Luzzara 1702 : The battle of Midsummer

The bloody battle fought on 15 August 1702 on the banks of the Po marked the beginning of a bloody struggle that lasted until 1706, which did not spare the cities and saw the active participation of the populations involved.The author turns his attention to the events leading up to the battle and the composition of the armies involved, with particular attention to that of the state of Milan, partly composed of officers and soldiers from the peninsula.The reconstruction of the situation on the field is very meticulous, carried out through the use of sources that are also difficult to find.It is worth noting the accurate study of the state of the places at the time of the battle, which today is no longer comparable to that of 1702, due to the alterations that the course of the Po has undergone over time and the human activity and settlements that have taken place: without it, it would not be easy to understand the movements of the troops in the area and the course of the battle itself.In this book, Fabio Fiorentin has been able to capture the different aspects of one of the most significant moments of the War of Spanish Succession in Italy, culminating in the famous siege of Turin in 1706 and ending with the defeat of the Franco-Spanish armies forced to abandon the peninsula.In it, instead of the Spanish, a strong imperial (or rather Austrian) dominance was established, which between various vicissitudes and the Napoleonic parenthesis, characterised Italian history for the next 150 years.Fiorentin also extends his research to the events that occurred after the battle and their consequences on the course of the war, which leaves us looking forward to his further studies on this period.