Rome
william.ward
Applauded by the audiences at Cannes last year, where it was the only Italian film in the competition, and nominated for a Palme d’Or, awarded four prizes at the Chicago International Film Festival, and favourably received at home, Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere is now being released in the UK, increasingly a rare event for films of Italian origin.And not without good reason: the flair of originality combined with an attention to the quality of the dialogue, the acting and the entire editing process is a skill set not often encountered these last 30 years in Italian cinema. It is often said Read more ...
andrew.hammond
At the Vatican, recently, the Pope attended a concert in his honour in the Sala Clementina. This is the great double-height room which stands at the entrance to the private papal apartments; it is where Pope John Paul II’s body lay in state almost exactly five years ago. I was one of about 150 guests, at least a third of whom were cardinals, bishops and other senior clerical figures. As we arrived there was the most ornate and intricate gavotte of seat-taking, lasting a good 40 minutes.While this eddied around us, one of the English critics and I (fortified by a clerical collar, not that that Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You always know where you are with Griff. You may be up a mountain or on a river or visiting any of the various topographical options the various TV companies deem it essential to send him. You may be doing up his house with him in Wales, where he freely admits he doesn’t really come from, or nosing round London, Paris or New York, as he did in the last series of Greatest Cities of the World. You may, as with the new series, be in Rome. But in the end, you never leave the Land of Griff.In the Land of Griff, all is bafflement, muddlement and of course chortlement. The lingua franca understood Read more ...
william.ward
The latest subject in the BBC Four series of composer portraits by Christopher Nupen is Ottorino Respighi. One of the most unfairly neglected major composers of the first half of the 20th century, his reputation has suffered less from not being considered at all, but for having been confined to his trilogy of tone poems that evoke respectively the Fountains, the Pines and the Traditional Festivals of Rome. Nupen's film, made in 1982, puts a welcome case for his more challenging but less well-known work.Composed over the course of 12 tumultuous years – from Italy’s disastrous participation in Read more ...
james.woodall
Antonio Pappano (b. 1959) enjoys the best of two opulent worlds. At the Royal Opera House in London (now his home city), he's well stuck in to his seventh season as music director, basking in popularity and plaudits previous incumbents could only have dreamt of. In Rome, he's director of the Orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, a post he took up in 2005. The orchestra, over 100 years old - the Accademia itself goes back to the 1580s - is based at an extraordinary Renzo Piano-designed structure, called the Auditorium Parco della Musica, a couple of kilometres north of the Read more ...
theartsdesk
The morning after the day before has dawned. If you're not inclined to join the shopping queues, theartsdesk is happy to suggest alternatives. Our writers recommend all sorts of cultural things you could get up to in the next week.See Wicked. This smart, feisty show is not just for teenage girls (though heaven knows they’ll thank you for taking them) but will tweak at the imagination and tickle the funny bone of anyone who’s ever contemplated the back-story of The Wizard of Oz. Stephen Schwartz’s zingy score is one of the best to have come out of Broadway in the last decade and you really Read more ...
william.ward
The rapturous reception for Zaha Hadid’s groundbreaking, breathtaking new confection in Rome, Il Museo dell’Arte del XXIesimo Secolo - the 21st-Century Art Museum (MAXXI for short) - has reopened for the umpteenth time one of Italy’s favourite cultural debates. Why the hell does it take so long to build anything decent in our capital city, especially when we have one of the finest traditions - if not the finest - in architecture, civil engineering and construction, of anywhere in the whole world?Well, “Rome,” as the old expression counselling patience in all things has it, “wasn’t built in a Read more ...
william.ward
“Guarda, è come se fosse morta la regina Elisabetta, sai?” I didn’t really need the comparison with the hypothetical demise of our own beloved monarch to be spelled out for me by my partner, a somewhat reserved professor of Paediatric Neurology at one of Rome’s leading hospitals, in order to drive home the deep shock engendered by the sudden death of Italy’s best-loved veteran TV compère on the collective psyche of a nation.True to his quietly heroic and endlessly energetic persona, Mike Bongiorno did not die what our Anglo-Saxon warrior forebears used to call a “cow’s death” – ie in bed, or Read more ...