David Reubeni and Africa’s Lost Tribe of Israel
A Black Jewish man arrived in Venice with stories of a lost Jewish kingdom that could save Europe’s Jews. Why was he believed?
Italy
‘Edda Mussolini’ by Caroline Moorehead review
Edda Mussolini: The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe by Caroline Moorehead explores how Italy became enslaved by ‘a corrupt gang of warmongers’.
Shut Up and Eat!
Does silence endure in Italy over Mussolini’s murderous regime?
A Century of Fascism
Fascism would plague the 20th century, but when Benito Mussolini seized power in October 1922 few could agree on exactly what it was.
Rome, Zombie City
Surveying history’s various attempts to rehydrate Rome’s ‘desiccated corpse’.
Playing Saints
Unmasking an audacious saintly fraud in early modern Naples.
Dante is Exiled from Florence
Sentenced on charges of corruption on 27 January 1302, Dante Alighieri never saw the city again.
Life Among the Ruins of Pompeii
Tall tales of Pompeii’s lost Roman lives form part of a long history of sensationalism.
Sun and Stone
A new cultural history of Sicily, the key to the Mediterranean.
‘The Fiume Crisis’ by Dominique Kirchner Reill review
The Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire by Dominique Kirchner Reill explores the complexity of ‘Europe’s smallest successor state’.