“At first there is a screech of tires on the asphalt, a bump in the air, the sound of a car horn, and soon after that what sounds like the concert of a jackhammer. The student looks up from the newspaper and turns in the direction from which that din is coming. What happens at 9:02 a.m. on March 16, 1978, continues to happen.”

Popes, wars, spies: the mysteries of the Vatican Archives unveiled by the Prefect who has led it for a quarter century.

A treasure trove of information, stories, gossip and pleases: this is “the bunker” for everyone in the Vatican, the 86 linear kilometer-long underground repository that houses millions of the most confidential documents, accumulated and kept on its premises since its founding in 1611.

In the legal culture of the church, and thus in the Code of Canon Law, rape and sexual abuse are considered transgressions of the sixth commandment. The history of this commandment shows that it is the only one of the biblical Decalogue to have changed its denomination: the “thou shalt not commit adultery” of the origins became “thou shalt not commit impure acts” in the 16th century. Although these are still norms related to sexual behavior, the difference is important.

Cleopatra’s life through seven pivotal moments, illuminated in live action: from the decisive encounter with Caesar, to that, later, with Antony. Ancient history as it has never been offered: interpretive power and pleasure in storytelling. This book is not (only) a biography of Cleopatra, but the account, through important steps in her life, of a crucial moment in Western history. In the story presented here, it was a woman who conceived the idea of gaining power over the world. A queen who would fight to the end to bring her plan to fulfillment.

Power and act: one of the most famous pairs in philosophy of all time, a grand rebus on which thinkers have racked their brains for centuries, but above all an elementary scheme for reading and interpreting change and becoming.

Observing oneself and the world through the special lens of these two key-concepts helps to understand and accept mobility, change, transformation: things and human beings are also all that they have been and could become.

Forty years ago, Ginzburg, a non-historian of art, set out to refute on the basis of external elements, related to patrons and iconography, the early date – advanced by one of the leading art historians of the 20th century, Roberto Longhi – of such a capital work as Piero's ‘Flagellation’. So is this a book that argues with art historians (who have criticized it, sometimes harshly)? Also, but not only. Investigations into Piero is aimed at all those who love the painting of Piero della Francesca, who appears here in an unexpected light.

As Ginzburg says in the Preface: «Those browsing through this book will perhaps be struck by the variety of themes addressed. Some will wonder if there are recurring elements behind such heterogeneity. I will try to suggest one, following in the tangle of essays the trace proposed by the volume’s title. “The letter kills, the spirit gives life,” said Paul of Tarsus in his Second Letter to the Corinthians (3:6), contrasting the Jewish law into which he was born with the new faith of which he was the founder. “Kills,” “gives life” are metaphors, which are not to be taken literally.

The divergence in religious ideas and energies between the different Christian Churches of the age of the Protestant Reformation and the Council of Trent has often been a dominant theme in Adriano Prosperi’s consequential research.