Italy
Marina Vaizey
Are you a fan of oysters or Marmite? Mary Beard is not to everybody’s taste, but love her or loathe her she is not only a distinguished academic but a ubiquitous writer and presenter of classical histories, connected travels, and ruminations on societal problems. She is enthusiastic, staggeringly energetic, erudite, profoundly knowledgable, the antithesis of fashionable in both opinion and appearance.Surprisingly, this survey (on BBC Two) of representations of the nude in Western art was unusually bland, at times banal, even though our presenter obviously set out to be provoking. There are a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A Fistful of Dynamite and Once Upon a Time in America are Sergio Leone’s films with the most explicit political underpinning. Indeed, given recent events, A Fistful of Dynamite is a thoroughly pertinent film, asking how we might achieve social change when the only human resource to hand is venal and self-serving. On the other hand, the conclusion offered by James Coburn’s world-weary - but still driven - IRA man on the run in Mexico veers towards anarchic nihilism: “I used to believe in many things – all of it! – but now I believe only in dynamite.”Also known as Duck, You Sucker, a Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In September 1944, a heavily pregnant Resistance activist in the north of German-occupied Italy was arrested on a visit to Milan. Lisetta Giua, a law student and fiancée of the Jewish anti-Fascist chief Vittorio Foa, worked as one of hundreds of women staffette: vital underground operatives whose roles might stretch from courier and spy to liaison officer and saboteur. Lisetta, captured while away from her home in Turin, soon found herself in Milan’s notorious Villa Triste – a torture centre where a half-German Fascist degenerate named Pietro Koch practised almost indescribable “scientific” Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Botticelli is a household name, but who knows the true story behind his most famous painting? The painter's 1480s masterpiece, The Birth of Venus, is one of the most striking images of Renaissance Florence – and has achieved iconic status. Because it has been minutely dissected by generations of art historians, it takes a bold playwright to smash through the scholarship and give a memorably fresh, in not necessarily accurate, account of its commissioning. Enter Jordan Tannahill, the Canadian polymath whose work spans theatre, film, dance, novels and everything else. And he's still only 31. Read more ...
India Lewis
A Month in Siena is a sweet, short mediation on art, grief, and life. Ostensibly describing the time and space of its title, Matar touches on vanishings and lacunae in his past. Early on, he links the disappearance of his father in Cairo in 1990 to his interest in art: “He was imprisoned and gradually, like salt dissolving in water, was made to vanish. It was shortly after this that, for reasons that still remain unclear to me now, I began to visit the National Gallery in London.” Art and Siena itself gave himself space in which to exist beyond his own troubles.Matar describes how the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
You seldom expect to feel the breath of apocalypse and the terror of the grave amid the modestly rationalist architecture and passion-killer acoustics of the Royal Festival Hall. In fact, before Edward Gardner and the London Philharmonic Orchestra set to work on the Verdi Requiem, I wondered whether – on a gloomy, rain-swept autumn night – any echoey, cobwebby, run-down Victorian church in south London might have suited the spirit of the piece better than this antiseptically clean, well-lighted place. By the time, though, that a lighting malfunction in the gantries above made the stage Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
July in Tuscany and the heat is intense. Oak-forested hills offer tempting shade; pale dust flies from the roads; in the houses curtains are drawn against the ferocious sun and around irrigated gardens the mosquitos are growing plump. If you love Italian sunshine, food, wine and chamber music, this is your ideal festival, as long as you pack some citronella. Its name: Incontri in Terra di Siena. The background to the event is both unusual and inspiring. In the 1920s the writer Iris Origo and her husband Antonio set up home in a sprawling villa, La Foce, overlooking the Val d’Orcia ( Read more ...
Liz Thomson
There is a video, part of Greenpeace’s laudable Save The Arctic Campaign, in which Ludovico Einaudi sits at a Steinway atop a small ice flow performing his Elegy for the Arctic. As he plays a descending scale, the camera pans slightly to the right just in time to see a chunk of glacier break away and crash into the sea. Perfect timing! The pianist-composer presumably needed to quickly warm up his hands after his performance, which was observed by a seal, and it would be interesting to know what treatment the piano required – humidity is the everyday enemy of pianos but they do not take kindly Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
While a spot of home cooking can be a relaxing experience with a nice meal at the end of it, signing up to this culinary campaign with Michelin-starred mega-chef Jason Atherton is like being sent off to join the Foreign Legion. The plan is that Atherton and his trusted advisers Dale and Andy pick a squad of young, untried chefs from around Britain, then take them to top restaurants across Europe to see if they can beat the locals at their own recipes.They began in Puglia, southern Italy, at a restaurant called Osteria Origano, where they were greeted by the cheerful proprietor Alfredo and his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
One of the most memorable moments in Ron Howard’s documentary about Luciano Pavarotti is one of its earliest scenes. It’s a chunk of amateur video shot when Pavarotti visited the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus, a splendid Belle Epoque structure in the midst of the Amazonian jungle. In front of a handful of curious onlookers, Pavarotti climbs onstage and sings Tosti’s "A Vuchella", a favourite piece of his idol Enrico Caruso, who also used to sing at the Teatro Amazonas. It’s a lovely tribute from one superstar-tenor to another from an earlier generation.Modern technology and media meant Pavarotti Read more ...
David Nice
Two years ago Ermanna Montanari and Marco Martinelli, the visionary partners who have powered Ravenna's revolutionary Teatro delle Albe since 1986, led local people and international visitors down through the circles of Dante's Inferno. In 2021, the 700th anniversary of the greatest Italian poet's birth, they will take us into the presence of God. This year’s Ravenna Festival special dealt with the most human of the three canticles, the central meditation and dramatisation of sharing and getting the chance to begin again. It concludes with the earthly paradise where Dante is reunited with Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
On paper, this might seem like a revival too far, a production clearly intended as a vehicle for world-class singers being tacked on the end of the Covent Garden season, and without any big names in sight. But it turns out that Laurent Pelly’s staging, now in its fourth London return, has enough charm and substance to justify an outing with lesser names. And the revival cast is certainly competent, with no obvious weak links, and a sense of ensemble that keeps the hackneyed plot ticking over and the light comedy just on the right side of cliché.The production was designed for big stages – it Read more ...