Robert Davis is a professor of Italian Renaissance and pre-modern Mediterranean history at Ohio State University. He studies 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 also recently co-authored a study of Venice, as the world's most touristed city, and after reading this, no one can ever look at Romantic Venice in quite the same way. He has been in a number of television documentaries, on shipbuilding, Carnival, and the Mediterranean slave trade.