Playing Saints
Unmasking an audacious saintly fraud in early modern Naples.
Italy
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’.
Escape from Vesuvius
In October 1943 the Allies liberated the area around the infamous volcano in the Bay of Naples. Its sudden eruption in March 1944, as war in Italy raged, stretched the resources of the combined services to the limit. What followed was an exemplary emergency operation.
On Her Most Serene Republic’s Secret Service
Venice developed the most sophisticated intelligence network in Renaissance Europe, securing it from enemies within and without.
That Terrible Thing Called Jealousy
Love and possession during the Italian economic miracle.
How Venice Lost Its Art
The arrival of Napoleon’s troops in Venice in 1797 instigated one of the biggest plunders in the history of art.
Forgetting Fascism
Never fully exorcised, the memory of Italy’s fascist past is fading.