The fact that Dartford Grammar School for Girls has reportedly gone from 52% of pupils classified as White British to just 7% in a single decade is truly staggering.And this is Dartford. In Kent. In England.

We need to have the courage to discuss what figures like these actually mean. When we talk about integration, we tend to concentrate on language, education, employment and individual behaviour. What we rarely discuss is the demographic transformation taking place in some communities — or the possibility that this transformation itself can affect integration.

There is also the phenomenon commonly described as “white flight”. That doesn’t necessarily mean that people are fleeing because they dislike their neighbours. It can simply mean that families who would once have sent their children to a particular local school decide to move somewhere else because they want their children to grow up in a different social and demographic environment.

And “white flight” doesn’t necessarily stop at the English Channel.

I have actually met people who provide a remarkable example of this. More than twenty years ago, a British family I came to know moved from the Dartford area to an Italian mountain village. They told me quite openly that they no longer considered Dartford a suitable environment in which to bring up their children.

What happened to those children is fascinating.

They didn’t retreat into a British enclave in Italy. Quite the opposite. They became thoroughly integrated into Italian life. They speak Italian perfectly and have made a real success of their lives here. In fact, they sometimes laugh at their mother because, despite living in Italy for years, she still speaks Italian with a strong foreign accent while her children speak it completely naturally.

That, to me, is genuine integration.

And it makes me wonder what might have happened had that family stayed in Dartford. Perhaps the children would have done just as well. Perhaps they would have become equally successful. We simply don’t know.

But that isn’t really the point.

The point is that we should be able to look honestly at what has happened to places like Dartford without immediately being accused of prejudice. A change from 52% White British to 7% in one decade is not a small statistical adjustment. It represents an extraordinary transformation in the composition of a school.

And if families who would previously have formed part of that school population are leaving — whether for another part of Britain or, as in the example I know, even for another country — then the statistics may be telling us more than simply how many immigrant-background children are entering a school. They may also be telling us something about who is leaving.

That matters because integration is supposed to work in both directions. The aim surely cannot be to create separate communities which increasingly have little contact with one another. A school should be a place where children from different backgrounds meet, learn together and become part of the society around them.

If a school becomes so demographically concentrated that it effectively becomes a self-contained community, then we have to ask whether we are still talking about integration at all.

And this is where the Italian approach is interesting. Italy has restrictions intended to prevent excessive concentrations of newly arrived, non-Italian-speaking pupils in particular classes and schools. The underlying principle is simple: if integration is the objective, there needs to be enough mixing for integration actually to happen.

I don’t believe that children should be blamed for their backgrounds, nor that immigrant families should be excluded from British society. Quite the contrary. I believe strongly in integration.

But genuine integration requires people to live, learn and work together.

We should therefore be able to discuss demographic change, school composition and the possibility of white flight without pretending that these things aren’t happening.

Because when a school changes from 52% White British to 7% in ten years, something very substantial has happened.

The question is not whether we are allowed to notice it.

The question is whether we are brave enough to ask what it means.

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“Who knows where the time goes?” sings Sandy Denny in that beautiful song of hers, which is the centrepiece of her own life and work. And who knows where the time goes for all of us? And who knows where that time goes, especially when we find ourselves in really exciting and interesting places?

Anyway, among the interesting, and often exciting, places to be in London are the various museums dealing with clocks and time. I can think of five of them, not all focusing on the same scientific aspects of clocks and time, but all dealing with this fascinating subject. And I would put them as follows.

My five are the Wallace Collection, which has a wonderful collection of fine historical clocks, especially French examples. Then we have the British Museum, with its incredible collections of clocks and watches, going from mechanical clocks to precision watches and chronometers.

And then we come to the place where time itself seems to begin: the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. It gave us, of course, Greenwich Mean Time, and here we have the historic home of the Prime Meridian and the four famous marine timekeepers made by John Harrison, the great pioneer of precision timekeeping at sea. These instruments helped solve one of the great problems of navigation: how to establish longitude accurately.

Then we have two more really interesting museums: the Clockmakers’ Museum, now part of the Science Museum in South Kensington a remarkable collection of historic clocks, watches and chronometers,

And finally, there is the Clockworks Museum at West Norwood, which we visited for the first time yesterday.

This is a very specialist museum, dealing with electrical horology: electric clocks, synchronised timekeeping, and the technology behind public clock networks. We were privileged to be part of a guided tour yesterday, conducted by its curator, Kirsten Tambling, who, in fact, is none other than the daughter of one of my classmates at Dulwich College.

