One of my favourite books about Italy is not what you would expect. Far from the glossy coffee table publications that show us the shiny veneer of cobbled streets winding through Medieval towns, towering Renaissance Cathedrals or pink and yellow seaside villages tumbling down a hillside into the Mediterranean, The dark heart of Italy by Tobias Jones digs beneath [...]

On a recent trip to Australia I fell madly in love with the paintings of Emily Kame Kngwarreye (pronounced Ung-warh-ay). I am not alone as Emily has been hailed as an artistic genius, her paintings acclaimed around the world as modern abstract masterpieces, her works compared to that of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko and her work [...]

Carnevale Viareggio, ITALY The regional train rattled its way from Florence towards the coast. The atmosphere was ripe with anticipation – not the usual journey of somber faced commuters staring into the void, pretending not to notice one another. The monotonous drone of the caravan was punctuated with the sounds of strangers chatting and laughing [...]