Author Archives: Blue Guides

Roman roads 2,000 years later

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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 pleased to be able to take one of my tours there to see what Simone was up to. He is busy excavating the opulent villas which once lined the road.

Construction of the Via Appia began in 312 BC under the censor Appius Claudius Caecus. Its aim was to support military operations as Rome encroached on the Greek cities in southern Italy. The Via Appia, ‘the queen of the long roads’, according to the Roman writer Statius, lived on in the consciousness of later generations and virtually every traveller or pilgrim to Rome ventured along it to inspect its paving or the catacombs which lay beside it. The Via is, as of July 2024, the first road to be made a World Heritage Site by UNESCO so I was especially glad to see the publication of Catherine Fletcher’s The Roads to Rome, an erudite and absorbing history which surveys not only the building of the original roads but their afterlives and diversions. Fletcher writes engagingly on her varied and often disjointed travels in search of surviving fragments.

Her approach, after three introductory chapters on the building of the imperial road network, is to take later travellers along the roads. So she recounts the escape from an arranged marriage in Constantinople of the mid-6th century Byzantine noblewoman, Arthelais, probably along the Via Egnatia. This road was the first to be built outside Italy, possibly in the 140s or 130s BC. Its starting point was the Million, originally a triumphal double gateway in Constantinople and now just a surviving stone, which marked distances from the eastern capital. The gateway may have been surmounted by the four Greek horses, now in St Mark’s, Venice. It would have been an uncomfortable journey to the port of Durres (now in Albania) and then across the Adriatic to Italy, as the road had decayed by the 6th century. Arthelais’ safe arrival, to see an uncle who would protect her, was short-lived as she died soon after reaching Italy.

By the 10th century, pilgrims were exploiting the original roads from northern Europe to reach Rome. The most famous, still patronised by pilgrims today, is the Via Francigena, which by-passed the coastal Via Aurelia but incorporated  parts of the Via Cassia. The stations on the road were first recorded in the 990s by Sigeric, an archbishop of Canterbury, on his way to receive his pallium from the pope in Rome. By the end of the 11th century, crusaders were choosing their own routes either by sea or land to the Holy Land whose roads had, of course, been once part of the Roman network. Many used the Via Egnatia or the Via Militaris (built in the 1st century AD), which went eastwards across what is now Bulgaria. Despite Covid restrictions and other hindrances, Fletcher makes an intrepid attempt to follow them. She avoids ‘the Bulgarian Forest’, which offered a host of dangers for those crusaders going by land.

With the Renaissance, there was a revived interest in Classical sources and this included appreciation of the road network. Enea  Silvio Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II (r. 1458–1564), was an exemplar of the entanglement of Christianity and paganism which gave such a boost to cultural life. This was an age of villa building along the ancient roads (as in Roman times), which required some rediscovery of the original surfaces or a repaving so that access was possible. Journey times approached those of 1,500 years before. One of the best travel journals, Fletcher tells us, is that of the French essayist Montaigne, who crossed the Alps to explore the roads to Rome, crossing southwards via Trent, Verona and Florence, admiring what ancient ruins he came across and being impressed by the improvements he found as he wandered from city to city.

Those embarking on the Grand Tour from Great Britain had had a Classical education beaten into them, so they knew the sources intimately. Their records are full of complaints about uncomfortable journeys in unsprung carriages, the hazards of the beds in inns, and the failure of the contemporary Italians to match the proud deeds of their Roman ancestors. Typically the tourists lamented the decay or complete disappearance of the original road network. ‘All are vanished, the splendid tumult is passed away: silence and desolation remain . . .’ as William Beckford recorded on the road from Ostia to Rome. Luckily, from 1763, the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum helped restore confidence in the Roman experience.