Kirsten gave us the lowdown on these clocks, and she mentioned some really important developments in the history of timekeeping.

The main thing, of course, was that clocks became public, and they had to become synchronised. For the first time, there was a real need to move away from the different local times that had been used in towns and cities throughout Britain. There had to be a single standard time, and the railways were largely responsible for making this necessary.

Before the railways, local time was good enough for most purposes. But once railways had been invented, timetables had to be written out, trains had to leave at particular times, and connections had to be made. You could hardly have every town operating according to a different clock. Railway time therefore became increasingly important, and Greenwich Mean Time eventually became the standard adopted by the railway companies.

Kirsten beautifully explained the various techniques that made all this possible, and, of course, showed us the collection itself. There is also a special laboratory where clocks can be repaired and worked on, which gives the museum an added dimension. These are not simply objects sitting behind glass; they are machines whose workings can still be understood, investigated and, where necessary, restored.

Anyway, we had everything here, from railway clocks to public clocks of the sort one would have seen in town halls and other civic buildings. There were examples showing how clocks in different places could be made to keep the same time, something which we now take entirely for granted.

And then there was one particularly interesting clock, of the sort that one might have seen on that ill-fated liner, the Titanic. It was a reminder that clocks are not just about scientific precision. They are also part of the history of the places in which people lived, worked and travelled, and sometimes of the great tragedies of that history.

We had a great day there, and Kirsten deserves our thanks for such an interesting and informative tour. It is one thing to look at a clock, but quite another to understand the technology behind it and the extraordinary changes it helped bring about.

And, of course, don’t forget that, as far as I am concerned, West Norwood is a delightful part of London in its own right.

Yesterday I finally managed to see St Luke’s, one of the four so-called Waterloo churches. These were built after the Battle of Waterloo, partly to commemorate the victory and partly to provide additional accommodation for London’s growing congregations.

St Luke’s is a beautiful church, with its incredible Corinthian columns at the front. It is one of those buildings that makes you stop and admire it, even if you have come to the area for an entirely different reason. It also has a special connection with one of the cinema’s greatest artists!

You might ask, well, where are the other three?

They are St John’s at Waterloo, St Matthew’s at Brixton and St Mark’s at Kennington.

Five London museums dealing with clocks and time, each in its own way; a wonderful visit to the Clockworks at West Norwood; a fascinating guided tour by Kirsten, with that unexpected personal connection going back to my Dulwich College days; and the discovery of a beautiful Waterloo church.

And all the while, Sandy Denny’s question continues to hang in the air. Who knows?

“Who knows where the time goes?”

Yesterday was a reminder that time is best spent discovering new things, renewing old connections and enjoying the unexpected pleasures that London has to offer. And that, surely, is one of the great joys of being able to explore this extraordinary city.

Every now and again, I go through my papers and decide to chuck out anything that obviously needs to be chucked out. Today, however, I came across a copy of a rather special newspaper: Il Corriere dei Bagni di Lucca.

For years, it was one of the principal ways of getting information across to our community, particularly in the days before email and, more especially, the internet. myself wrote for it. Sadly, it no longer exists. As its former editor, our local chemist Massimo Betti, who founded it in 1986, pointed out, people now have their own ways of communicating . There are the various Facebook groups and community pages, emails flying from A to B, and websites of one sort or another. Information is certainly still being circulated, although perhaps in a rather different fashion.

Nevertheless, there was something rather charming about being able to read the news of Bagni di Lucca in a proper newspaper sat at a cafe table with a nice cup of capuccino in front of one. You could pick it up, turn the pages, discover what was happening locally and read about the people and events that made up our community. Much as I enjoy the convenience of modern technology, there is something to be said for the old-fashioned pleasure of reading a local newspaper, rather than scrolling through an endless succession of online posts.

The copy I found dates from 2010, and it is fascinating to browse through its pages. There are names that will be familiar to many of us, people who were very much part of the life of Bagni di Lucca at the time like Natalia Sereni and Marco Nicoli. Sadly, some are no longer with us. Others will, I hope, still be around to remember those days. A newspaper such as this becomes more than a collection of local news: it becomes a little piece of social history.

And that set me thinking. Who, in years to come, will be able to discover what life was like in Bagni di Lucca in 2026? Of course, there will be vast quantities of digital information stored somewhere, assuming that anyone can find it, open it and make sense of it. But will future generations really want to trawl through countless Facebook posts, old websites and emails to reconstruct the life of a small Tuscan community?

