Florence

Post image for Boccaccio and Dante: The miracle of free speech

One of the many wonderful aspects of Boccaccio’s genius is his relationship with Dante. Bocaccio greatly admired Dante: he knew him, he wrote a biography of him, and he lectured on The Divine Comedy – becoming in the process the first person in the late Middle Ages to lecture formally on a contemporary author.

The Presence and the Absence of Rome

Thumbnail image for The Presence and the Absence of Rome

The Presence and the Absence of Rome
My visit to Rome of October 2016, and this current one, seem to have completely reversed the negative impression I developed of the city in 1982, when I first visited it.

Read the full article →