Italy

He edited a socialist newspaper to a circulation of a hundred thousand before turning against everything it stood for, and the party that expelled him for supporting the war never got the chance to see what he became instead.

Dante wrote his epic in everyday Tuscan rather than Latin, and that single choice did more to shape Italian than centuries of the political career his exile had just destroyed.

The man later called the only wholly admirable figure in modern history conquered a kingdom with a thousand volunteers and then handed it to a monarchy he privately despised, because unification mattered to him more than his own republicanism did.

Leonardo's most famous biographer wrote thirty years after his death and is now known to have invented, or at least dressed up, some of the best stories, including, probably, the one about how he died.

Michelangelo's grandnephew rewrote the pronouns in his love poetry after his death, and it took a nineteenth-century translation to restore what he had actually written.

Petrarch's own famous account of climbing a mountain just for the view turns out to claim a novelty earlier medieval climbers had already managed, which says something about how carefully he built his own legend.

Raphael ran the largest painter's workshop of his era, which means a fair share of what carries his name was finished by other hands under his direction.

1922

1397

Historians still argue whether the Renaissance was a genuine break from the medieval world or a later label pasted onto centuries that were never as separate as the name implies.

1815

Dante put the Venetian Arsenal in Hell as a picture of ceaseless, specialised labour, and three centuries later the yard could still turn out nearly a ship a day using techniques that would not look out of place on a modern production line.