in their way
which on one dark day included Cola’s
own brother.
Di Rienzo was obsessed with the mis-
sion of restoring Rome to its former glory.
In 1344 he began gathering friends and al-
lies to overthrow the city authorities. After
three years, he succeeded. Terrified of the
mobs di Rienzo had at his back, the noble
families fled to their country estates.
He had the support of powerful and
important people, including Petrarch, a
poet also fascinated by Roman history. Pe-
trarch saw in di Rienzo a new Brutus—a
fighter against tyranny (Marcus Junius
Brutus had conspired to assassinate Julius
Caesar in 44B.C., believing Caesar a man
determined to hold the powers of a dicta-
tor over Rome). Petrarch had made a life-
long study of Roman writers and had
translated many of their manuscripts, sev-
eral of which he had discovered himself.
Although Rome had been a pagan city, he
believed that it could serve as a model for
pious Christians, and that the ancient
books and monuments of Rome served as
worthy inspirations for writers and artists
of his own day.
Di Rienzo battled in vain. In 1354, the
Roman mob turned against him, attacking
and murdering him during a speech. His
power in Rome had been fleeting, but the
example of classical Rome endured for Pe-
trarch and the generations that followed.
Writing, art, sculpture, and architecture
brought a Renaissance, or rebirth, of the
ancient world of the Romans and Greeks.
This creative flowering spread from Italy
to the rest of Europe and brought forth
the most famous works ever created on
the continent.The Renaissance in Italy
In the fourteenth century, scholars such as
Petrarch and Poggio Bracciolini were
combing the libraries of monasteries and
cathedrals, where the ancient books of
Plato, Aristotle, Livy, Vitruvius, Cicero and