The Romantics, among them Wordsworth, Goethe, Keats and Shelley, brought a new aesthetic dimension to travel. By this date it was not so much the surface of the ancient roads which excited travellers as the impact of Nature, especially in the Simplon Pass forged by Napoleon in an echo of his admiration of the feats of Hannibal in crossing the Alps. The story continues with the railways and the unification of Italy, which went hand in hand. (Not everyone approved. The fastidious John Ruskin compared being sent by railway as being ‘little different from becoming a parcel.’) Garibaldi’s exploits aroused new enthusiasm for the Classical heroes to which he was compared. Americans came too, among them Mark Twain, Nigel Hawthorne and Frank Douglass. Guidebooks, the celebrated Baedekers, ancestors of the Blue Guides, had to be provided to cater for them.

The 20th century is well dealt with by Fletcher. ‘The March on Rome’ of 1922 provides an echo of the legions setting out on some of the same roads to conquer Italy. Mussolini was excited by the idea of recreating of the Roman Empire. He was responsible for the Via del Mare, which stretched from Rome to the ancient trading port of Ostia and the impressive Via dei Fori Imperiali which still cuts through the ancient fora. The fate of the Jews shows the roads being used in the other direction, leaving Rome for Auschwitz. With the Allied invasion of Italy, the Via Appia was designated as ‘Highway 7’ and Fletcher devotes an entire chapter to the tortuous and brutal campaigns that followed in 1943–4. Conquest is inseparable from the history of the network.

Almost any reference to the original roads catches Fletcher’s eye and so this is a richly researched book which knows when to divert to travellers’ tales. I much enjoyed it, not least the determination of the author to discover any trace of the original network.Throughout The Roads to Rome Fletcher reflects on the importance of road networks as defining the geographical unity of a country or empire. Yet the Via Appia remains supreme and its recent accolade as a World Heritage Site richly deserved.

by Charles Freeman. In his The Horses of St Mark’s (Little, Brown, UK, 2009; Abrams Press, US, 2010) he searches for accounts of triumphal chariots drawn by ‘four horses’ in Constantinople before the Venetians looted one of several recorded in the Fourth Crusade of 1204. He is also the author of Blue Guides’ Sites of Antiquity:

Sites of Antiquity: from Ancient Egypt to the Fall of Rome»

Blue Guide New York – update

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Carol von Pressentin Wright’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 to find despite our frequent requests to them, but, just to be sure, here it is:

Amazon US: Blue Guide New York » 
Amazon UK:  Blue Guide New York »

Check the ISBN of the edition Amazon take you to.  If it is not 9781916568051 then put in the search box exactly this ISBN (not the title).  Ignore the one star review, the 86 reviews averaging 4.6 stars for precisely the same book have been buried by Amazon.  And if you have the right book the price will be $40 / £30, with the above cover.

This is a special reprint addition of Carol Wright’s 2017 fifth edition. Printed in black and white, for copyright reasons it may not include all the original photographs, but the quality Blue Guides text and the mapping are all there in full.

After 40 years and five editions selling tens of thousands of copies Carol Wright is stepping back.  A new edition is in the works, being lovingly researched and written as we speak by the architectural historian, lecturer and journalist Francis Morrone.  More details will follow in due course.

Blue Guide New York »

Now You See Us at Tate Britain

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“Now you see us” 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 achieves this without lecturing or hectoring, without portraying them as victims of a conspiratorial patriarchy, and without making any performative claims about their merits vis à vis male contemporaries. 

Colouring by Angelica Kauffman (1778–80), Royal Academy.

For most of the period under examination, it was never questioned that women possessed talent; it was simply never considered that they would use their talents in a professional, remunerative capacity, certainly not after marriage. Many husbands were humiliated by the idea of their wives earning money. A female artist would typically change her status from professional to amateur when she married. Others would paint anonymously (like Jane Austen’s early novels, written by “A Lady”). (We should not be too amazed by this; the rule forcing women in the UK Foreign Office to resign their jobs on marriage was only rescinded in 1972.) As an illustration of the difficulty women found in using their artistic gifts to make a living, the exhibition presents a portrait of Messenger Monsey, a Cambridge physician, painted in voluptuous pink satin by Mary Black (1737–1814). Monsey was shocked that Black wished to be paid, even though she had dropped her price to well under half of what Sir Joshua Reynolds could have commanded. He felt it improper that a woman should expect to be paid at all. Unsurprisingly, many women artists were hard-up. Male portraitists, as soon as they could afford to do so, might employ an assistant, specialising in drapery and fabrics. Anne Forbes (1745–1834) could not afford this—and her portrait of Margaret, Countess of Dumfries, shows how badly she needed one. 

