Richard Hodges explores Alésia in Burgundy and the legacy of Julius Caesar’s defeat of Vercingétorix and the Gauls.…
A free and united Europe is the necessary premise to the strengthening of modern civilisation… The Ventotene Manifesto (1941).…
Last summer, one day stands out. While on holiday on the Ionian island of Kefalonia, I persuaded three friends to spend a morning investigating a castle that has intrigued me. Situated on a high hill, the ruins command breathtaking views of the island’s mountains and blissful seaways. Picturesque though this…
Richard Hodges has been following in the wake of generations of mariners by investigating the extraordinary concentration of inscriptions carved into the rock of Grama Bay, Albania.…
I would restore the great chambers of Boyne, prepare a sepulchre under the cupmarked stones. Seamus Heaney, ‘Funeral Rites’…
In the conclusion to this two-part article, Richard Hodges examines the circumstances surrounding the attack on the Benedictine monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno in AD 881.…
Based in Rome, LoveItaly is now in its seventh year and its accent is decidedly American and not patrician. It owes everything to the dynamism of a Californian who is every bit as Roman as the Romans.…
The astonishing thing about Paul is his photographic memory. I recall he once joined a Roman sherd from Butrint with a piece from the maritime villa at Diaporit, three miles away.…
Upper Palaeolithic flints, Eneolithic tombs, and remains of a Bronze Age semicircular hut, as well as a tomb with a Villanovan shield, show that the place evolved over time, before being bafflingly abandoned in the earlier Iron Age.…
Thanks to modern scientific analyses, the every-day circumstances of Tuscany’s Dark Age peoples are no longer mute. One thing is certain from this excavation: objects and nature played an active part in transforming the primitive experiences of Tuscany’s 9th-century peasants and their early feudal masters into some of the most…
Is Ithaca, in fact, Odysseus’ island, where Penelope faithfully weaved, steadfastly waiting for her mischievous prince in their well-appointed palace?…
The symbol of the new Penn Museum is in the refurbished main entrance hall. On a prominent podium behind the ticket desks sits the Museum’s celebrated sphinx. Richard Hodges reports.…
Let me go back over a quarter-century to Albania on a blissful autumn day in 1995 when, like a Martian, the President of the World Bank descended upon us.…
Ancient Kydonia, as Chania was known to Homer, owes its origins – like Knossos – to Neolithic times.…
As far as I could tell, every minor contour of the original has been replicated, as of course have the paintings themselves.…
Beyond the island I saw the thin campanile of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, which houses the Mouth of Truth, a bucket- list ‘must’ thanks to the incomparable Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday (1953).…
Devil or pastoral sprite and mischief-maker, Pan’s presence in the form of the lost sanctuary on Mount Mile lends a new dimension to the god’s story…
Richard Hodges explores the Viking fortresses at Trelleborg and Borgring.…
At the far end of Valletta, within the massive angular bulwarks of the fortress of St Elmo poking out at the entrance of the Grand Harbour, is a museum devoted to the town’s history and its struggle for survival.…
Athens conjures up ancient Greece and the civilisation symbolized by the fastidious re-building of the Parthenon. Yet Athens boasts possibly the most extensive remains of any Roman city in Greece. Why should this matter? Well, for the imperial Romans, Greece was a role model that they sought both to emulate…