A fascinating, concise and comprehensive description of the rise, glory and fall of the Celtic civilization. Since ancient times, the Celts have been more feared than welcomed. Known to be fierce, indomitable warriors, mercenaries and conquerors, they were in the eyes of the Mediterranean world barbarians par excellence, the enemies of civilization. Sharing a common language and social structure (which supported their warrior ideology), the various Celtic populations of fighting men, farmers, and artisans who never knew political unity over the centuries came to occupy the whole of continental and insular Europe, to the fringes of Asia Minor. The Celts did not build megalithic monuments and left only a few large sculptures comparable with those of the Greek and Etruscan-Italian world. Their art was applied to small objects and the figurative repertoire "not-classical/anticlassical" gave shape to a fantastic, fleeting vision of a very specific nature, reflecting their own spiritual and magico-religious world. Despite the territorial conquests of Rome and other populations, the identity, language, cults and the beliefs of the Celts survived until the dawn of the Middle Ages. Thanks to the transmission of their oral literature, compiled and transcribed by Irish monks, we can intensively explore both the spiritual world and the culture of the Celtic peoples, who were among the most important formative forces in the history of European continent. AUTHOR: Daniele Vitali graduated in Etruscology at the University of Bologna. Since 1998 he has been a professor of Pre- and Protohistory in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage at the University of Bologna. He is member of UMR 8546 CNRS (Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris), a corresponding member of the Institute of Etruscan and Italic Studies and of the Institute of Italian Pre- and Protohistory. Daniele Vitali has held classes and seminars on Celtic-Italian archaeology in major European universities and has directed various international congresses. He continues to direct archaeological excavations at Celtic sites. He directs the University of Bologna's team at the Centre Archeologique Europeen du Mont Beuvray (since 1989), which participates in excavations in Bibracte, and since 2005 he has directed the University of Bologna's team at the Hungarian-French-Italian excavation site on the Great Hungarian Plain. Colour illustrations