Sleepwalking into a New World

“A fresh look into how communes in the mid-12th century successfully prepared Italian power structures for the cultural significance they would later have.” — Publishers Weekly Amid the disintegration of the Kingdom of Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a new form of collective government—the commune—arose in the cities of northern and central Italy. Sleepwalking into a New World takes a bold new look at how these autonomous city-states came about, and fundamentally alters our understa