Martin

June 2013 Like other Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century, the poet John Keats, who died in Rome in 1821, was obsessed by the interplay between the world of the imagination and the concrete world of experience. In his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ one of the scenes he describes is a wild dance, […]

February 2013 Sometime about thirty-five years ago a friend gave us a poster of an exhibition in Bologna devoted to the etchings — Le Acqueforti — of Giorgio Morandi. It depicts a disparate group of bottles, vases and jugs lined up on a table. They look at the same time solid and fragile, distinct and

October 2012 As today’s traveller sets off for Italy—or anywhere else—he is likely to take with him a guide book. Whatever his choice, its presence in his luggage can be traced back to the work of one woman—Mariana Starke—who in 1802 published Travels in Italy between the years 1792 and 1798. Over the subsequent thirty-five

December 2011 Learn Italy holidays are nearly always based in cities, but for many north Europeans contact with Italy consists mainly of a stay by the beach. At the end of August huge processions of overloaded family cars from Denmark, Holland, and Belgium toil northwards. What fascinates me is how strange it is that, in

August 2011 I am just back from a week at the Italian seaside with my grandchildren. This is the fourth year we have stayed in self-catering apartments at a small resort on the coast of the Maremma, Tuscany’s malaria-ridden marsh, for centuries known to be ruinously inhospitable: Dante’s Pia Tolomei laments the area’s destructive power

March 2011 In her book about books, Howard’s End is on the Landing, the novelist Susan Hill starts a section with the following comment: ‘Memory is like a long dark street, illuminated at intervals in a light so bright that it shows up every detail. And then one plunges into the dark stretch again.’    

January 2011 This is the time of year when we are exhorted to dream of summer holidays by the sea. Can anything offer a clearer view of the difference between the Italian and the British frame of mind than the Italian idea of a beautiful beach? Of course, one should not make generalisations about the

For me many good things have resulted from Learn Italy. First of all I’ve listened to some very clever and knowledgeable tutors, and from them I’ve absorbed the rudiments of art history, at least as it relates to the Italian paintings and sculpture of the middle ages and the Renaissance. Bits and pieces of formerly

As a student I visited Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel in Padua and in my ignorance I was pretty much unimpressed: all those awkward figures with their tent-like garb and narrow eyes, doing inscrutable biblical things. Coming up in October is the third Learn Italy study holiday in Padua – and some forty-five years later how differently

In 1223 St Francis went to Rome to seek approval from Honorius III for his new order of friars; he also asked the Pope’s permission to create a new and special kind of church service. He had recently returned from the Holy Land where he had been profoundly impressed by his visit to Bethlehem. His