As passengers on a plane emerge from a thick blanket of clouds, a sunlit view opens up of a verdant archipelago of great beauty, so the journey through history our readers are about to embark on will open their eyes to pages of history that describe a world rich in excitement, the memory of which has long been shrouded in undeserved oblivion. They will thus experience the moment when Europe became a subject with its own identity and not merely a simple geographical expression; they will discover the origins of European Culture; they will meet the figures who ushered in the European cycle in which we still live; they will be able to reflect on the foundational contribution of Christianity to European civilization and on the role of the Old Continent as a scene of cyclical migrations, which initially brought disorder but, if "read" through the lens of historical time, also enriched flows of knowledge. And thus they will learn about the Longobard peoples and their extraordinary contribution to history and culture: a hereditary heritage formed in the phases of a migration that unfolded throughout the first millennium AD, from the North Sea to Central and Eastern Europe to the Mediterranean shores of Southern Italy, and whose repercussions have continued into the following millennium, right up to the present day.