Italy

Ancient Roman election advice suggested some uncomfortable campaign strategies. Evidence from Pompeii suggests many candidates followed it enthusiastically.

On 27 September 1130 a Norman usurper gained a crown from a desperate pope and the Kingdom of Sicily was born.

The Catholic Church’s ban on wigs in the 18th century was as revealing of attitudes towards disability as vanity and sanctity.

In Catherine de’ Medici: The Life and Times of the Serpent Queen, Mary Hollingsworth helps the pragmatic queen escape her ‘black legend’.

A community of Ethiopian monk-scholars in Renaissance Rome brought their learning, language and liturgy into the heart of the Roman Church.

Under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, public ceremonies honouring the eternal life of Italy’s far-right dead have grown larger. 

Once Rome’s main artery south, for centuries the Via Appia has been taken as proof of Roman greatness.

In the 17th century news spread that the Jewish messiah had finally arrived. Within a year he had converted to Islam. Who was he, and what had happened?

On 7 February 1497, the Piagnoni of Florence set sin ablaze in the original ‘bonfire of the vanities’

Early Christianity brought new opportunities for Roman and Byzantine women – it also brought new reasons to vilify them.