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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 father’s “ancestry test revealed a staggering 97.5 percent near to the…
The drama of Sicily’s history – 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 – risks overshadowing appreciation of the peace, prosperity…
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…
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…
“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…
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…
In his famous Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari describes the sculptor Alessandro Vittoria as ‘most rare in marble portraits’. From humble beginnings, Vittoria (1525–1608) went on to become one of the greatest Italian sculptors of his age. who was alessandro vittoria? Vittoria was born in Trento, a city in…
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 Molnár, now translated into English for the first time. Molnár was a famous pre-war dramatist whose many plays included one on which the Rodgers…
The life of Josef Mayr-Nusser (1910-1945) is a chapter in the complicated story of South Tyrol. 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 – literally…
(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…
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 – in the person of the (Austrian) counts of Tyrol – across the Alps to the north than to the papacy and principalities and…
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), the great lexicographer, journalist, conversationalist, inveterate London pub-goer and general good egg, famously remarked that if a man is tired of London, he is tired of life. Another quote of his on London is less well known: “Sir, if you wish to have a just notion of…
Ross King’s ‘The Bookseller of Florence’, reviewed here as work begins on a new edition of Blue Guide Florence. Four hundred and eighty pages might seem a lot to fill, when one chooses as one’s subject a man about whom next to nothing is known. But Ross King, in this…
The Book of Revelation, the last book in the New Testament, is traditionally held to have been written by St John (variously the apostle, the divine, the evangelist) while exiled to the island of Patmos from Ephesus on the mainland. It is prefaced by letters to seven churches* on the…
Paola Pugsley explores the history of this now established custom When faced with a crisis like the death of a much beloved sovereign, human beings tend to seek comfort in ritual. One of these is the tradition of the lying in state, when the deceased is laid in his or…
The colour always favoured by Eleanor was red, and the entrance to this exhibition devoted to her life and patronage, which has just closed at Palazzo Pitti, was hung with a sumptuous crimson curtain. Beyond it, the visitor was at once confronted by what at first glance seemed to be…
Italy’s best maestro, the artist Pietro Vannucci, is always known as Perugino, after Perugia, the chief city of his native Umbria. He was born c. 1450 and a superb exhibition, celebrating the 500th anniversary of his death in 1523, went on show at the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria in 2023. Paintings…
Blue Guide Venice (ed. 10) is now in full colour, the first of a new look for the core series. Since 1918, when the first Blue Guide appeared, the books have been through a number of redesigns but the quality of the text remains completely unchanged. The detailed focus on…
The UK-based Venice in Peril Fund is one of several international charities devoted to safeguarding the future of this unique city. Guy Elliott, Chairman of Venice in Peril, outlines some of its recent projects. The Venice in Peril Fund was founded in 1971, succeeding an earlier fund instituted in 1966…
To be a sultan, even for less than a month, is an achievement. Cem, the twenty-day sultan paid for it for the rest of his life. Here is his story. Cem’s birth and childhood Born the third son of Fatih Sultan Mehmet (the conqueror of Constantinople), Cem could style himself…
