Furio Durando

This is really quite a lovely book and I enjoyed reading it. The photographs are magnificent and often on multi-page fold outs. And the book itself is already large format. It follows, very roughly an historical sequence but diverges from this with sections on art and culture and archeological sites. And, towards the end, has a section on the archaeology of Magna Graecia (or the south of Italy and Sardinia).
If there's a fault it probably lies with a paucity of decent maps. Yes, there are show more maps at the start of each new geographic section but they are a bit sparse and not easy to interpret.....they could be much better. But this is a minor criticism. There is probably something like a 40/60 split between text and pictures and generally, the pictures match the text which makes for easy reading. If you are looking for a detailed understanding of the battle of Thermopylae then you won't find it here. Yes the battle is mentioned and there is actually a map but no details. And the same applies to most of greek history: it gets mentioned in passing but the deatril is not there.
I must say that I was very impressed by the quality of the construction and the current state of ancient temples in Sardinia and, if I ever get to Italy again, it will certainly be on my wish list to get to see some of the Greek cities of Sardinia.
There are a large number of drawings of cities as they would have looked in their heyday and I found these really useful in trying to visualise what used to be there where now are just ruins. And the illustrators have also included some great drawings of Greek fighting ships and classical era constructions. I loved all of this attention to detail. Come of the reconstructed cities wer on the multi page fold-outs so they make quite an impact.
I came away from the book with a better appreciation of the rather precarious situation of the settlements on the various Greek Islands in Ionia. They really were "sitting ducks" to the land based emires such as Athens and Sparta and also to the Persians and any other marauders who happened to be around. They just didn't have the space to build up a big enough population to defend against all comers yet, through trade, they could become quite wealthy for a time. (Until the next big power came along and sacked their cities. Much the same happened with even the large land based cities in Sardinia such as Syracuse. Though, I'm still unaware of what their landscape was like in the classical times. Was it wooded with pastures and streams? Because most of these islands seem dry and sterile today and scarcely capable of grazing sheep of harvesting timber. Durando seems silent on this subject.
Overall, I really liked the book, enjoyed reading it and learned a lot. An easy five stars from me. show less

This glossy big book merits 3 plus stars because of its beautiful photography and style, but its writing is typically empty art and culture criticism of the Italian "Dante, un grande poeta" school. It is a style of empty rhetoric and no intelligence.

Magnificent; however, I do think that some of the paintings/drawings look a little amateurish and not up to T&H's normal standard; however, the photography is nothing short of first rate.

Greek antiquities