Customer Reviews:
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 An outstanding and readable work. August 15, 2006
40 out of 43 found this review helpful
An excellent book that from now on (but just until I'll write my own narration of Lepanto ....) will be the unquestionable reference work on the subject. Almost one hundred years ago Alethea Wiel, in The Navy of Venice (London, 1910) wrote: "They (the six Venetian Galleasses positioned in front of the Christian fleet) bore so distinguished and important a part in the crushing defeat of the Turks at Lepanto as to have, it is said, secured the victory to Venice and her allies." This in one of the various points that Niccolo Capponi, leading Italian military historian, probed and researched in depth providing full evidence of what really happened the 7th of October 1571. Many errors, constantly repeated since the times of Jurien de la Graviere (and perhaps earlier) by almost all the authors, have been so eradicated with the help of an opulent amount of newly discovered archival documents.
Some inaccuracies: at page 187 the moschetto, a small piece of artillery was named after a bird, a special kind of falcon; at page 192 Antonio (and not Arturo) Surian, called the Armenian, was a very well known inventor and not a Master Gunner. This is all I have been able to discover so far but, being green with envy, I am sure that reading the book again I'll be able to uncover other crucial blunders of the same magnitude.
Summing up: a virtually flawless, superior level academic work that can be read with absolute ease and pleasure.
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