Erin Maglaque

Giovanni Pico​, count of Mirandola and Concordia, was 23 when he travelled to Rome to become an angel. It was 1487. Christendom’s most important priests would be there; the cleverest theologians would debate him. The pope would watch. Pico was going to dazzle them all. He planned to begin with a poetic, densely allusive speech, which almost no one would understand; then he would make...

In​ 1345, Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted a monumental mappa mundi for the wall of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. At the axis of its rotating concentric wheels was the little city. For painters, Siena was the centre of the world. Dozens and dozens of them lived elbow-to-elbow in a couple of tiny parishes in the commune. They rendered tempera landscapes with pigments cooked from Sienese dirt. The...

Many fairy tales​ begin something like this: a woman is alone in a garden, or under a tree, or bathing in a pond. She longs for a child and prays. She might carve an apple, spill a few drops of blood onto the snow or speak to a frog. Her wish comes true, and she gives birth to a child. But the story doesn’t end with the baby, because her prayer isn’t really a prayer but a...

What​ is it about the body that resists plain description? When we discuss our bodies, we evoke other things: the body as machine, possibly malfunctioning; the body as computer, infinitely programmable. The body as input-output system, or stardust. The electrical wires of the nerves, the mainframe of the brain. We start young: my train-obsessed three-year-old thinks of his digestive tract as...

In his book​ 16 ottobre 1943, Giacomo Debenedetti describes the deportation of Rome’s Jews to the death camps. When the soldiers came in the early evening, everyone in the neighbourhood was at home.

The Jews of the Regola quarter were still in the habit of going to sleep early. Shortly after dark they were all in their homes. Perhaps the memory of an ancient curfew is still in their...