Rome and Lazio

  • Electing a new Pope: The Conclave

    Electing a new Pope: The Conclave

    Farewell and Rest In Peace to His Holiness Pope Francis, who died on 21st April 2025. The task now must be to find a successor. But how is it done? Blue Guide Rome (12th edition) describes the process as follows: Popes are elected by the cardinals, who comprise the so-called…

  • 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 as basolato. Today only a very few segments of such paving survive: along…

  • 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 ») sees our Blue Guide Rome, the best guide book to Rome, at the detailed and scholarly end of the…

  • 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…

  • Cem: The Twenty-day Sultan

    Cem: The Twenty-day Sultan

    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…

  • The Colour Purple

    The Colour Purple

    Empires that tend to be large, and try to unite peoples of disparate ethnicities under one ruler, certainly have a communication problem, more so in antiquity when getting ideas around was a much slower business. The power, the benevolence—indeed the very existence of a new emperor had to be drummed…

  • Keats and Rome: 200 years

    Keats and Rome: 200 years

    It is exactly 200 years since the poet Keats died. This article looks back on Keats and Rome. where and how did keats die? The poet John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome, in February 1821: two hundred years ago exactly. The apartment on the Spanish Steps that he rented…

  • New Blue Guide Rome reviewed

    “Gripping” and “delicious”: Harry Mount reviews The Blue Guide’s latest offering for Chapter House in the Catholic Herald. Ever since 1918, Blue Guides have been the best guides to European cities. No other guide has the sheer quantity of facts. For people who want to know why a building is where it…

  • Artemisia Gentileschi

    Artemisia Gentileschi

    This month, a new exhibition devoted to the art of the 17th-century painter Artemisia Gentileschi was to have opened at the National Gallery in London. Blue Guides was to have visited the exhibition and posted a review of it. That will now have to wait. Artemisia Gentileschi features in many…

  • Letter from Italy

    Virtual museum tours: some of the best For professional guides in Italy this is, of course, a period in which they suddenly find themselves without work. However many museums, while closed to the public, have made it possible not only to consult their catalogues or browse the collections online but…

  • SPQR and expressions of Rome

    SPQR and expressions of Rome

    As work for the 12th edition of Blue Guide Rome goes full steam ahead, we found ourselves coming up time and time again against the letters SPQR, reproduced all over the city, on lamp posts, manhole covers and public fountains, not to mention in ancient inscriptions. Here is a little…

  • A Time in Rome

    A Time in Rome

    Elizabeth Bowen: A Time in Rome. Reviewed by Charles Freeman. Originally published by Longman (1960). Reissued by Vintage Books. I wonder how much the novelist Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973) is read now? Bowen was of Anglo-Irish stock, a fine but delicate writer acutely attuned to the cadences and concealments of an…

  • Season’s Greetings

    Season’s Greetings

    This Advent we’ve chosen twelve different depictions of the Nativity, which we have discovered in the course of Blue Guides research trips around Italy—plus one final one from our latest title in preparation. 1. The ox and the ass and the baby in the manger from an early Christian sarcophagus…

  • Guide to the Via Francigena

    Guide to the Via Francigena

    The Via Francigena in Northern Lazio. Map and guide in English from the Touring Club Italiano, Itineraries on Foot series. Reviewed by Charles Freeman. The Via Francigena, the road of the Franks towards Rome, has been known for over a thousand years since Sigeric, the Archbishop of Canterbury, decided to…

  • Comments on Blue Guide Rome

    Comments on Blue Guide Rome

    The most comprehensive guide to the eternal city, repository of many of the most famous works of art in the world. View the book’s contents, index and some sample pages, and buy securely from blueguides.com here »

  • The Roman Forum Reconstructed

    The Roman Forum Reconstructed

    Book review of Gilbert J. Gorski and James E. Packer, The Roman Forum: A Reconstruction and Architectural Guide, Cambridge University Press, 2015. It needed quite a lot of collaboration between kind friends before I could own a copy of this book. It is a lavishly detailed and illustrated study of…

  • Bernini’s Beloved

    Bernini’s Beloved

    With the new edition of the Blue Guide to Rome just off to press, it is time to catch up on new books to accompany it. I recently reviewed Richard Bosworth’s excellent Whispering City, Rome and its Histories for this site and now there are two more studies that have…

  • The Imperial Ramp in the Roman Forum

    The Imperial Ramp in the Roman Forum

    In 1900 the archaeologist Giacomo Boni uncovered some intriguing remains in the Roman Forum: those of the so-called ‘Oratory of the Forty Martyrs’ and, leading off it, a covered brick ramp. These remains are usually closed to the public, and work on them is ongoing, but at the moment (until…

  • Pilgrimage pathways to and from Rome

    Pilgrimage pathways to and from Rome

    It is always good to meet up with old students from the International Baccalaureate history classes I taught in the 1980s and even more special if they have followed a path that interests me. So it was a real pleasure to meet with Simone Quilici, an architect who now teaches…

  • Frescoes in a convent of a closed order of nuns

    Frescoes in a convent of a closed order of nuns

    In the lovely convent of the Santi Quattro Coronati, in a quiet corner of Rome reached on foot in little more than ten minutes from the Colosseum, frescoes were discovered in a Gothic hall in 1995. Since this was in an area belonging to a closed order of Augustinian nuns…

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