Ros Pesman

In October 2005, Monash University hosted a workshop on Australians in Italy at its Centre in the Palazzo Vaj in Prato. Australians in Italy were certainly visible in the week of the conference. Wall posters in Rome advertised the Macquarie Bank and an exhibition, Viaggio nella Provincia di Roma di una pittrice australiana, the paintings of the expatriate artist Janet Venn-Brown. In Florence, the ... (read more)

An Australian tourist visiting Italy in the mid-1930s wrote home: ‘you may say what you like about Mussolini but you cannot deny that he has done a more amazing thing than anyone else in history.’ Unstinting admiration for Fascist Italy was common in Australian references to Italy in the interwar years; politicians, businessmen, Catholic prelates, Protestant pastors and middle-class tourists a ... (read more)

The history of fifteenth-century Florence is indissolubly linked to the Medici, the political bosses and patrons of the arts who presided over the city-state’s Renaissance. The names of Cosimo, Lorenzo and Giovanni, known to God and the world as Pope Leo X, immediately come to the fore in any discussion of Renaissance Italy. Rarely heard are the names of their female kin: Contessa de’ Bardi, w ... (read more)