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Times
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
8 books that evoke the spirit of Rome
Pope Francis's funeral is a reminder of Rome's twin historic roles as imperial capital and the headquarters of the Roman Catholic church. Its combination of beauty, power and antiquity has inspired travelling writers from Goethe to Henry James, as well as Italian greats who called it home, such as Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante. Whether you're going to be in the front row at St Peter's this weekend or are just planning your next visit, this is what to read for a glimpse of life down the centuries in the Eternal City. While Robert Harris's Conclave (2016), recently filmed, captures the drama surrounding the election of a new pope, this historical novel — the first in a trilogy — is perhaps his masterpiece. Told by the secretary of Cicero (106-43BC), it charts the rise of the orator and statesman. The elements of a thriller are supplied by the political manoeuvrings and power games of allies and rivals such as Pompey and Julius Caesar, with Harris drawing directly from Cicero's speeches and contemporary sources to fashion a vivid mosaic of life in the last years of the Republic. Before Tom Holland's recent translation of Suetonius, the historian of the Caesars, the best-known version was by Robert Graves. It inspired him to write this gripping fictional memoir by the Emperor Claudius, who ruled from AD41-54. Dismissed because of his limp and stutter as no threat to more ambitious members of his family, Claudius is witness to the vices and (literal) backstabbing of the early Roman Empire until his survival instincts bring him the throne after Caligula's assassination. The novel (made into a celebrated TV series in 1976) is the template for every internecine power struggle saga from Dynasty to Succession. Benvenuto Cellini was one of the finest sculptors and goldsmiths of the late Renaissance, but he is now chiefly remembered for writing his era's liveliest autobiography, even though it wasn't published until the 18th century. The rumbustious Cellini takes us into Rome's inns and palaces, fights brawls and conjures up spirits in the ruins of the Colosseum as he mixes with cardinals, cardsharps and not a few women. His stories of his part in the sack of Rome in 1527 by troops of the Holy Roman Empire, or of his escape from prison after being accused of stealing the Pope's jewels, may be exaggerated, yet nothing betters his evocation of those who made the age. Rome was for centuries an essential stop on the Grand Tour, part of the education of well-born visitors such as the great chronicler of the Gilded Age, Edith Wharton. Although more associated with France, where she settled, the American author spent a lot of time in Italy. In this short story, a characteristic exploration of feminine social competitiveness, two friends, rich widows from New York, look out at the Forum as they recall the trip to the city that preceded their marriages. As ruthless as Roman senators, each thinks they have done better than the other. Wharton's laconic revelatory twist is as devastating as any in fiction. After the war Italy was transformed by an economic boom, which was captured by the films of the period. Italian directors such as Federico Fellini briefly turned Rome into the most glamorous city in Europe, teeming with foreign film stars — Roman Holiday and Cleopatra were made at the Cinecittà studios — as well as the paparazzi chasing shots of them. Shawn Levy's history of Hollywood-on-the-Tiber may be gossipy, but it also lifts the stage curtain: Marcello Mastroianni compared having to kiss the icy Anita Ekberg in the Trevi fountain to being rounded up by a Wehrmacht soldier. Carlo Emilio Gadda's novel is ostensibly a detective story. In 1927 Don Ciccio ('Fatso') is called to investigate the murder of a woman who happens to be a friend. Then more crimes begin happening in the building where she lived, and it becomes clear that everyone is implicated. Often compared to James Joyce's writing for its experimental wordplay, Via Merulana is Gadda's excoriating portrayal of a Rome where fascism flourished because too many did nothing. The Italian language's more florid tendencies are often tricky to convey into English that reads well — the translation by William Weaver (who also did Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose) is itself a work of literature. Robert Katz's cinematic style of writing — he also penned screenplays, such as that for the 1970s disaster film The Cassandra Crossing — led critics to underestimate his abilities as a historian. This is the most readable account of the Nazi occupation of Rome and the resistance to it — for instance by the Irish priest Hugh O'Flaherty, who has inspired Joseph O'Connor's recent thrillers. Partisans, spies, Jews on the run — they are all here. A new translation of arguably the greatest Italian novel depicting the time, Elsa Morante's History, is due from Penguin next year. Before he himself was known as a mould-breaking director, Pier Paolo Pasolini made his name as a poet and novelist, focusing in particular on the marginalised outsiders who were to become the subjects of his early films. Ragazzi di vita showed another Rome to that of the Dolce Vita, where its working-class youth had to hustle and scam to get by, living day to day and without care for morality. Pasolini's stories may be influenced by his Marxism and homosexuality, but the vigour and vision is universal.
