Rome
Was Klaus Mann all Thomas Mann's fault?
Thomas Mann, despite strong homosexual emotions, had six children. The two eldest, Erika and Klaus, born in 1905 and 1906…
Jhumpa Lahiri's new tongue
Imagine you’re an unknown young writer whose first collection of stories wins the Pulitzer prize. Your first novel is filmed,…
Coming of age in New York
I read this, Meg Rosoff’s first novel for adults (though her previous fiction, aimed at teenagers, is widely enjoyed by…
The delights and dangers of the Grand Tour
The Grand Tour usually culminated with Naples, ragamuffin capital of the Italian south, where Vesuvius offered a visual education in…
Puccini’s villain as swashbuckling hero
You don’t need to know the opera Tosca to understand and enjoy this book about Puccini’s most notorious villain, Vitellio…
Augustus: here was a Caesar! Or at least his great-nephew
It’s strange that tourists rarely visit the most famous site in Roman history. The spot in Pompey’s assembly hall where…
How strange to feel nostalgic for the 1970s
The 1960s were already more than halfway over when I realised that I was living through what was supposed to…
How Fellini made his modernist masterpiece
Ian Thomson on the creative limbo that spawned Fellini’s modernist masterpiece, 8½
Rise early to see the Vatican at its best
The sun has only just risen in Rome and we are standing bleary-eyed in a short queue outside the Vatican.…
An earthquake with a Baroque legacy in Sicily
Syracuse is a handsome place, steeped in a rich historical broth. At the tip sits Ortygia, an island offshoot, which…
The Magna Carta was hopelessly behind the times
Important as the Magna Carta (ad 1215) has been as a founding myth for everything we hold dear about law…
Cabinet of curiosity: we do not even know for sure the maker of the Sixtus Cabinet at Stourhead
Italian cabinets and tables decorated with inlaid semi-precious stones known as ‘pietre dure’ were a ‘must-have’ for English milords returning…
Rome, Open City still shocks
Roberto Rossellini shot his neorealist landmark Rome, Open City while the war still raged and rubble littered the freshly liberated…
Hadrian on the Somerset levels
Since the Somerset Levels are a flood plain, nature will flood it. Romans had no problems with that. Much of…
What Emperor Augustus left us
Roderick Conway Morris on the influence and legacy of Augustus
The death of Tory Anglicanism
Women bishops, gay marriage, and the death of Tory Anglicanism
Italo Calvino's essays, Collection of Sand, is a brainy delight
The Japanese are sometimes said to suffer from ‘outsider person shock’ (gaijin shokku) when travelling abroad. Recently in London we…
Romans always love a Vatican scandal. But what if this time they're right?
The people of Rome have always liked to believe the worst of their bishop. When I was a correspondent in…
