NB! · Archaeology · Art · Monarchies · Museums · Rome · Humour
Overdosing on fillers: when the Emperor Trajan cannot be told from the Emperor Vespasian. The large marble so-called Bosham Head of AD 121 was found in West Sussex in 1800 and is on display at the Chichester District Museum.
Faith · Pop Culture · Rome · Humour
On Friday a bishop in mischievous socks bearing the image of a kissing, waving Pope was spotted at Mass in Saint Peter's Basilica. The Catholic community is seething like holy water in films about exorcism: the jaunty bishop, whose name remains a mystery to many, is called an
Faith · Museums · Science · Rome
The Mother of All Churches, the Lateran Basilica in Rome, where the Pope celebrates Mass and sits enthroned, keeps a veritable collection of Christian relics. In a small museum, tucked away between the chapels, lies this fragment of the tunic of Saint Francis of Assisi, which is tied to one
Faith · Museums · Observations · Rome
In the cramped corridor of the Church of the Sacred Heart, exhibits testifying to the apparitions of souls in Purgatory are hung right on the walls. These are pages from the prayer books of nuns, bearing the fiery fingerprints of their sisters who appeared to those at prayer after death;
Faith · Museums · Observations · Rome
This tiny museum holds artefacts that point to the existence of a life after death: the traces of souls that have found their way into Purgatory. In the nineteenth century a chapel for prayers for the dead stood on this spot. After a fire there in 1897, a mark appeared
Faith · Observations · Heritage · Rome
Paid a visit to the Holy Infant in Santa Maria in Aracoeli. Touching pilgrims go on bringing their notes, petitions for wishes granted and for healing, to the copy of the original stolen in 1984, while the genuine Infant, carved from Gethsemane wood, is kept in a secret room in
Archaeology · Cinema · Mores · Rome
As for the leather jerkin in which Maximus the gladiator performs on the arena floor, this is yet another unpardonable stretch on the part of the film's makers: gladiators had no armour to speak of, for the most part they fought quite naked, and only in the rarest
Archaeology · Cinema · Rome
But then, the specialists already snort at this armour as it is, the so-called lorica musculata, that is, a two-plate cuirass fashioned in the shape of a male torso, with the detailed contours of a muscular chest at the front. Such armour was in use in the Roman
Art · Society · People · Rome
If you should ever find yourself in an unequal struggle with the hidebound notion that the history of world culture knows no great women creators, then remember, for instance, Lavinia Fontana, a Renaissance or, as she is sometimes called, early Baroque painter from Bologna. Fontana achieved the same successes as
Art · Museums · Observations · People · Rome
Statue of Pyrrhus (318-272 BC) in the Capitoline Museums, 1st century AD. Of course you remember the expression "Pyrrhic victory", but it is not the military past of this commander and ruler, so important to the history of Greece, that I wish to draw your attention to,
Heritage · Mores · Society · Rome
In the last two years alone, 40 cases of vandalism at the Colosseum have been recorded in Rome. And now, at last, the city authorities have updated the legislation governing public order in the capital, which has stood since 1946. The new rules cover both the assistance rendered by police
Architecture · Monarchies · Mores · Rome · Humour
At the entrance to the main building of the Villa Medici, which today houses the French Academy in Rome, stands a fountain of imposing size. The round basin was acquired by Cardinal Ferdinando de' Medici, who bought it in 1587 for 200 scudi from the monastery of San Salvatore