The question of what was seemly brought other challenges: women had little access to training and for centuries were not permitted to attend life-drawing classes. This is why we see an elbow in completely the wrong place in the portrait of Anne Sotheby by the 17th-century portraitist Mary Beale (1633–99). Other obstacles included simple chauvinism: Sir Joshua Reynolds rudely commented that he did not know whether to laugh or cry when his sister Frances attempted to paint; the portrait of Harriet, Countess Howe, in toffee-coloured taffeta, by Margaret Sarah Carpenter (1793–1872), is a work of genius yet twice the artist’s nomination to membership of the Royal Academy was declined. In 1857, watercolour societies admitted women as exhibitors but they were not allowed to play a role in the administration of those societies nor to share in their profits. There was prudery, too. A woman painting nudes provoked horror. In 1885, an outraged male academician pretended to be a pearl-clutching ‘Matron’ in a letter to the Times, protesting about a (female) Baccahnte by Henrietta Rae (1859–1928). Five years later, though, the pert male buttocks in Anna Lee Merritt’s Love Locked Out received rapturous acclaim. 

There are plenty of painters on display whose names we know (Vanessa Bell, Gwen John, Laura Knight, Helen Allingham) but a far greater number whose names have vanished from the roster, for no obvious good reason. Joshua Reynolds might not have liked the idea of women painting “serious” canvases. He might have believed they should confine themselves to tapestries, floral paintings and collages. It must be said, that the examples of such pictures on display – the tapestries, the floral paintings, the collages—are absolutely exquisite. Clara Maria Pope’s (1767–1838) peonies and Mary Delany’s (1700–88) flower cut-outs are astonishing; the delicate watercolours of Margaret Meen (1751–1834) are exactly the kind of thing one would want to have on one’s wall. And among the bungling and the amateurism, we find artists who are truly virtuosic, boundary-pushing and pioneering: the photography of Julia Margaret Cameron is well known; the First World War paintings of Anna Airy perhaps less so.

In Colouring, a roundel from the ceiling of Burlington House, now the Royal Academy, painted by Angelica Kauffman (1741–1807), the Swiss-born artist who was one of the two female founder-members of the RA, there is a little green chameleon in the foreground. But the chameleon is largely camouflaged against a patch of equally green grass, one does not immediately notice it, if at all. This might be a symbol for this fascinating show as a whole. After touring this exhibition, one suddenly does see the chameleon, and one realises it was there all the time.

Detail of a chameleon, from Colouring, by Angelica Kauffman.
Blue Guide London»

Medieval Horizons

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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 until 1000 or 1100 and Ian Mortimer, a distinguished medievalist, adopts this approach in his Medieval Horizons. Many scholars, as Mortimer acknowledges, see the 15th century as marking an essential transition, yet he extends his story up to 1600. I shall challenge this at the end of this review.

Traditionally medieval Europe has been described as stagnant and superstitious compared to the chronological bookends of the Graeco-Roman Empire and the Renaissance. Mortimer is an ardent defender of the vitality and diversity of the Middle Ages and this thoughtful book deploys his arguments. An analysis of the historiography of the period adds to the quality of the text. His sources are mainly from England (as have been those of his earlier books). There are good sections on the improvements in English homes, especially with heating through chimneys; and speed of travel, which Mortimer calculates (largely again from English sources) as rising some five miles per hour on horseback. Mortimer does discuss the technological advances of medieval Europe: the amazing complexity of the Gothic cathedrals, the replacing of vellum with paper and the development of the clock. However, if he had included more from mainland Europe he would surely have made his case for the Middle Ages stronger. In terms of the economic vibrancy of urban life, the technological achievements of the northern Italian cities outshone those of England. I would also have expected more on the impact of the revival of Roman law and its adaption to the challenges of the city states of Northern Italy, the emergence of the universities (they are only briefly mentioned) and the attempts to find constitutional solutions both for monarchies and for republics such as Florence and Venice. The substantial costs of the wars of the Middle Ages had an important effect in encouraging popular involvement in government. Monarchs had to call parliaments to approve levies and these became a fixture, not only in England. The arrival of Greek texts through the prism of Arab philosophers were crucial in embedding the works of Aristotle into the European curriculum.

