Robert Davis is professor emeritus of Italian Renaissance and pre-modern Mediterranean history at Ohio State University. He has studied Naples, Rome, Palermo, Venice, the Vatican, and Perugia, and mostly works on the lives of ordinary people and the values they cherished. His subjects have ranged from shipbuilders, bull fighters, and amateur boxers in Venice to the corsairs who terrorized the Mediterranean everywhere else. He has co-authored studies of Venice as the world's most touristed city and of Renaissance men and women. He has also been in a number of television documentaries, on shipbuilding, Carnival, and the Mediterranean slave trade, and is currently writing a textbook on the history of modern Europe.
