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Fancy pants: skirmishes with the fashion police in 16th-century Italy
On 15 September 1595, a Genoese man-about-town called Salvagio de Aste was spotted breaking the law. The record in Genoa's state archives describes with remarkable precision what Salvagio was wearing...
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Arms and the man: how a culture of warfare shapes masculinity
Brawls tend to take a familiar pattern. Verbal insults are traded and physical violence erupts. Something like this happened in the graveyard of a church in Florence on 30 March 1561. It began when a...
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Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker comes to Cambridge
Rosi’s most recent documentary, 2016’s Fire at Sea, was an uncompromising look at the everyday life of six locals on the Italian island of Lampedusa, the first port of call for the hundreds of...
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Animating objects: what material culture can tell us about domestic devotions
It’s an enduring irony of history that the most commonplace objects from the past are those least represented in today’s museum collections. The more precious and expensive an object, the more likely...
View ArticleDigital resurrection: bringing one of Italy's most important lost churches...
Art historians have created a new app which allows users to roam around one of Florence’s oldest and most important churches, San Pier Maggiore, 240 years after it was demolished.
View ArticleAstrolabe reveals Islamic–Jewish scientific exchange
The identification of an eleventh-century Islamic astrolabe bearing both Arabic and Hebrew inscriptions makes it one of the oldest examples ever discovered and one of only a handful known in the world....
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Bella Italia: an Englishman’s adventures abroad
Samuel Butler (1835-1902) was a man who defied easy categorisation: he has been most commonly described as a polymath, maverick and iconoclast. He was a scholar and writer, artist and photographer,...
View Article‘Altar tent’ discovery puts Islamic art at the heart of medieval Christianity
A 13th-century fresco rediscovered in Ferrara provides unique evidence of medieval churches using Islamic tents to conceal their high altars. Dr Federica Gigante believes the 700-year-old fresco could...
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