There are drawbacks, of course, of extending the survey to Europe. Although Mortimer argues persuasively that violence was decreasing by the 15th century, the devastation caused by the French invasion of Italy in 1494 is not mentioned nor the atrocities of the French wars of religion. His chapter on inequality is a model of how a topic with virtually no statistical back-up can be addressed. He notes the end of serfdom and slavery in England but he does not mention Venetian and Genoese trade in slaves nor Pope Nicholas V’s bull of 1452 authorising King Afonso V of Portugal to subjugate any ‘enemies of Christ’, a religious justification for slavery.

Vernacular texts had freed readers from having to know Latin and so, not least, from clerical authority. Using Tyndale’s Bible (1526), Mortimer notes the importance of this translation in the quality of the English which gave it a lasting readership. He contrasts it with the English of 400 years earlier, which would have been incomprehensible to later generations. Yet as early as the beginning of the 14th century, one of the great masterpieces of European literature, Dante’s Divine Comedy, had been written in Italian and other European authors followed suit in a variety of vernacular languages. In this case, England was much later in the game.

How does one measure individualism in a society? I wonder whether an objective assessment is possible. Here Mortimer is more responsive to European examples. He cites the appearance of spiritual awareness, highlighting Abelard’s Know Thyself and History of My Calamities—although I find the letters of his lover Heloise more revealing of a self-aware personality. (Nothing, of course, could compare for self-awareness with the 4th-century Confessions of Augustine.) An expanding economy, not least in the range of delicacies and dress that it created, allowed an elite to present themselves in exotic ways. The reappearance of mirrors allowed people to see themselves as they really were and, of course, in a technological advance, the Florentine Brunelleschi effectively used mirrors to define perspective in art. The Black Death must have reinforced human beings’ sense of helplessness but the economic opportunities it gave appear to have opened new vistas. I would have dwelt more on the entrepreneurial skills of merchants and bankers in trade, shipping and finance. The choices and judgements they had to make was surely a mark of individualism. I finished this chapter only partially convinced by Mortimer’s argument. Compared to other periods and societies, is individualism really a dominant feature of medievalism?

I would also disagree with Mortimer’s extension of the medieval period to 1600. There were significant changes in the 15th century that ushered in a new age. I believe that medievalism is associated with a pre-Reformation, uniform Christendom. Medieval philosophy was inseparable from the dominance of a single creator God and there was a plethora of theories as to how He could or could not act. This limitation acted as an intellectual straitjacket which was loosened by Humanism, the new emphasis on Classical sources. The German scholar Johannes Fried in his The Middle Ages talks of the arrival of Humanism. ‘Humanism spread to become the dominant intellectual movement of the 15th century. It promulgated not just a new ideal mode of education, but also a whole new image of mankind which posited the intellectually autonomous human being as the focus of its attention.’ I think that this is a valid assessment.
If one takes the 15th century as the point where the Middle Ages ended, one could argue that there were limitations to its achievement, certainly when compared to the 16th century. There were the attacks (as early in the 14th century by Petrarch) on the obscurity of scholasticism, the method of argument used in the universities. Texts could only be copied by hand (inevitably with errors), until the invention of printing enormously expanded a critical readership. It meant that a corrected printed text was authoritative, with important implications for science and mathematics. This is surely a turning point. While European merchants had reached China through the Mongol Empire in the 13th century, surely the European discovery of the Americas was not only a geographical event but led to a revolutionary appraisal of alternative societies. The Copernican revolution was also crucial. When the vast majority of the population laboured in the fields, however, any argument for transition must be cautious. The 15th and early 16th centuries surely saw a new world and to claim Erasmus, Copernicus, Vesalius and Shakespeare as ‘medieval’ (as Mortimer does) is contentious. Nevertheless, with this caveat in mind, this is an impressive and immensely readable summary of change and diversity between the period 1000 and 1600. While it is fine to assert that ‘the European character had changed profoundly’ in the Middle Ages, I feel that it is restrictive to rely so much on English sources for this conclusion.

