Books like Italian City-Republics

I wanted to like this book, but it wound up being a bit disappointing. The Italian communes are one of my favorite subjects in medieval history - they're so different from so much of what's going on in the rest of Europe, and they usually wind up being a whirlwind of competing factions and overlapping ideas. No matter what your interest, you'll find it somewhere in the history of Italian cities. That said, I'm not sure this book does a great job introducing them. Its main problem is that in the span of less than 250 small pages (many of which are graced by some lovely pictures) it tries to cover all of the cities in Italy during a three hundred year period. It's just too big a topic for too small a book, and I wound up with the feeling that I still don't have a good grasp of what happened in any of them. I think it may have worked better if he took three or four substantially different cities and provided case studies on each of them. It would have allowed for some specificity while also highlighting the degree of difference between all of the communes. It's not a terrible book by any means, though, and there's still quite a bit to take away from it. The edition I had actually had loads of (colored!) pictures in it, which was very exciting for me. It's a solid place to start if you just want a broad-strokes history of what a commune was, and how its institutions operated. It also does a good job of highlighting the precarious balance (or lack of it) between factions in the cities, and how feudal/landholding interests never entirely receded in the face of republican systems. For a more detailed (if a bit dated) look at Italian communes, William Butler's The Lombard communes;: A history of the republics of north Italy is dense but good, and John Larner's Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch, 1216-1380 provides a broader view that includes religious and social life as well as politics. If you want to know particularly about religious life of the period, you can't beat Augustine Thompson's Cities of God: The Religion of the Italian Communes, 1125-1325.