Rome

Conrad Black adheres firmly to the ‘great man’ view of history

27 January 2024 9:00 am

The movers and shakers of Volume I of his projected history of the world are Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Hannibal rather than any socio-economic forces

Everyday life in the Eternal City: Roman Stories, by Jhumpa Lahiri, reviewed

14 October 2023 9:00 am

Each story circles around events both big and small, such as lunch at a simple trattoria, a birthday party, a summer holiday or the funeral of a friend

Fighting every inch of the way: the Italian Campaign of 1943

30 September 2023 9:00 am

When Allied forces landed at Salerno on 9 September, they expected an easy run to Rome. But the intelligence proved dangerously faulty, as James Holland explains

Of road and rail

26 August 2023 9:00 am

Enthralling: BBC4’s Colosseum reviewed

26 August 2023 9:00 am

In the year 2023, the Neo-Roman Empire was at the height of its powers. A potentially restive populace was kept…

‘I always made an awkward bow’: John Keats’s poignant farewell

24 September 2022 9:00 am

On Sunday 17 September 1820, John Keats and his travelling companion, the young painter Joseph Severn, set sail for Italy,…

Raphael – saint or hustler?

2 April 2022 9:00 am

Laura Gascoigne dishes the dirt on Raphael

Is it an exaggeration to talk of a ‘gender war’?

5 February 2022 9:00 am

According to Nina Power’s forceful and rather unusual What Do Men Want?, we in the West are currently engaged in…

How Rome’s rubbish became a political problem

23 October 2021 9:00 am

‘Excommunication,’ reads a stone plaque on the wall of the church of St Theodore in Rome, ‘and a fine of…

Tales from my private jet

13 March 2021 9:00 am

Gstaad I was very sad to read of Rupert Hambro’s death. I didn’t know him well, but first met him…

An elegy on the end of elegance

13 February 2021 9:00 am

Gstaad During these dark, endless periods of lockdown, let’s take a trip down memory lane to a time when we…

A Chaucerian tale: Pilgrims, by Matthew Kneale, reviewed

20 June 2020 9:00 am

Matthew Kneale is much drawn to people of the past. In his award-winning English Passengers, he captured the sensibilities of…

It’s still impossible for Horst Wächter to recognise his father as a Nazi war criminal

18 April 2020 9:00 am

In 1926, while putting in place the repressive laws and decrees that would define his dictatorship, Mussolini appointed a new…

For a solution to the backstop, team up like Rome and Carthage

31 August 2019 9:00 am

The EU is demanding that, in return for a new deal, the UK must come up with a solution to…

How Boris’s Roman predecessors took back control

17 August 2019 9:00 am

The Tories, allegedly a ‘one-nation’ party, are currently imposing Brexit on a divided nation. As a result, some Tory MPs…

Tobias and the angel, attributed to Titian

Angels through the ages

2 March 2019 9:00 am

A good question for your upcoming Lent quiz: where are angels mentioned in the Nicene Creed? I asked this at…

Why I won’t be turning Catholic just yet

17 November 2018 9:00 am

I didn’t get an audience with the Pope when I visited Rome last weekend. But given that he’s a borderline…

‘Apollo and Daphne’, early 1620s, by Bernini

Turning marble into cushions and stone into flesh: the magic of Gian Lorenzo Bernini

13 January 2018 9:00 am

Seventeenth-century Roman art at its fullblown, operatic peak often proves too rich for puritanical northern tastes. And no artist was…

When in Rome…

14 October 2017 9:00 am

I know I keep saying that in Decline of the West terms we’re all currently living in Rome, circa 400…

A kind of posthumous existence: a death mask of Keats, sold at auction for £16,100 in 1996

A beautiful place to die: Italy and the Romantic poets

28 May 2016 9:00 am

People can be mightily protective of their Romantic poets. When I worked at the Keats Shelley House, overlooking the Spanish…

Sex, violence and anticlimax in 16 (very short) chapters

23 April 2016 9:00 am

‘Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime,’ begins…

The obelisk in the Place de la Concorde. Its transport from Luxor to Paris took seven years and involved the destruction of an entire village

Are Egypt’s obelisks more stunning even than the pyramids?

23 April 2016 9:00 am

On the banks of the River Thames in central London, an ancient Egyptian obelisk, known as Cleopatra’s Needle, reaches towards…

St Paul (detail) by the Byzantine Master,St Sophia Cathedral, Kiev

Following Jesus’s followers

26 March 2016 9:00 am

In his new book Apostle Tom Bissell has an advantage over writers who go looking for Jesus: he can start…

Aeneas and the shade of Dido by Bartolomeo Pinelli.

Gifts from beyond the grave — from Virgil and Seamus Heaney

19 March 2016 9:00 am

Andrew Motion finds a touching parallel between Virgil’s unfinished Aeneid and Seamus Heaney’s barely finished translation of Book VI

RA’s Giorgione show is so rich it’s worth returning to several times

19 March 2016 9:00 am

Walter Sickert was once shown a room full of paintings by a proud collector, who had purchased them on the…