The brilliant artists of the Pustertal, medieval or modern?

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Innichen centre. Innichen/San Candido is a typical town of the Pustertal, with steep shingled roofs, Baroque churches and the jagged peaks of the Dolomites reaching into the sky.

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 of Austria-Hungary. Two rivers flow along the valley: the Rienz, which flows west into the Eisack from the watershed at Toblach; and the Drau/Drava, which flows east into Austria and Croatia, eventually emptying into the Danube. What might appear at first sight to be a remote alpine valley, hemmed in by vast dolomitic peaks, cloaked in larch and fir and snowed in for much of the year, has in fact always been an important trade route and has been inhabited for a very long time, by prehistoric humankind and subsequently by Illyrians and Rhaetians—and then by the Romans, who left traces of a settlement named Sebatum in the town of St Lorenzen. The Pustertal was also an important outpost of early medieval Christianity: the Benedictine abbey at Innichen/San Candido, with its beautiful and imposing Romanesque church, was founded in 769 in ‘campo gelau’, the ‘icy field’.

In the 15th century, the Pustertal gave birth to a thriving school of painters and sculptors. Most worked in a northern Gothic style and many of them still remain anyonymous. Their names have not come down to us and very little, if anything, is known of their lives. Instead we have works attributed simply to the ‘Master of Uttenheim’, for instance, or the ‘Master of Niederolang’. Other masters are known by a first name appended to the town or village where they were active: ‘Leonhard of Brixen’ and his pupil ‘Simon of Taisten’ are two examples. Although the output of these painters and sculptors is primitive and stylised in many ways, it is always lively and amusing, often with humorous interjections and wry comments on everyday life. The world that they depict, in their scenes from scripture and hagiography, is the world in which they lived, with the features and lineaments of the people who inhabited the Pustertal at the time, as well as their costumes and landscape. It is also through these artists that the ideas of the Renaissance first reach the alps. While the talents of many of them might be said to be homely, there was clearly collaboration and an exchange of ideas going on; and some of the artists travelled to central Italy, bringing back a lot of what they had learned of perspective and depiction of the human form. Among them, one true genius emerges: Michael Pacher (1430/5–98. Born in the 1430s, he began his apprenticeship in Bruneck, from where he went to Padua, where he came into contact with the Venetian and Florentine art that was to have such a profound and visible influence on his own. Pacher is one of the greatest masters of the Tyrolean late Gothic, credited with bringing Italian Renaissance ideas of art to the Alps. He later opened a workshop in Bruneck, before moving to Salzburg, where he died.

Frescoes and altarpieces by the hands of these artists are preserved in churches and museums throughout the Pustertal region, in the places underlined in red on the map below.

Full colour, detailed mapping from Blue Guide Trentino and South Tyrol

What to see

1. Bressanone/Brixen. The Diocesan Museum in the Hofburg, the former seat of the Prince-Bishops, has two rooms devoted to sculpture and painting by Leonhard of Brixen, an artist who ran a successful workshop which he later passed on to his son.

Figure from a group depicting the Coronation of the Virgin, with the narrow, elongated nose often seen in Leonhard of Brizen’s work.

2. Novacella/Neustift. The excellent museum of the Augustinian priory has works by many artists of the Pustertal school, among them Friedrich Pacher (who may have been Michael Pacher’s brother), Leonhard of Brixen, the Master of Uttenheim and Master of Niederolang. The former high altarpiece of the priory church, by Michael Pacher, is now—thanks to Napoleon—in Munich.

