• What is the continent we call Europe?
• When and how was its modern civilization founded?
• Which brilliant minds and which malevolent personalities wrote its most glorious pages and its bloodiest chapters?

In this book, we will answer all of the above and see European history as we have never seen it before. We will meet extravagant crowned heads, cunning clerics, and depraved monks. We will talk about shrewd merchants, conspiratorial bankers, greedy explorers, and plump little sailors.

We will see oppressed minorities, abused women, tortured scientists, and inspired artists, while we will read about paradoxical beliefs, spicy mysteries, gourmet recipes, sex scandals, and deadly intrigues. But, above all, we will ponder human nature, a nature capable of the greatest achievements and the worst disasters…

Europe in 11+1 stories. From the outbreak of the medieval plague to the Florentine Renaissance.

From the Fall of Constantinople to the conquest of America and India. From the romantic customs of Europeans to the great artists of the High Renaissance.

From the Reformation to the Witch Hunts and the Scientific Revolution.

From the magnificent Baroque to the golden age of French absolutism and an earthquake that shook the Europeans.

Society, economy, art, science, politics, and all the events that shaped European civilization, presented with humor, and at the same time with essential seriousness and a love for humanity.