Rome, Emergence of the Roman commune

The Roman revolution in 1143 had fundamentally the same goals as other contemporaneous communal movements in northern Italy: freedom from episcopal (in Rome's case, papal) authority and control of the surrounding countryside. The revival of the Roman Senate and other echoes of the Classical past perhaps owed something to the preaching of Arnold of Brescia, a priest

Marschner, Heinrich August

Marschner studied law at Leipzig, but, encouraged by Ludwig van Beethoven, whom he met in Vienna in 1817, and others, he turned to composing. In 1820 his close friend Carl Maria von Weber produced Marschner's opera Heinrich IV und d'Aubign� at Dresden. Marschner was later appointed

Environmental Works, Groundwater sources

The value of an aquifer as a source of groundwater is a function of the porosity of the geologic stratum, or layer, of which it is formed. Water is withdrawn from an aquifer by pumping it out of a well or infiltration gallery. An infiltration gallery typically includes several horizontal perforated pipes radiating outward from the bottom of a large-diameter vertical

Piura

Department (formed 1861) of northern Peru, consisting of coastal desert, particularly in the west and south, and low, forested Andean mountains in the east. It is drained by the Chira River in the north and the Piura River in the south. The irrigated valleys of these two rivers are used chiefly for the production of cotton. Upstream on the Piura River, sugarcane, rice, tobacco,

Nagoya

The history of Nagoya dates from 1610, when a great castle was erected by the Owari branch of the powerful Tokugawa shogunate. After the Meiji Restoration (1868), which marked the end of shogunal government, Nagoya continued as a commercial

Balas, Iolanda

Balas cleared the bar in a variation of the scissors method; her coach was Ion S�ter, an outstanding high-jumper whom she later married. She already held the women's