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“... one not explored in Rowland’s book. There is a theory that it was written by the Roman nobleman Francesco Colonna, but the author is more likely to have been a Dominican friar who died in 1527 aged 94, having lived in Venice and Treviso. Poor man, he was bound not only to follow Christ rather than Cupid, but to do so in male company. In Angelo ...”

“... down in Rome. This was broadly the case with the current tenants of the building: Count Francesco Cenci, a 52-year-old Roman around whom accusations of corruption and violence clustered like summer flies; his second wife, Lucrezia; and his youngest daughter, Beatrice. The two women were essentially prisoners in the castle, slaves to the Count’s ...”

“... Francesco Petrarca​ , known in English as Petrarch, is one of the tre corone – the ‘three crowns’ – of early Italian literature. There was a brief period when all three were alive: Dante died in 1321, when Petrarch was 17 and Boccaccio eight; the younger writers worked in his shadow. They were all Florentine, and in the phrase’s first coinage they were the ‘three crowns of Florence ...”

“... call him Manuel; we do, however, know the name of the merchant accompanying him: Giovanni di Francesco Maringhi, a Florentine who has been living in Istanbul for five years now.’ A classic piece of misdirection, drawing scrupulous attention to the authorial liberty taken early in the sentence so that the later invention can slip smoothly by. There’s ...”

“... had to rescue him from a Roman prison where he was being held for the murder of an apothecary), Francesco Stelluti and Anastasio de Filiis. Responsibility was divided. Cesi did botany, Heckius philosophy and metaphysics, and so on. Their way was not easy. Cesi’s father objected violently to the Academy, and did all he could to destroy it: at one point he ...”

“... from Italy in 1929, was from a lower class than the normal run of Jesuits and, as Marcantonio Colonna writes in The Dictator Pope: The Inside Story of the Francis Papacy (2017), ‘in the class-conscious society that is Argentina’s legacy from its oligarchic past this was always a visible handicap.’ (Colonna is the ...”