HOWARD CARTER

One November morning in 1922, in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, Howard Carter, a self-taught and restless English archaeologist, made a hole in the door of an ancient Egyptian tomb. He had just discovered the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamon, the most sensational discovery in the history of archaeology. The chronicle of what happened has been told so many times that it is often difficult to distinguish fact from fiction...

CHARLES DARWIN

His name was Charles Darwin. Some saw him as an evil genius, others as simply a genius. The truth, however, is that he never intended to be either. In writing the final words of his On the Origin of Species, he would have never imagined that his ideas would later raise an uproar. So how could such a calm and respectable scholar, a decent Victorian, a man who seemed nothing but ordinary...

DANTE ALIGHIERI

Dante Alighieri: the brightest star of our literature, the father of the Italian language. Everyone knows who he is. Or, at least, everyone has heard about him and his “Divine Comedy”. But who was he really? There are only a few things about his life that we know for sure. One of these is that before becoming the Supreme Poet, Dante was a man in flesh and bone, with his doubts and his contracontradictions...

LEONARDO

Leonardo is remembered as being one of the great geniuses of humanity, but he also continues to be one of the most enigmatic figures ever. Gifted with a boundless imagination, insatiable curiosity, and the unique ability to combine art and science, there was no discipline he didn't excel at, turning it into something that had never been seen before. But he had his weak points too, first among which the habit of leaving his works unfinished…

MARY SHELLEY

Strong-willed, bold, passionate, nonconformist, but also stubborn, insecure, and obsessive, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, one of the most famous novels of all time. Her life was both extraordinary and tormented. This is the story of how, 220 years ago, as an adolescent expecting a child, she ran away from home and became a star of the literary world. But it is also about how, during a summer without a summer, a woman reinvented fear, creating one of the most terrifying creatures ever.

NIKOLA TESLA

Nikola Tesla did not just live at a time when a remarkable number of scientific discoveries forever changed our worldn — he was also one of its undisputed protagonists. He was the inventor of the system of wireless power transmission that is still in use today, as well as of the three-phase electric motor, the induction bobbin, radio-controlled torpedo boats, and a variety of hydrogen fluoride and phosphorus lamps. And yet, the name Tesla was omitted from all the textbooks, and one of the greatest inventors ever was forgotten...

CARAVAGGIO

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was a painter, but not just any painter: he was one of those artists that art history books devote lots of chapters to, famous for his exceptional artistic ability as well as for his equally amazing ability to get into trouble wherever he went. Yet, his true identity is mostly a mystery to this day...

MARIE ANTONIETTE

No queen has ever attracted as much interest as Marie Antoinette has for over two centuries. But who was she really? And why so much interest in the woman who was perhaps the most detested sovereign ever? Perhaps what determined her destiny, more than anything else, was the fact that, from the time she was born to the day of her death, she was forced to play roles that others compelled her to. And the magnificent golden palace of Versailles could do little to protect her from a world that would never be the same...