You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
description not available right now.
This book concentrates on the sometimes Greek but largely Roman survivals many travellers set out to see and perhaps possess throughout the immense Ottoman Empire, on what were eastward and southward extensions of the Grand Tour. Europeans were curious about the Empire, Christianity’s great rival for centuries, and plenty of information on its antiquities was available, offered here via lengthy quotations. Most accounts of the history of collecting and museums concentrate on the European end. Plundered Empire details how and where antiquities were sought, uncovered, bartered, paid for or stolen, and any tribulations in getting them home. The book provides evidence for the continuing debate about the ethics of museum collections, with 19th century international competition the spur to spectacular acquisitions.
Odysseus was notoriously vague about where he lived. Ithaca was the place, he said, but his description of its whereabouts was a mixture of geography and poetry. Tradition says that it was the modern island of Ithaki in the Ionian Sea. Other theories, however, have placed it elsewhere. This book takes a close look at the traditional view, and at some of the other theories. The author examines the Odyssey in detail, draws on ancient and modern scholarly texts (some translated into English for the first time), reproduces antique and contemporary maps, and satellite imagery, quotes from the accounts of earlier travellers and topographers, sails the Ionian Sea, and above all, walks the landscape...
Drawing a portrait of the islands off the coast of Greece, Corfu resident Jim Potts narrates the cultural legacies of this unique place from Homer to modern times.
The Ionian Islands stretch south from the Adriatic, where Corfu’s Pantokrator mountain overlooks Albania across narrow straits, along the western coast of mainland Greece through Paxi, Kephalonia, Ithaca, Lefkada and Zakynthos, to Kythira, midway between Athens and Crete. Three crucial sea-battles were fought here – Sybota (the first recorded), Actium and Lepanto – an indication of the Ionians’ role as an East-West crossroads, between Western Christendom and the Orthodox and Islamic East. Ruled by Venice in her Stato da Mar (sea-empire), the islands became an independent state, as the Septinsular Republic and then, under British Protection, as the United States of the Ionian Islands....