Yahoo
04-04-2025
- Yahoo
Emu running loose in North County rescued
VISTA, Calif. (FOX 5/KUSI) — An injured emu was rescued Wednesday night in Vista. Reports of an emu running loose and wandering into a yard in the 600 block of Vale View Drive prompted San Diego Humane Society's officers to respond, the animal agency said in a news release Thursday. Humane Law Enforcement and its Emergency Response Team were able to take the emu to SDHS' Escondido campus. North County woman competes on dating show 'Farmer Wants a Wife' The emu had injuries to its neck and right wing, according to animal officials. 'To ensure a safe and comfortable recovery, the emu has been placed in a fully enclosed yard where our medical staff is closely monitoring and treating their wounds,' Nina Thompson with SDHS said. The animal shelter's staff temporarily named the emu Claudius, who is around three years old and will remain on a 72-hour stray hold while next steps are determined. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Guardian
25-03-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Iron age hoard found in North Yorkshire could change Britain's history
One of the biggest and most important iron age hoards ever found in the UK has been revealed, potentially altering our understanding of life in Britain 2,000 years ago. More than 800 objects were unearthed in a field near the village of Melsonby, North Yorkshire. They date back to the first century, around the time of the Roman conquest of Britain under Emperor Claudius, and are almost certainly associated with a tribe called the Brigantes who controlled most of northern England. The objects include parts from wagons and/or chariots including 28 iron tyres, elaborate harnesses for at least 14 horses, bridle bits, ceremonial spears and two beautifully ornate cauldrons, one of which was probably used as a wine mixing bowl. Experts involved in the find, described as internationally important, say the objects may lead to a reassessment of how we understand subjects such as wealth, status, trade and travel among Britain's iron age tribes. The hoard was discovered and reported just before Christmas 2021 by a metal detectorist, Peter Heads, who got a reading, dug a hole and realised he needed expert help. He contacted Prof Tom Moore, the head of archaeology at Durham University, who had been conducting research in the area. Moore saw right away the potential significance of what had been uncovered but had no idea it would be of such a jaw-dropping scale. 'Finding a hoard or collection of 10 objects is unusual, it's exciting, but finding something of this scale is just unprecedented,' he said. 'We were not expecting it … I think for everybody on the team, we were just lost for words.' After securing £120,000 funding from Historic England, excavations took place in 2022, including the removal of one large block of tangled metal objects that may have been in a bag together. Moore said the horse harnesses pulling the wagons or chariots were beautifully decorated with coral and coloured glass and, with the vehicles, would have been quite a sight. 'They would have looked incredible,' he said. 'It just emphasises that these people had real status and real wealth. 'Some people have regarded the north as being impoverished compared to the iron age of the south of Britain. This shows that individuals there had the same quality of materials and wealth and status and networks as people in the south. 'They challenge our way of thinking and show the north is definitely not a backwater in the iron age. It is just as interconnected, powerful and wealthy as iron age communities in the south.' Keith Emerick, an inspector of ancient monuments at Historic England, said the decision to provide funding was agreed the same day Moore contacted him. 'The scale of the find and the material in it is completely unparalleled in this country,' he said. 'To have something like this from the north of England is really exceptional.' He recalled seeing the objects laid out at Durham. 'It was one of those wow moments really, just to see how rich and splendid and mind-bogglingly beautiful some of it is. It has been a once-in-a-lifetime find for everyone involved.' Moore said the working assumption was that the high-status objects belonged to someone who was 'probably part of a network of elites across Britain, into Europe and even the Roman world'. A lot of the material had been burned, suggesting it may have been part of a funerary pyre for an elite person before being thrown in a ditch. Moore said one of the most exciting parts of the discovery was the first evidence of four-wheeled wagons used by iron age tribes in Britain, possibly imitating vehicles seen in continental Europe. He said: 'We're going to have spend years thinking what did these vehicles look like, where did they come from?' The Melsonby hoard has been valued at £254,000 and a fundraising campaign to secure it for the nation will be launched by the Yorkshire Museum in York. Its discovery was announced jointly by Historic England, Durham University and the British Museum. The heritage minister, Chris Bryant, said the hoard was an extraordinary find 'which will help us to better understand the fabric of our nation's history'. Emerick said the find posed lots of interesting questions. Julius Caesar led the first Roman expeditions to Britain a century before Claudius's invasion and the Brigantes would have known about them. 'You kind of look at this material and ask is this people thinking about the end of something, or are they thinking about the beginning of something?'
