Stephen Greenblatt · 2011 · road

Pulitzer and National Book Award winner. In January 1417 an unemployed papal secretary with a taste for hunting manuscripts took a book off a shelf in a German monastery and recognised a name he remembered from Cicero - and Greenblatt argues that the poem he found, and had copied, is where the modern world starts.

1. 1
   Rome

   The first century BC, and Lucretius writes seven thousand lines arguing that the universe is atoms in empty space, that the gods take no interest in us, and that there is nothing to fear in death.

2. 2
   Herculaneum

   The Villa of the Papyri, an Epicurean library buried by Vesuvius in 79 and dug out as carbonised rolls in the eighteenth century - evidence that these ideas were once ordinary reading in a rich Roman house.

3. 3
   Rome

   Fourteen centuries on, and Poggio Bracciolini is apostolic secretary at the papal court - a man with the finest handwriting in Europe, a low opinion of monks, and a private obsession with hunting classical manuscripts.

4. 4
   Constance

   The Council of 1415 deposes his employer, the antipope John XXIII, and Poggio is suddenly unemployed in southern Germany with time on his hands and a list of monastic libraries nobody has looked in for centuries.

5. 5
   Fulda

   January 1417, and in a Benedictine library he takes down a manuscript, sees a name he remembers from Cicero, and orders a copy - the last surviving text of On the Nature of Things, and the date the world swerved.

6. 6
   Florence

   The copy goes to Niccolo Niccoli, who transcribes it in a hand so beautiful it becomes the model for italic type - and from there to fifty more copies, to print in 1473, and on to Montaigne, Bruno and Jefferson.