Rome
A tale of cloaks and daggers
You don’t need to know the opera Tosca to understand and enjoy this book about Puccini’s most notorious villain, Vitellio…
On the way to the Forum
It’s strange that tourists rarely visit the most famous site in Roman history. The spot in Pompey’s assembly hall where…
Long life
The 1960s were already more than halfway over when I realised that I was living through what was supposed to…
The dreamer
Ian Thomson on the creative limbo that spawned Fellini’s modernist masterpiece, 8½
The Vatican
The sun has only just risen in Rome and we are standing bleary-eyed in a short queue outside the Vatican.…
Sicily
Syracuse is a handsome place, steeped in a rich historical broth. At the tip sits Ortygia, an island offshoot, which…
Long before the Magna Carta
Important as the Magna Carta (ad 1215) has been as a founding myth for everything we hold dear about law…
Divinely decorative
Italian cabinets and tables decorated with inlaid semi-precious stones known as ‘pietre dure’ were a ‘must-have’ for English milords returning…
Occupational hazards
Roberto Rossellini shot his neorealist landmark Rome, Open City while the war still raged and rubble littered the freshly liberated…
Hadrian on the Somerset floods
Since the Somerset Levels are a flood plain, nature will flood it. Romans had no problems with that. Much of…
In praise of the Emperor
Roderick Conway Morris on the influence and legacy of Augustus
Beyond belief
Women bishops, gay marriage, and the death of Tory Anglicanism
A brainy delight
The Japanese are sometimes said to suffer from ‘outsider person shock’ (gaijin shokku) when travelling abroad. Recently in London we…
Long life
The people of Rome have always liked to believe the worst of their bishop. When I was a correspondent in…
