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A voyage to the kingdom of the seas The sea is fascinating and mysterious in equal parts, and Alessandro Vanoli guides us through the exciting story of four billion years of history to, after navigating among creatures, abysses and civilizations, reach the seas of the present. In this great book of the sea, we will discover ancient geology and the beginnings of life, dinosaurs, primitive fish and the great cataclysms. We will travel in the precarious boats with which our ancestors faced the sea for the first time and we will discover their great myths, the biblical and the Homeric. We will also get to know the civilizations that sailed it: the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Vikings, the Chinese and the Muslims, until we reach the Modern Age when the Spanish and Portuguese turned all the seas into one. From the compass to the caravels, we will travel with Christopher Columbus, Magellan, Vespucci and the pirates of the Caribbean, and we will dream of hidden treasures and the legends of the kraken. Finally, we will come to the present, to a sea full of submarines and aircraft carriers on which today's unstable geopolitical balance rests. We will discover, finally, that to speak of the sea is to speak of our deepest dreams: we are part of it, and that is perhaps the most important thing about this millenary adventure. Winner of the Melvin Jones Award
About the author
Alessandro Vanoli is an expert historian in Mediterranean history and in the medieval Islamic presence in the Iberian Peninsula and Sicily. A graduate of the University of Bologna in History of Medieval Philosophy and PhD from the University of Venice in European Social History, he has been a professor for almost a decade at the University of Bologna and has traveled around the world to collaborate with academic institutions in Salamanca, Granada, New York, State College (Pennsylvania), Amsterdam or Mexico City. He is the author of several books, including La reconquista, Andare per l'Italia araba, Quando guidavano le stelle, La Sicilia musulmana, L'ignoto davanti a noi, La Ruta de la Seda (in collaboration with Franco Cardini), Il Mediterraneo in 20 oggetti and Invierno. The Story of Waiting.
