Rome

Wednesday

Alice Hancock

How to spend 48 hours in Rome

Contrary to the title of this article, do not spend 48 hours in Rome on your first attempt. Unless you have legs of steel, high levels of determination and a desire for non-stop sightseeing. The two pivots about which the city’s history turns – the Vatican and the Roman Forum – are best taken a day each and visited early, fuelled by €1 coffees and sweet, crumbly pasticcini off sticky local bar counters: 48 hours, done. But to focus on these titanic monuments of European history alone is to miss the real chatter of the city: couples meeting for Monday drinks by the Ponte Sisto, watching the sun go down

Thursday

Owen Matthews

How Rome’s rubbish became a political problem

‘Excommunication,’ reads a stone plaque on the wall of the church of St Theodore in Rome, ‘and a fine of 200 gold ducats for any person who should dare to unload… waste of any kind and cause a stink outside these precincts.’ This threat might have worked when the plaque was erected in 1703, but it certainly doesn’t work now. A few paces down the street, a waist-high pile of stinking rubbish bags festers in the autumn sunlight, pecked at by seagulls. In Rome, even the rubbish is eternal. Italy’s capital is strewn with litter — geological layers of the stuff. In a pile of last year’s crumbled leaves by

Thursday

Taki

Tales from my private jet

Gstaad I was very sad to read of Rupert Hambro’s death. I didn’t know him well, but first met him long ago, along with his younger brother Rick, also gone. They were both quintessential English gentlemen: handsome, kind and with a great sense of humour. Rupert invited me to lunch quite a few times, but because of circumstance I was never able to reciprocate. The last one was at Wiltons, which he owned, I believe, but he never gave any indication that all was not well. In an age of crybabies and professional victims, Rupert stood out like a saint in hell. He leaves his lovely wife Robin, a Philadelphia-born

Thursday

Taki

An elegy on the end of elegance

Gstaad During these dark, endless periods of lockdown, let’s take a trip down memory lane to a time when we still had real high life: parties galore, carefree girls in their summer dresses, and drunken dawns playing polo in dinner jackets. Life forms began to move properly about 500 million years ago, but I will take you back only 50 or so years, when chic creatures moved to the beat of the samba, the tango, the waltz and the cha-cha-cha. The Roaring Twenties roared because of the Great War’s privations, and the fabled, fabulous Fifties were a reaction to the second world war. People ached to have a good time

Thursday

Matthew Adams

A Chaucerian tale: Pilgrims, by Matthew Kneale, reviewed

Matthew Kneale is much drawn to people of the past. In his award-winning English Passengers, he captured the sensibilities of a group of 19th-century seafarers bound for Tasmania in search of the Garden of Eden by chronicling their voyage in 21 singular, vibrant voices, and by weaving into their journey a heavy thread of racist and colonial endeavour. In his latest book, he returns to these themes of voyage and discovery, adventure and prejudice with his band of 13th-century pilgrims who have assembled in England as a ‘proper party’ in order to travel to Rome — without, they hope, being ‘stabbed or robbed or cudgelled to death along the road’.

Thursday

Caroline Moorehead

It’s still impossible for Horst Wächter to recognise his father as a Nazi war criminal

In 1926, while putting in place the repressive laws and decrees that would define his dictatorship, Mussolini appointed a new chief of police. Arturo Bocchini was 36, a lawyer and former prefect of Brescia, a cynical, vengeful, witty and corpulent Neapolitan. Under his 17-year tenure, fascist Italy became one of the most sinister and efficient police states of the years between the wars, with overlapping and rivalrous legal and illegal police bodies, fed by a vast army of informers and spies. Said to number around 10,000 at their peak, these men and women were to be found in every corner of Italian life, from the civil service to the Vatican,

Saturday

Yoram Hazony

Guilt by association at Rome’s National Conservatism Conference

This week’s National Conservatism Conference in Rome was an important meeting of national conservatives from all over the world. Sadly, it has been sullied by disgusting attacks from British liberals against the Conservative MP Daniel Kawczynski for agreeing to take part. Publications from BuzzFeed to the Guardian pounced on Kawczynski’s decision to appear alongside European leaders such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Italy’s Matteo Salvini as proof of ‘anti-Semitic’, ‘racist’ and ‘homophobic’ beliefs, held not only by Daniel but the political party to which he belongs, the Conservative party. The Tories subsequently proved themselves to be utterly witless in the face of the attack (a point to which I return

Monday

Daniel Kawczynski

Why I’m going to the National Conservatism conference in Rome

The Guardian has heavily criticised me for agreeing to speak at a conference on national conservatism in Rome, alongside several European political leaders. The paper has suggested a Tory MP should not speak at an event ‘with far-right’ figures on the subject of nationalism. But they are wrong – and here is why I will be going nonetheless. What is the fate of national independence and self-determination in the context of today’s European Union? Are the freedom of nations that were promised when the Berlin Wall fell a generation ago still desirable now? Both are fair questions, you might think and ones the conference will aim to answer. But any