With just over 120,000 people, Bergamo, northeast of Milan, is not a particularly populous city, and it is short of priests, like almost every other city in the Catholic West. Yet in the second week of March alone, six priests died of coronavirus in Bergamo, and five more died the week after. By . . . . Continue Reading »
An observer of a Spenglerian bent might just write Venice off, taking the floods that afflict the city with increasing frequency as the finishing touches on a long-running spectacle of political, economic, and cultural decline. That decline, spanning half a millennium, has by now reduced the city to . . . . Continue Reading »
Keeping religion and politics separate is nearly impossible. Continue Reading »
Italy’s new government represents the most radical challenge yet to the order that has dominated Europe since World War II. Continue Reading »
In Italy, liberal orthodoxy is being challenged in the name of tradition. Continue Reading »
Identity, tradition, and religion have new prominence in Italy after the recent election. Continue Reading »
Italy's fastest-growing political movement, Lega, may end up leading the country’s next government. Continue Reading »
It turned out there was no need to condemn Sigismondo to hell—his own defeats brought him to his knees. The Tempio Malatestiano, moreover, is now an active church, and people are trickling in for Saturday confession. Our group stops for discussion, and we concede a reluctant parallel with our own American Sigismondo, and then we imagine the ruins of a bankrupt Trump hotel, its deserted lobby the setting for a humble Mass. Continue Reading »
One could be forgiven for thinking that Gregory Hanlon’s The Hero of Italy: Odoardo Farnese, Duke of Parma, his Soldiers, and his Subjects in the Thirty Years’ War is titled backwards. The peevish, heavyset Duke of Parma, a minor French ally in the war against the Habsburgs, is certainly the protagonist of Hanlon’s book, but this is neither a biography nor a particularly compelling case for his heroism. Rather, it is an examination of Parma’s two years in the war, and its effects on the broad swath of people under Odoardo’s rule, command, or occupation. Continue Reading »
The Tigress of Forli: Renaissance Italy’s Most Courageous and Notorious Countess, Caterina Riario Sforza de’ Mediciby elizabeth levhoughton mifflin harcourt, 316 pages, $27 Immortalized by Botticelli in the Sistine Chapel, rumored to be the most beautiful woman in the world, the epicene . . . . Continue Reading »
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