Guido Ruggiero underscored his position as one of the world’s leading authorities on the Italian Renaissance with his most recent book, The Renaissance in Italy: A Social and Cultural History of the Rinascimento. Winner of the American Association for Italian Studies’ prize for the best work of 2014 on premodern Italy, it posed a major rethinking of the period from the mid-13th through the 16th centuries as both a movement and a historical era.

Ruggiero, a professor of history at the University of Miami, Florida, examines that extraordinary time of reform, renewal, and rebirth in a discussion coinciding with the final weeks of Da Vinci: The Exhibition at Kansas City’s Union Station. Attendees of the Library event will receive discounted admission to the hands-on exhibit, which is on display through May 1.