The 2025 Jubilee Year has come to a close, and the statistics are in: over 33 million pilgrims made their way to the Eternal City during that time. For the story on Vatican News, see here. During our research visits for the new, 13th edition, of Blue Guide Rome, we…
White smoke above the Vatican recently announced the election of Chicago-born Robert Prevost as pope, the 266th incumbent of the Chair of St Peter. He has taken the regnal name of Leo XIV. The world waits to see what kind of a pontiff he will be. Meanwhile, we look at…
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…
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…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 »
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…
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…
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…