From the collection of Neustift Abbey: Ascension of Christ (c.1515) by the Master of Niederolang, an artist who takes his name from the Pustertal village known as Valdaora in Italian. While the faces are sometimes cartoonish, recognisable expressions are nonetheless captured. Is the man looking out at us, top right, a self-portrait of the artist?
From the collection of Neustift Abbey: St Augustine in his Study by the Master of Uttenheim (c. 1470). The saint meditates on the mystery of the Holy Trinity, symbolised by the haloed head with three faces in the top right of the picture space. The texture of the gold brocade drapery is beautifully rendered, as is the expression of curiosity on the face of the woman sneakily looking over Augustine’s shoulder. Uttenheim, the village from which this artist takes his name, is in the valley leading north from the Pustertal, at the head of which is Campo Tures/Sand in Taufers. The altarpiece from the church there, by the same artist, is now in the Belvedere in Vienna.
Another scene from the same altarpiece as above, by the Master of Uttenheim. Here St Augustine (in pale brown) is shown rapt and wide-eyed as he listens to the preaching of St Ambrose in Milan, sitting next to a fashionably dressed young man similarly captivated. Ambrose appears to have got into his stride, ticking items off on his fingers. Meanwhile two members of his audience, a man in the back row and a woman at the front, have fallen fast asleep.

3. San Lorenzo/St Lorenzen. The parish church has a very fine gilded and painted sculpture of the Madonna and Child by Michael Pacher. The Child holds a bunch of black grapes, one of which he has plucked to taste.

Madonna and Child by Michael Pacher, in the church of San Lorenzo/St Lorenzen.

4. Tesido/Taisten. Here the parish church has a tiny ceiling boss of the Madonna and Child by Michael Pacher. The little chapel of St George has exterior frescoes by Simon of Taisten.

External frescoes of St Christopher are a feature of churches and chapels in the South Tyrol. This example, which adorns the chapel of St George in Tesido/Tasiten, is by the eponymous Simon of Taisten, thought to have been born in the village. Simon is known to have been an astute businessman as well as an artist and the workshop which he ran was a successful one, concentrating on frescoes in the dry, summer months and on painted panels for altarpieces in the winter. He also produced secular works for his patrons.

5. San Candido/Innichen. The exterior of the south portal of the old abbey church has a fresco of the patron saints St Candidus and St Corbinian by Michael Pacher. Deep in the forest to the north of the town is the little chapel of St Sylvester, which has charming apse frescoes attributed to Leonhard of Brixen.

The Visitation, attributed to Leonhard of Brixen, in the tiny chapel of St Sylvester above San Candido/Innichen. The Virgin Mary, pregnant with Jesus, is shown greeting her kinswoman Elizabeth, who despite her advanced age, is miraculously also pregnant, with John the Baptist. The artist charmingly depicts the two babies in embryo.

6. Campo Tures/Sand in Taufers. The castle has paintings by Michael Pacher.

7. Monguelfo/Welsberg. Outside the parish church is a painted tabernacle with a Madonna and Child, Crucifixion and other scenes by Michael Pacher. Though only partially conserved and much restored, it is perhaps the best place in the Pustertal to gain an impression of how modern this artist’s style was, and must have seemed in his day.

Head of the Virgin, from the tabernacle in Monguelfo/Welsberg. Michael Pacher is not known to have gone to Florence, but he did go to Padua, where Donatello was at work. Looking at the face and hair of this Madonna, it is difficult to imagine that he did not at some point see the art of Botticelli or Ghirlandaio.
Detail from Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (1480s) in the Uffizi, Florence (photo: Wikimedia).

8. Brunico/Bruneck. Although Bruneck, where Michael Pacher lived and had his studio, has no works by the master, the building where he lived and worked, on the main street of the old town, is proudly emblazoned with his name.

Façade of the building where Michael Pacher had his studio, in Bruneck.
Blue Guide Trentino & the South Tyrol