Articles and Reviews

  • Food and art in Florence

    Food and art in Florence

    The art of the Renaissance or the art of food? Do we go to Florence for the food or for the art? Has gastronomy replaced Giotto on the Florence bucket list? how it began โ€˜Yes,โ€™ said Lucy. โ€˜They are lovely. Do you know which is the tombstone that is praised…

  • Cobbled together: the streets of Rome

    Cobbled together: the streets of Rome

    A look at how the streets of Rome are paved. All roads lead to Rome. And Rome still leads the world in roads. The streets of the ancient city were paved in huge, irregular blocks of stone known asย basolato. Today only a very few segments of such paving survive: along…

  • The Seuso Roman silver treasure

    The Seuso Roman silver treasure

    The Seuso Treasure is one of the finest hoards of Roman silver ever discovered. what is the seuso silver treasure? The Seuso Roman silver Treasure, in the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest, consists of 14 stunning pieces of late imperial Roman tableware: Four huge platters, variously decorated; a washbasin; five…

  • Drink & Think VENICE: the author’s choice of bars and cafรฉs

    Drink & Think VENICE: the author’s choice of bars and cafรฉs

    We asked author Robin Saikia to explain which bars he recommends in his invaluable Drink & Think Venice – The Story of Venice in Twenty-Six Bars and Cafรฉs. Here are his descriptions of 10 of them: Each chapter of Drink & Think Venice begins with an introduction to one of…

  • BLUE GUIDE SICILY – New Edition

    BLUE GUIDE SICILY – New Edition

    A fully revised new 2025 edition of this popular Blue Guide, by Sicily resident and tour guide Ellen Grady, will be available shortly. Now presented in the Blue Guides new, full-colour format, with stunning photographs and award-winning Blue Guides mapping. The guide retains the Blue Guides’ traditional focus on architecture,…

  • BIEDERMEIER Lifestyles: Exhibition

    BIEDERMEIER Lifestyles: Exhibition

    On art and culture in the post-Napoleonic ageโ€”and how this relates to society today. โ€œBiedermeier Lifestylesโ€ is the title of an exhibition currently running at the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest. It is a title that will possibly need explanation. In Hungary, people know what Biedermeier means. It is a…

  • TRAVEL BY RAIL IN EUROPE: Changes for 2025

    TRAVEL BY RAIL IN EUROPE: Changes for 2025

    On 15 December 2024, the annual major timetable revision by European railway operators was announced. This is when new routes and schedules for 2025 are published, essential knowledge for planning rail travel in Europe in speed and comfort. Mark Dudgeon, the Blue Guides rail correspondent, highlights the main changes and new services…

  • WHAT TO SEE IN VENICE: TIPS for a great visit

    WHAT TO SEE IN VENICE: TIPS for a great visit

    Venice offers a huge wealth of museums, churches, architecture and other sights to see and visit.  Here, by district (โ€œsestiereโ€) are the highlights selected in Blue Guide Venice, the definitive guide to the Most Serene City: 1. SESTIERE OF SAN MARCO Some highlights of the sestiere of San Marco. For much more detail…

  • Blue Guide Rome recommended

    Blue Guide Rome recommended

    “Exuberantly impractical” may be overstating it, but we are happy that Liam Callanan (author of When in Rome) in a round-up of great books on Rome (in the Week, here ยป) sees our Blue Guide Rome, the best guide book to Rome, at the detailed and scholarly end of the…

  • Alexandria: The City that Changed the Word by Islam Issa: A Review

    Alexandria: The City that Changed the Word by Islam Issa: A Review

    Islam Issa: Alexandria: The City that Changed the World. Sceptre Books, 2023 Islam Issa, the author of this expansive history of Alexandria, spent his childhood in his native city. His Alexandrian descent through the male line was unequalled. His fatherโ€™s โ€œancestry test revealed a staggering 97.5 percent near to the…

  • The key dates in Sicilyโ€™s extraordinary history

    The key dates in Sicilyโ€™s extraordinary history

    The drama of Sicilyโ€™s history โ€“ frequently fabulously prosperous, sometimes desperately poor, devastated by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, overrun by Ancient Greeks, invaded by Romans, Byzantines, Moors and Normans, then shuffled between powerful powerful European dynastic interests: Swabian, Angevin, Aragonese, Savoyard, Bourbon โ€“ risks overshadowing appreciation of the peace, prosperity…

  • The Roads to Rome by Catherine Fletcher: A Review

    The Roads to Rome by Catherine Fletcher: A Review

    Catherine Fletcher: The Roads to Rome, A History, The Bodley Head, London, 2024, reviewed by Charles Freeman Simone Quilici, one of my former pupils (when I taught the International Baccalaureate History programme), is now director of the Via Appia, which stretches in its original paved state outside Rome. I was…

  • Blue Guide New York – Update

    Blue Guide New York – Update

    Carol von Pressentin Wrightโ€™s classic Blue Guide to New York City, relied on by tour guides, residents and visitors alike since its first edition in 1983, is available in a special reprint edition from Amazon in the UK and US. You might not guess it, Amazon make the correct edition almost impossible…

  • Now You See Us at Tate Britain: A Review

    Now You See Us at Tate Britain: A Review

    โ€œNow you see usโ€ is the title of an exhibition running at Tate Britain until October. It aims to place before us the output of British women artists over the course of half a millennium, from 1520 to 1920. Along the way, it plucks many names from oblivion and it…

  • Medieval Horizons

    Medieval Horizons

    Ian Mortimer, Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter, The Bodley Head, 2023. Reviewed by Charles Freeman When do the Middle Ages begin and end? I think AD 500 is a good starting point, following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476. Many studies do not get going…

  • Artists of the Pustertal

    Artists of the Pustertal

    The Pustertal (in Italian, Val Pusteria) is a valley in the mountainous South Tyrol region of Northern Italy, the region on the border of Italy and Austria and known in Italian as Alto Adige. Until the end of the First World War, this was territory that belonged to the Empire…

  • The playwright Ferenc Molnรกr, by his grandson

    The playwright Ferenc Molnรกr, by his grandson

    The latest title in the Blue Danube imprint, which focuses on literature, history and travel in Central Europe, is Venetian Angel, a short novel by Ferenc Molnรกr, now translated into English for the first time.  Molnรกr was a famous pre-war dramatist whose many plays included one on which the Rodgers…

  • The Blessed Josef Mayr-Nusser: Anti Nazi hero

    The Blessed Josef Mayr-Nusser: Anti Nazi hero

    The life of Josef Mayr-Nusser (1910-1945) is a chapter in the complicated story of South Tyrol.ย  Born in Bolzano Bozen, he was an active German speaking Catholic, contributor to the subversive young Catholic newssheet Tiroler Jugendwacht (subversive because the Italian government banned use of the German word Jugendwacht โ€“ literally…

  • Venice attempts to stem the tide

    Venice attempts to stem the tide

    (and some news from Rome and Florence) by Alta Macadam The long-discussed entrance restrictions to Venice are finally to become operational on 25th April. The system is designed to limit the numbers of day-trippers, who come to the city for just a few hours (often as part of a tour…

  • Bolzano Bozen – Italian or German?

    Bolzano Bozen – Italian or German?

    Historically Bolzano was a semi-independent merchant city state and sometimes part of the Trento prince-bishopric, with its allegiance more to the (Germanic, Habsburg) Holy Roman Empire โ€“ in the person of the (Austrian) counts of Tyrol โ€“ across the Alps to the north than to the papacy and principalities and…

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