Tag: Italy
Milanese Hospital Bones Suggest Early Use of Cocaine
Researchers in Italy excavating a crypt in Milan’s Ospedale Maggiore have discovered something which sets established history on its head: traces of cocaine in the brains of two bodies, which suggests the…
Baldassare Castiglione: The Courtier, Perfected
The term “Renaissance Man” is a reasonably well known one, which draws a pretty wide set of definitions but which basically refers to someone who is accomplished in multiple fields seen as…
Searching for the Lost Treasure of Alaric the Visigoth
For those with a mind to search for them, there are many rumoured lost treasures out there. Some are certainly waiting to be find, sunken ships loaded with valuables or hidden caches.…
666: Making Sense of Revelations and the Roman Connection
The Book of Revelations is a total trip. It is hard to read its apocalyptic foretellings and warnings of chaos and catastrophe without feeling that someone, somewhere, was smoking something pretty strong.…
The Voynich Manuscript: Never to be Deciphered?
In 1912 a Polish book dealer came across a manuscript which, at first glance, did not seem to be that out of the ordinary. Composed of roughly 240 pages of vellum, it…
Orichalcum: A Lost Metal that we Never Lost?
The ancient Greek philosopher Plato, writing about Atlantis, made mention of a fabulous metal which he called “orichalcum”, literally “mountain copper”. This mysterious element was supposedly second only to gold in value,…