The Guardian
03-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Is this a cheese grater I see before me? This is Shakespeare as you've never seen it before
It opens with two flashlights, standing on a tabletop, nervously awaiting the arrival of a cheese grater. Or rather: the ghost of a grater, with a thirst for vengeance – and a slender glass-bottle son who may or may not get the job done. This is Hamlet, as you've never seen it. Instead of a stage, a table. Instead of players, humble household and supermarket items: a canister of flea powder standing in for the murderous usurper King Claudius; a pepper grinder for Queen Gertrude. Instead of the usual three to four hours, just one. Instead of Shakespeare's poetic prose, a single performer delivers a narrative re-enactment. 'To be or not to be' – one of drama's most vaunted soliloquies – boils down to: 'Hamlet comes along and he's thinking about death – again.' This pared-back Hamlet is one of 36 tabletop versions of Shakespeare's plays performed by UK theatre mavericks Forced Entertainment, who will bring the series to Australia for the first time this month in Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare. A full set will be staged across eight days at the Adelaide festival, and an abridged set over three days at Tasmania's Ten Days on the Island festival. (You can even watch them for free on their website.) Table Top Shakespeare has proved immensely – if not universally – popular, touring Europe and the US to acclaim over the decade since it premiered. 'Occasionally you get somebody who's unhappy that we've stripped the Shakespearean language out of the pieces,' says Forced Entertainment's artistic director, Tim Etchells. 'But there's plenty of productions of the full plays. It just wasn't what we were interested in doing.' Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Forced Entertainment, an ensemble of six that turned 40 last year, has built a reputation for experimental and often absurdist durational work, building marathon productions from improvisations rather than using existing texts. In the 24-hour performance Quizoola!, one performer improvises answers to an apparently never-ending stream of questions asked by another, while audience members are free to come and go. In the six-hour improvisation And on the Thousandth Night, eight performers jostle with each other to tell a story that never ends. They were never going to do 'straight Shakespeare', says Etchells. 'There was a subversive impulse there – to take these high-culture texts that are so revered and to play them as this kind of lo-fi puppetry on the tabletop,' he adds. 'And I think it also chimed with our interest in the way that spoken language conjures images, makes things happen.' It's true: under the spell of the performer's narration – and careful hands – even a grubby, half-empty bottle of linseed oil seems haunted by some dreadful dilemma; over the course of each show's duration (45 to 75 minutes) you find yourself inexorably absorbed into the drama. Watching the plays reveals something about Shakespeare's craft, too. 'It's like taking the car engine apart and putting all the pieces on the driveway; it makes you see the mechanism a little bit more clearly,' says Etchells. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion 'The comedies are really interesting because they often work on pairings – so on the tabletop, they're very beautiful; they have this endless symmetry. But something like Cymbeline is a bit of a mess on the tabletop, because it's an inelegant structure.' Each of the performers, assigned six Shakespeare plays apiece, took different approaches to 'casting' their productions: Cathy Naden used objects from her late mother's house, while Richard Lowdon used items from his cellar – including a grimy jar, a tin of paint stripper and a crusty old faucet handle – to conjure a dank aesthetic for his Macbeth. Some choices are delightfully tongue in cheek: Iago is played by a pack of cigarettes; he will kill you. All of the performances are unscripted, giving each the quality of a pal telling you the plot of their favourite film at the pub. Some performers are chatty; others adopt a more dramatic, campfire delivery. It's this 'theatre in the everyday' that continues to excite Etchells a decade into the series. 'This magical transformation of space and time is not the sole province of the big stage with the fancy lighting rig,' he says. 'You can do it right here on the tabletop with a few everyday objects. It's a human capacity for transforming and narrating.' Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare runs 8-16 March as part of Adelaide festival, and 21-23 March as part of Ten Days on the Island, Tasmania.
