Buondì. I’ll keep this very, very quick. Today’s free Summer Series article with audio is ready for you to read and listen to. And it’s an interesting one, with a link to an entertaining video about the De Medici family, which I assume was produced for Italian teenagers (who are obbliged to memorise medieval history), […]

Buondì. Episode 26 of our FREE thirty-part Summer Series of articles with audio recordings, which cover the thousand-year medieval period in the Italian peninsula, is now ready. We’re in the middle of a sequence of four related articles, which recount how the various powerful ‘comunes’ ended up back being ruled by hereditary figures. Monday’s article […]

Buondì. In Friday’s episode twenty-four of our FREE 30-part Summer Series of articles with audio on the medieval period in the Italian peninsula (scroll down past The Romans to get to it) we heard and read about the new, self-governing ‘comunes’, which were, perhaps, an early form of democracy. So what happened next? Did this […]

Buondì. Episode 24 of our FREE summer series on the medieval period in the Italian peninsula is ready for you to read and listen to. Rivolte e disordini nei Comuni (XIII-XIV secolo) For any aspiring or actual revolutionaries out there, this is quite an exciting one as it explains how the ‘comunes’ (basically cities, those […]

Buondì. Episode 23 of our FREE 30-part Summer Series on the medieval period in the Italian peninsula is ready for you to read and listen to: Episodio 23, Gli invasori francesi e la rivolta dei siciliani (XII-XIII secolo) As you can see from the title, this time we’re in the twelfth/thirteenth centuries, in Sicily. ‘Italians’, […]

Buondì. Episode 22 of our FREE Summer Series of articles with audio, on the medieval period in the Italian peninsula, is now ready. Below are the links, to that one, and to the club’s History page, where you’ll find the previous 21 along with all thirty articles from last year’s Summer Series on the Romans: […]

Buondì. A short one today, as I messed up and spent ages proofreading (and listening to) the wrong episode of our FREE Summer Series, then had to go do the correct one as well. Also, we got up late this morning, after a disturbed night of vomiting, diarrhoea – what a horrible word to spell […]

Buondì. I quite often hear from club members that they’re not, or weren’t before they started hanging with us, ‘good at languages’. It’s common that people in Britain think this, though hardly surprising given that they live on an island and that if they mistakenly venture off it, their native tongue is used just about […]

Buondì. Here we are, the final week of August! And the hot weather is supposed to break today, at least in Bologna, where I live. We’re looking forward to a storm, plenty of rain, and a welcome drop in temperature – from the mid-thirties to the mid-twenties! The final week of August in Italy, besides […]

Buondì. You’ve probably never heard of Drunk William Chainmail Head (my translation) but, according to the writer of our FREE 30-part series of texts with audio on the middle ages in the Italian peninsula, he was an imaginative Genovese merchant who sought his fortune in the Crusades, and ended up capturing the Sarcen-held city of […]