Both a museum and the official palace of the Spanish royal family, the Palacio Real features armor, artworks and treasures that were once the private possessions of Spain's kings and queens. Inside the Palacio Real, Madrid, we discover that Spain reached its height of glory not through the acquisition of silver and gold, but because of the unique properties of a third element. We investigate how a famous swordsman bested 17 challengers, then examine...

E. M. Forster's 1908 novel 'A Room with A View' narrates the story of a young woman in the restrained culture of Edwardian England. Set in Italy and England, the story is both a romance and a critique of English society at the beginning of the 20th century.

A charming, young English woman finds herself at war with the snobbery of her class and her own conflicting desires when she is attracted to someone socially unsuitable.

"A novel set in Renaissance Italy, and centering on the captivating young duchess Lucrezia de' Medici"--

Young Girolamo's life is a series of miracles. It's a miracle that he can see demons, plain as day, and that he can cast them out with the force of his will. It's a miracle that he's friends with Pico della Mirandola, the Count of Concordia. It's a miracle that when Girolamo visits the deathbed of Lorenzo "the Magnificent," the dying Medici is wreathed in celestial light, a surprise to everyone, Lorenzo included. It's a miracle that when Charles...

The young and virtuous physician's daughter Helena desperately loves Count Bertram, but he regards her as beneath his notice.

This World War II-era newsreel includes the following segments: 1. Mopping-up operations in Florence, Italy, by South African and New Zealand troops. 2. U.S. troops enter Rennes, France; surrendered German troops and collaborators are marched to stockades. 3. Allied troops complete the rout of the German 7th Army in northern France; General Montgomery; Allied airplanes strafe and bomb German vehicles.

Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon awakens in a hospital in the middle of the night. Disoriented and suffering from a head wound, he recalls nothing of the last thirty-six hours, including how he got there, or the origin of the macabre object that his doctors discover hidden in his belongings. Langdon's world soon erupts into chaos, and he finds himself on the run in Florence with a stoic young woman, Sienna Brooks, whose clever manuevering...

The secrets of the dome that rises over the town of Florence were buried centuries ago within the cathedral itself-along with the enigmatic genius who designed and built it: Filipo Brunelleschi. How was Brunelleschi able to build the world's largest brick and mortar dome, at a time when the technological know-how of the time should have made it impossible? One scholar has gone to the extreme lengths of constructing his own model of the dome to prove...