Italy

Tall tales of Pompeii’s lost Roman lives form part of a long history of sensationalism. 

A new cultural history of Sicily, the key to the Mediterranean.

The Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire by Dominique Kirchner Reill explores the complexity of ‘Europe’s smallest successor state’.

In October 1943 the Allies liberated the area around the infamous volcano in the Bay of Naples. Its sudden eruption in March 1944, as war in Italy raged, stretched the resources of the combined services to the limit. What followed was an exemplary emergency operation.

Venice developed the most sophisticated intelligence network in Renaissance Europe, securing it from enemies within and without.

Love and possession during the Italian economic miracle.

The arrival of Napoleon’s troops in Venice in 1797 instigated one of the biggest plunders in the history of art. 

Never fully exorcised, the memory of Italy’s fascist past is fading.

The War Office’s map of cultural treasures in Rome, 1942.

Salò was Mussolini’s German-backed experiment in ‘real Fascism’ and fine living. Italians find it hard to come to terms with its legacy.