At a conference in June 2018 the geographer James A. Tyner argued for the importance of the idea of violence as a process which comes into being through political practice and suggested that scholars should ‘interrogate critically how individuals and society simultaneously represent and experience violence’. In this short final reflection I will not repeat the points made by the editors in the Introduction or those made by the contributors in their respective chapters. Instead, I offer a few reflections on Tyner's ‘simultaneous experience of violence and its representation’ as approached through the three broad themes of narrative, gender and place which recur throughout this volume. It is hoped that highlighting this way of looking at violence at the end of this book will prompt readers to make connections for themselves between the various essays.

First, some historiographical context is needed. It is no surprise to readers of this book that the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ may have been no more violent than other periods in Italy's past, including the present. If this was so, why did the image of these centuries as a violent age come about? One answer is that many of the surviving narrative sources privileged certain sorts of violent behaviour which now seem remote and even shocking to us. The obvious example is feuding, although we now know that phenomenon was less prevalent, less brutal and rather more complex than has often been supposed, even in Italy. Even so this volume certainly shows that very many episodes of political disarray can be found in earlier medieval Italian history, well-documented in diverse written genres as the Introduction outlines. Typically, texts reported violent actions which arose out of disputes over political control both because of their own interest in that violence and its consequences but also to make moral or other points for the benefit of readers, usually by presenting violence as the just result of the actions of God in the world. Another myth is that this period is always poorly documented, but as the chapters taken together make absolutely clear, the amount of evidence is considerable.

I first visited Varese Ligure in January 1995. It was very cold. There was thick ice along the roadsides. The hotel I stayed at, the ancient Albergo Amici founded in 1760 and run by the Marcone family ever since, was freezing, as the heating had broken down just before we arrived. We were the only guests and we huddled with the family around the single wood-burning stove in the reception area. It was hard to be impressed, and I really did not want to go back if I am honest, certainly not at that time of year. I travelled there with Charles Watkins from the School of Geography, University of Nottingham. We soon developed a new course for final-year undergraduates, called ‘The Landscape History of Liguria’, centred on an annual week-long field trip to Varese. The first field trip was 24–31 March 1995. As it turned out, I have been returning almost every year since with between 10 and 30 final-year university students in tow, usually in March/ April, but last year for the first time in September. I have also been there in August for summer holidays. I will not be going in 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic caused the cancellation of the module, as well as all overseas field work at my university (University of Nottingham, UK). For this year at least, I have become a Victorian cliché, the ‘fireside traveller’ who features elsewhere in my teaching portfolio. Instead I shall have to visit from a suitable social distance (roughly 1670 km) looking again at Varese through the eyes of Frederic Lees, a rather eccentric traveller, who made a single visit to Varese in 1911 during a three-month walking tour of Liguria. He was 39 years old.

Varese Ligure is a small town, the capital of the Upper Vara Valley in the far east of the Liguria region. The northern part of the town's jurisdiction (Ital.: comune) borders the region of Emilia Romagna at the Pass of Cento Croci (1055 m a.s.l.). The earliest historical evidence for the town is a brief mention of the plebs de Varia (‘Vara parish’) in a register of the archbishops of Genoa dated 1031 AD.

The relationship between humour, history and gender is still neglected by historians despite a recent fashion for books about humour as an historical phenomenon. This chapter illustrates the degree to which these three issues were linked together by Liutprand of Cremona (c.920/5–72) in his various writings. Liutprand's Antapodosis (or ‘Book of Revenge’, written 958–62), Liber de Ottone rege (965) and Relatio de legatione Constantinopolitana (969–70), each contain humorous passages, which are a fundamental feature of his unique literary style. The most developed of all Liutprand's jokes (or ludibrium, as he has it) is a tale that appears in Antapodosis 4.10, inserted into an otherwise anodyne report of a battle, which took place in the late 920s, between Tedbald, a relative of King Hugh of Italy, Liutprand's sometime patron, and some Greeks. I quote this in full in Frederic Wright's translation: