A little learning is a dangerous things, said Alexander Pope famously. With due respect, I would reply, it can rarely be as dangerous as self-satisfied ignorance; especially ignorance not just of the what, of things, but of the how, of how to understand and learn about things.( Read more )

President Obama has made a unilateral decision to place the American Embassy to the Vatican in the same building as that to Italy, excusing that with expenditure and security considerations. This is my comment on it, as a historian who knows a little about diplomacy and its conventions, and an Italian who knows a lot about Italy and Rome ( Read more... )

The drift away from normative lifelong monogamous marriage seems to be as old as the human race. That seems to me to be what Our Lord meant when He said: "Moses told you so [allowing divorce] because of the hardness of your hearts, but from the beginning it was not so." Jesus had asked "What did Moses teach you [about marriage]?" And he had been ( Read more... )

125 years ago, Theodor Mommsen gave crushing evidence to prove that no piece of Roman history - meaning the traditional history, as told by Livy, Appian, Polybius and the other ancient historians - before 380 BC, and few before 275 BC, were reliable. Theodor Mommsen was not only one of the greatest historians of ancient Rome who ever lived, but one ( Read more... )

An excellent account of what actually happened two days ago in Rome, by an American visitor: http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/may/10051702.html . As I was in the city at the time (thouth I wasn't able to see the ceremony, being busy some twenty miles away), I ( Read more... )

I have taken these photos at various points in the last couple of years, but I never thought they were up to much. I am rather unhappy about publishing them when so many of my f-list are so astonishingly good. However!
( Read more... )

Quite apart from the appalling mutual hatred that has poisoned the air for years, and in which at this point it is useless to blame the original culprits - since the whole political spectrum has thrown itself in it with a will - there is the quite extraordinary self-importance, vanity, lack of sense of proportion, and preference for empty and ( Read more... )

...I can recommend you a place to eat. Of course, Rome is full of good restaurants - if you are lucky; and equally full of bad, rip-off places meant to exploit careless or ignorant foreign visitors. However, I can speak for the quality of this one. The name is Emilia Romana, and as the name suggests, it is untypical of Italian restaurants in ( Read more... )

I recently spent a couple of days in Rome on business. I mostly live and work in London, but I am involved in a company in Rome and from time to time I have to make brief dashes south. On this occasion, however, I was struck by a difference in mood, in the quality of activity and even attitude, between London and Rome - or rather, Italy. Rome is ( Read more... )

...they say that you know that you are a Roman when you find yourself saying: "Most of the time, this town drives me crazy. But every now and then it just stops my heart how beautiful she is."

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Roma capoccia

by Antonello Venditti

Quanto sei bella Roma quann'e' sera
How beautiful you are, Rome, in the eveningquanno la luna se specchia ( Read more... )