"The swerve", "deviation": this is the original title translated into French by ... "Quattrocento"; this might raise a smile, but this habit homegrown changing the original titles here puts into relief that the Renaissance is to discover the works of Greek and Latin authors. The Pulitzer Prize was awarded to a book that relates the resurrection by the Pontifical Secretary Poggio a copy of the work of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura "is very reassuring on the good taste of American jurors in the book excellent effect; it is the true romance of philosophy and Greek and Latin literature, obscure work of the monks copyists, and free spirits who unearthed in sometimes incredible circumstances the texts of the thought of antiquity, whose epicurean masterpiece to Lucretius, whose disclosure would cause so many "deviations" from Botticelli to Giordano Bruno, Galileo Montaigne. Greenblatt's book is the fascinating story of the intellectual adventure, and the author excels both in narrative and in the description of the turn that represented "On the Nature of Things" at various times.