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The Florentine
Harry Cochrane is a jobbing man of letters from Northumberland. When he’s not penning his own poetry, Harry is likely reviewing other people’s for the Times Literary Supplement, or commenting on opera as The Florentine’s resident reviewer. With his brother George, he runs Bookstalling, a blog devoted to careful reading.
I was at a birthday party when the news came through. Italy was under lockdown. It was 11pm or so. Buoyed by other people’s wine and other people’s cigarette fumes—I ...
When people speak of the British Romantic poets who made a home of Tuscany, the name of Leigh Hunt is often neglected. The Italian stories of Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley ...
Good Friday, 1300. Dante wakes up in the middle of a dark wood, and is found by the Roman poet Virgil, who has been tasked with showing him what happens ...
Think back to Dante’s lifetime (1265–1321) and count the number of foodstuffs that were unknown to him or his Italy: potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate and maize, to name but a few. ...
Say “Florence train station” and you mean Santa Maria Novella, and for the vast majority of tourists this thronging, thriving terminus might as well be the city’s only. It makes ...
Until January 5, Maggio Musicale Fiorentino stages Bruno Ravella’s and João Carvalho Aboim’s production of Puccini’s classic Christmas opera, a story of love, hunger and roofs-over-heads in fin-de-siècle Paris. Peopled ...
Late October saw the official opening of the new Mercato delle Pulci, or flea market, in largo Annigoni. Nearly four years have passed since the stalls were moved from piazza ...
The music critic Edward Joseph Dent did not think the one-act opera a successful genre. He recognised only two famous and successful examples, Pagliacci and Cavalleria Rusticana, and even they ...
It was too good to be true. “I have a friend who’s a winemaker,” said Ambrogio, my Italian literature teacher, “and he’s suggested that I bring some students out there ...
The Bigallo museum and loggia are to be restored thanks to the Florence-based advertising agency Real Media, who will cover the total cost of just over one million euro.
On May 22 in Milan, Justice Paola Barbara Folci ruled that a child will be allowed to keep her name: Blue. This was by no means a foregone conclusion.
The initiative is in response to a law requiring artworks to be included in public buildings.
Children will receive breakfast, toys, a little rucksack and a carton of milk.
It was just in front of Nicodemus – a self-portrait from Michelangelo say art historians – and Christ below, wasted with the effort to redeem us that the text pressed ...
The ciborium was commissioned by Piero de' Medici and designed by Michelozzo.
The sculpture will be displayed until September 23, sharing a room with Michelangelo's Bandini Pietà.
Renovation is underway at Villa il Ventaglio park, in the upper Le Cure neighbourhood in Florence, with reopening slated for late spring.
Twenty Renaissance tapestries, depicting the Parables of Joseph, are returning to the Palazzo Vecchio after an agreement signed on Monday between Mayor of Florence Dario Nardella and President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella.
This spring you can follow the flowering of the wisteria at Villa Bardini by webcam if you can’t make it there in person (or you’re feeling too lazy to clamber up the hill).
An image of my lady lives insideThe church of San Michele, where her face,Her kindness and her honesty provideAsylum seekers with a moment’s grace.Thus she, when people kneedrop and draw ...
Enter, feigning nonchalance, the French tour group to hear Dominum Jesum Christum escape the newly christened sound system. They amassed like it was 1034. Electric candles. My eyes swept the ...
For most of the Divine Comedy, the pilgrim Dante trots after the Roman poet Virgil, who solemnly responds to his wide-eyed questioning. A similar dynamic was at work when I ...
