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This book uses the work of Bolognese physician and anatomist Gaspare Tagliacozzi to explore the social and cultural history of early modern surgery. It discusses how Italian and European surgeons' attitudes to health and beauty – and how patients' gender – shaped views on the public appearance of the human body. In 1597, Gaspare Tagliacozzi published a two-volume book on reconstructive surgery of the mutilated parts of the face. Studying Tagliacozzi’s surgery in context corrects widespread views about the birth of plastic surgery. Through a combination of cultural history, microhistory, historical epistemology, and gender history, this book describes the practice and practitioners considered to be at the periphery of the "Scientific Revolution." Historical themes covered include the writing of individual cases, hegemonic and subaltern forms of masculinity, concepts of the natural and the artificial, emotional communities and moral economies of pain, and the historical anthropology of the culture of beauty and the face and its disfigurements. The book is essential reading for upper-level students, postgraduates, and scholars working on the history of medicine and surgery, the history of the body, and gender and cultural history. It will also appeal to those interested in the history of beauty, urban studies and the Renaissance period more generally.

'Panzersoldaten!' covers the history of the Blackshirt Division during the campaign on the Eastern Front, focusing on its relations with the Italian Army, the history of the MVSN, and its ultimate retreat from the Eastern Front in 1943. This volume includes over 80 contemporary images.

A new illustrated history of the German and Italian air campaigns in the invasions of Greece and Yugoslavia, the last full-scale Axis air offensives before Operation Barbarossa. The Greece campaign was launched by Italy in October 1940, the first large-scale campaign of the Italian Air Force outside North Africa, and its last major solo effort. With the German involvement in April 1941, and with the invasion of Yugoslavia, the Balkans saw the last large-scale Axis air campaign in Europe before the invasion of the USSR. It was also the campaign that saw expeditionary units of the RAF fighting alongside the Greeks – most famously, the handful of Hurricanes that fought to the end from makeshift olive-grove airfields, among them the Hurricane ace and future novelist Roald Dahl. In this book, renowned historian Pier Paolo Battistelli and air power expert Basilio di Martino explain how this unique campaign was fought. They highlight elements such as the Italians' development of air-to-ground support while carrying out, for the first and only time, an airborne operation, and how the Germans refined their tactics from the 1940 campaign in the West, while now also playing a major anti-shipping role. Illustrated throughout with rare photos, superb original paintings, maps and 3D diagrams, this is an expert account of the air war over the eastern Mediterranean.

The Austro-Hungarian Stormtroopers and the Italian Arditi of World War I were elite special forces charged with carrying out bold raids and daring attacks. These units were comprised of hand-picked soldiers that possessed above-average courage, physical prowess as well as specific combat skills. Many military historians have argued that the First World War was mainly a static conflict of positional attrition, but these shock troops were responsible for developing breakthrough tactics of both fire and movement that marked a significant change to the status quo. Both armies used special assault detachments to capture prisoners, conduct raids behind enemy lines and attack in depth in order to prepare the way for a broad infantry breakthrough. This account traces the development of Austrian and Italian assault troop tactics in the context of trench warfare waged in the mountainous front of the Alps and the rocky hills of the Carso plateau. It not only examines their innovative tactics but also their adoption of vastly improved new weapons such as light machine-guns, super-heavy artillery, flamethrowers, hand grenades, daggers, steel clubs and poison gas. This book offers a narrative of the organizational development of the shock and assault troops, of their military operations and their combat methods. The bulk of the chapters are devoted to a historical reconstruction of the assault detachments' combat missions between 1917-18 by utilizing previously unreleased archival sources such as Italian and Austrian war diaries, official manuals, divisional and High Command reports and the soldiers' own recollections of the war. Finally, it offers a comprehensive description of their uniforms, equipment, and weapons, along with a large number of illustrations, maps and period photographs rarely seen. This epic trial of military strength of these special stormtroops cannot be properly understood without visiting, and walking, the battlefields. The appendix thus offers the reader a series of walks to visits key high mountain fortifications in the Italian Dolomites, many of which have attained almost legendary status.

A detailed account of how aces of the calibre of Brumowski, Kiss and Linke-Crawford did their best in their Albatros fighters, which often sported colourful and fanciful insignias. Austro-Hungarian industry produced a series of poor fighter types such as the Phönix D I and Hansa-Brandenburg D I during the early stages of the war, and it was not until licence-built examples of the battle-proven Albatros and D II and D III began to reach Fliegerkompagnien, or Fliks, in May 1917 that the fortunes of pilots began to look up. Unlike the German-built Albatrosen, the Oeffag aircraft were far more robust than German D IIs and D IIIs. They also displayed superior speed, climb, manoeuvrability and infinitely safer flight characteristics. The careful cross-checking of Allied sources with Austrian and German records form the basis for a detailed reconstruction of the dogfights fought by the leading aces. It will also chart the careers of the Austro-Hungarian aces that flew the D II and D III, their successes and their defeats, with additional information about their personal background and their post-war lives in the nations born from the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire.

The first of two volumes on the Axis campaigns in the Balkans, exploring Mussolini's fateful decision to move against Greece in October 1940. The Greek President Metaxas rejected the Italian ultimatum with a famous 'Oxi' ('No'), and what followed was Italy's first debacle in World War II. In the wake of Italy's rapid annexation of Albania in April 1940, Mussolini's decision to attack Greece in October that year is widely acknowledged as a fatal mistake, leading to a domestic crisis and to the collapse of Italy's reputation as a military power (re-emphasized by the Italian defeat in North Africa in December 1940). The Italian assault on Greece came to a stalemate in less than a fortnight, and was followed a week later by a Greek counter-offensive that broke through the Italian defences before advancing into Albania, forcing the Italian forces to withdraw north before grinding to a half in January 1941 due to logistical issues. Eventually, the Italians took advantage of this brief hiatus to reorganize and prepare a counteroffensive, the failure of which marked the end of the first stage of the Axis Balkan campaign. The first of two volumes examining the Axis campaigns in the Balkans, this book offers a detailed overview of the Italian and Greek armies, their fighting power, and the terrain in which they fought. Complimented by rarely seen images and full colour illustrations, it shows how expectations of an easy Italian victory quickly turned into one of Mussolini's greatest blunders.