This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. ITALY AND THE WESTERN NATIONS OF EUROPE IN THE MIDDLE AGES?THEIR POETRY AND THEIR REAL LIFE. The period, commonly spoken of as The Middle Ages, is bounded at either end by two great catastrophes?the first being that irruption of the Northern barbarians which overwhelmed the Greece-Latin civilization? the second, the invasion of the Turks, which destroyed the Byzantine Empire and brought Asiatic barbarism into Europe. In the interval between these two calamities, the domestic life of Christendom was one long term of suffering that seems like a chastisement. The old towns and ruined monuments of Europe bear pathetic witness to the saddened lives that must have been led by the men of former days. We cannot see all these evidences of the care they took to hide their goods and fortify their dwellings, without the conviction that they must have suffered the torments of continual mistrust, and occasional terror. Observe the labyrinths of narrow, tortuous streets, some of them looking like cul-de-sacs but always communicating with each other?notice the vaulted passages where only a glimmering twilight struggles in at mid-day?the dreary wastes by the river-sides, like that by the Ghetto, from which the benighted wayfarer saw the corpse of Giovanni Borgia thrown into the Tiber?mark the covered bridges connecting the palace with the prison or citadel, like that by which Clement VII. took refuge in the Castle of St. Angelo from the sack of Rome; note the massive signorial strongholds, like those at Florence, fit to brave any assault?the castles perched like eagles' nests on the summits of a mountain-peak, like Acqua-pendente, or ranged along a wall of rock, as at Narni, or protected by Pelasgic ramparts, as at Cortona, or squeezed between the sides of some ravine, as a...