Month: October 2017

Educating Christopher

Now that the clocks have gone back the winter film-on-a-sofa season is officially open. I rummaged around and realise that I have far too many  DVDs.

Pines & Needles

There is more to Rome than the churches that have featured here recently and not all of it is good.

Baroque around the Clock

We left J L-M’s exploration of Roman architecture at the Tempietto on Thursday. He chooses one more example of the Renaissance style: Palazzo Pietro Massimo alle Colonne.

The Last Stuarts

No Plan Like Yours To Study History Wisely is a useful mnemonic: Norman, Plantagenet, Lancaster, York, Tudor, Stuart, Hanover and Windsor.

Tosca

It’s not easy to date the opera house in Rome because it has twice been altered. Most recently the facade (not my greatest picture) was re-done in 1958. Prior to that, in the 1920s, there was a substantial make-over.

Romanesque & Renaissance

James Lees-Milne fast-forwards from Early Christian (Santa Constanza) to Romanesque; Santa Maria in Cosmedin. It was built in 782 on the site of a granary and grain market. Astonishingly the church has two reminders of its mercantile past: some of the columns are incorporated into the walls and two grain measures are preserved in niches… Continue reading Romanesque & Renaissance

Two Churches and some other stuff

J L-M’s Roman Mornings kicks off with an ancient Roman masterpiece, the Pantheon. If you have been to Rome you will have seen it so we don’t need to revisit it this trip.

Roman Holiday

The picture is a detail of Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino by Turner. He had been painting Rome for twenty years and this was his last picture of the city, completed in 1839. It was sold by Sotheby’s in 2010 for £29.7 million – a record for a Turner – to the Getty Museum. But… Continue reading Roman Holiday

Lucia

On Wednesday I went to a Friends of Fulham Opera gig in their unprepossessing home at St John’s Church – they have the builders in.

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The Three Rs

Reading, Rithmetic and Rock ‘n Roll – that’s the three Rs you learn at a progressive school in New York City, right? Wrong, that’s what you learn at Ireland’s last boarding prep school, Headfort in Co Meath.