As the birthplace of Fascism – and both ally and victim of Nazi Germany – Italy presents a particularly complex case study of how countries came to terms with the catastrophic events of the Holocaust after the war. Robert Gordon’s new book charts the cultural fault lines that emerged as it slowly learned to acknowledge its part in the tragedy.
An ancient Italian town whose remains are buried beneath the earth has been mapped by a team of researchers, revealing evidence of a bustling social and economic settlement 1,500 years ago.
Sunshine equals ice cream. Food historians have long portrayed ice cream as a luxury product confined to the elite until freezing technology brought it to the masses. Now research by Cambridge University historian Dr Melissa Calaresu suggests that in Italy iced products were enjoyed by rich and poor alike as long as 300 years ago.
Why did Renaissance shoppers fill their baskets with rosaries, crucifixes, Christ-dolls and devotional paintings? A new study by historian Dr Mary Laven investigates the significance of Catholic clutter, as she explains.
Renaissance scholar Dr Abigail Brundin, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Italian, has been awarded an ‘I Tatti’ Fellowship from Harvard University, enabling her to spend time exploring 16th- and 17th-century Florentine archives. She hopes to shed light on a turbulent period in Italy’s literary history, when poets and writers laboured in the face of religious censorship.
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