New York Times
24-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Rising Star Rides the Stormy Seas in a Maritime ‘Hamlet'
In the Royal Shakespeare Company's new 'Hamlet,' the Danish royal court is all at sea — quite literally. The set is a ship's deck that tilts and creaks ominously while a screen plays eerily textured footage of a roiling ocean. At several points, the action pauses and an ensemble of actors in Edwardian dress scatters around the deck in panic, wearing Titanic-style life vests that foreshadow the play's catastrophic climax. It is a risky move to evoke a sinking ship: If the play falls short, the wisecracks practically write themselves. But this 'Hamlet' — directed by Rupert Goold and running at the Royal Shakespeare Theater in Stratford-upon-Avon through March 29 — proves seaworthy, thanks in large part to Luke Thallon's psychologically absorbing turn as the embattled prince. Already grieving for his father and sickened by the recent remarriage of his mother, Queen Gertrude (Nancy Carroll) to his uncle Claudius (Jared Harris), Hamlet learns that Claudius had in fact murdered his father, and he is therefore duty bound to exact revenge. This is always a lot for anyone to take in, and Thallon — a rising star with recent stage credits in 'Patriots' and 'Leopoldstadt' — portrays Hamlet's anguish with a vulnerable, semi-abstracted candor. He delivers his lines in a pensive, haltingly conversational rhythm, as though feeling his way into them; we get the sense of a man continually processing his incredulity at the baroque predicament in which he finds himself. Thallon also uses his body to good effect in a lithe, controlled display of nervous physicality. He is rag-doll-like, dynamic in his despondency. Now and then, he enlists the audience for moral support, throwing us a wry, self-pitying smirk, or striking ironically hammy poses. Carroll's Gertrude has a brittle standoffishness consistent with repressed shame, complementing Harris's cagey Claudius. Anton Lesser's incantatory declamations as the father's ghost are genuinely spine-tingling, and Elliot Levey is endearingly funny as the sycophantic councilor Polonius, whose desperate desire to ingratiate himself to the royal household inadvertently results in the tragic demise of his daughter, Ophelia (Nia Towle). With his velvet dinner jacket, adenoidal intonations and shameless cynicism — at one point he shows off Ophelia like a calf brought to market — he is part smarmy salesman, part 1970s light entertainer. The pivotal 'Mousetrap' scene — in which Hamlet has a troupe of actors re-enact his father's murder, so he can gauge Claudius's reaction and confirm his guilt — is a crisply choreographed mime accompanied by creepily portentous singing. There was a ripple of audience laugher during the buildup, when a member of the troupe wearing a top hat performed elaborate stretches as though limbering up for a marathon. Small touches like this keep the show ticking along, and the two-and-a-half-hour run time flies by. Not everything works, however. The presence of a large digital clock, which buzzes into life to indicate that the drama is unfolding within a compressed time frame, adds little. And the overt nod to the sinking of the Titanic feels contrived, since there is little obvious connection between the 1912 maritime disaster and the political intrigues of 17th-century Denmark. The tenuousness of the metaphor undermines its symbolic force. The maritime setting would have worked equally well without it, evoking a more elliptical sense of dread. But whatever you thinks of the Titanic conceit, it is relatively unobtrusive and it doesn't impinge on the story. The set, by Es Devlin, is gorgeous, and also has practical benefits. When the rear of the deck pitches upward as the ship begins to sink, the stage becomes a ramp, bringing gravity into play. In the gravedigger scene, the skull of the jester Yorick isn't handed to Hamlet but rolled down to him. And during the famously bloody denouement — when all but one of the remaining characters are killed, in a matter of minutes — the bodies of Gertrude, Laertes and Claudius tumble down the deck and out of sight, one by one, leaving only the dying Hamlet, cradled by his friend Horatio. It is an impressively clutter-free death spree, which ensures the tragic hero has our full attention in the play's final moments. This is as it should be, given the virtuosic esprit of Thallon's performance. Blending affable sincerity with restless, self-therapizing neediness, his is a fitting Hamlet for our anxious age. A London transfer surely awaits.
