Said to have been designed by Michelangelo himself, above, Villa Machiavelli is a piece of history nestled among Tuscany’s rolling hills—and now it can be rented. Getty Images Home to the ...

A prince must acquire the nature of both; if he possesses the qualities of one without the other, he will be lost,” early-Renaissance thinker Niccolò Machiavelli counseled half a millennium ago.

In his book Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction, Quentin Skinner, perhaps the foremost contemporary scholar of modern republicanism, relates how the renowned republican thinker Niccolò ...

Machiavelli, who himself was a diplomat and military leader, wrote the book as a guide for ambitious rulers, specifically the Medicis, seeking to obtain and maintain power in tumultuous times ...