Italy

F.M. Godfrey sifts through diverse depictions of Italy's Renaissance family.

Elizabeth Wiskemann writes that Bentinck’s achievements as British Minister in Sicily, and inspirer of Italian resistance to Napoleon in the years 1811-1814, suggest interesting parallels with recent conflicts.

Sir Kenneth Clark discovers echoes of both ancient and modern in a true Renaissance man.

The Italian prince who boasted that the Pope was his chaplain, and the Emperor his condottiere, ended his days in 1508, forgotten in a foreign prison

Jane Everson highlights the social networks of the Italian academies, the first of their kind in Renaissance Europe.

Christopher Winn recalls the death of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and other mysterious drownings.

Ann Natanson visits an exhibition in Rome that highlights the papacy’s interaction with major figures of European history.

During the Napoleonic Wars Britain occupied the strategically important island of Sicily. Most of its inhabitants, tired of long-distance Bourbon rule, welcomed the arrangement, but their monarch did not, as Graham Darby explains.

During the Second World War many cities were bombed from the air. However Rome, the centre of Christendom but also the capital of Fascism, was left untouched by the Allies until July 1943. Claudia Baldoli looks at the reasons why and examines the views of Italians towards the city.

Alex Keller tells the story of how an unlikely friendship between a Dutch doctor and a young Italian nobleman led to the establishment of the first scientific society, which lent crucial support to the radical ideas of Galileo Galilei.