Perhaps they will. Perhaps they will have ingenious ways of searching through all that digital material that we cannot even imagine today.

But I rather doubt that it will have quite the same romance as coming across an old newspaper, blowing away the dust, turning its slightly yellowed pages and finding the names, faces and events of a world that has partly disappeared.

And so, before I consign this particular piece of paper to the great recycling bin in the sky, I think I shall have another look through it. After all, it is not every day that one discovers a small piece of one’s own history while attempting to clear out the clutter.

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Postscript

Our local chemist founder of this paper sent me this comment:

“I founded Il Corriere dei Bagni di Lucca with my friend Mauro Buonamici in 1986. It was one of the many things we did, and a wonderful memory that we still cherish, with the several hundred issues we published still preserved. We were very young. We kept the newspaper going for more than 35 years, with subscribers all over the world.

Eventually, the original team of friends who made up the editorial staff drifted apart, which is only natural over 35 years. Some moved away, others found themselves with increasingly demanding commitments, some married and started families, and sadly, some died.

It wasn’t easy to find correspondents in every village, either, and I can only thank those who took on that task. We simply couldn’t be everywhere. I still remember Livio Alessi with great affection. He was Dalida Antonini’s uncle, a veritable well of knowledge and a wonderfully engaging writer.

But running a newspaper isn’t just about writing articles. There are technical updates, bureaucracy, subscription campaigns, administration, postal distribution, finding advertisers, and careful research for interviews and in-depth articles to avoid bias and omissions.

Unfortunately, Bagni di Lucca suffers from a problem that is widespread everywhere. There are plenty of people who explain to others what they should do and how they should do it, sometimes with a fair degree of conviction but without proper analysis or knowledge. Facebook is an excellent showcase for this! ☺️ I say this without referring to anyone in particular.

Quite simply, there was no new generation ready to take over and keep the newspaper going. We would have handed it over free of charge, without hesitation, along with all our advice and the support of decades of experience.

Nowadays, of course, with online newspapers, a printed publication might perhaps seem anachronistic.

Anyone who takes the initiative to carry something forward should be welcomed. There are always active, engaged citizens, and Dalida is right about that.

Mistakes can happen, but if you do nothing, you make no mistakes”.

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Two recent stories, one from Italy and one from England, made me stop and think about the very different ways in which national pride is regarded in the two countries.
In Florence, a man was caught on CCTV removing an Italian Tricolore displayed near Santa Maria Novella railway station. Two flags had been flying together: the Italian flag and the European Union flag. The Italian flag was removed, thrown to the ground and trampled on, while the European flag was left untouched.

The reaction in Italy was one of considerable indignation. And perhaps that should not surprise us. Italy takes its national symbols seriously. Article 292 of the Italian Penal Code makes it a criminal offence publicly to destroy, damage, soil or otherwise desecrate the national flag.
The Tricolore is not simply a piece of cloth. It is a highly visible part of Italian public life. It flies outside public buildings, appears at official ceremonies and is displayed at national celebrations. Every Italian sindaco wears the green, white and red sash when formally representing the municipality.
Having lived in Italy for many years, I have always been struck by how unselfconsciously Italians display their national identity. It is generally accepted that being proud of Italy is perfectly normal.
Then there is England.
A recent controversy in Birmingham concerned the removal of English and British flags that had been attached without permission to lamp posts, railings and other public infrastructure. I

Why does the display of an Union Jack flag in the UK so often become entangled with arguments about nationalism, immigration and multiculturalism?
Of course, England and Britain are not without patriotism. The St George’s Cross is everywhere during major football tournaments, and millions of people are perfectly comfortable displaying it. But there is nevertheless a certain nervousness surrounding national identity which I do not encounter to the same extent in Italy.
Perhaps this is because British and English identity have become extraordinarily complicated. England is part of the United Kingdom; Britain itself is multinational; and questions of immigration and multiculturalism have inevitably become part of the debate about what it means to be English…or British?
Italy has its own complicated history, but the relationship between national identity and the State is rather more straightforward.
There is an interesting illustration of this in local government. In Italy, the sindaco is both the elected political leader of the municipality and its principal civic representative. The office is immediately recognisable, not least because of that green, white and red sash.
Britain has a much more complicated arrangement. Birmingham has a ceremonial Lord Mayor, while political leadership is exercised separately. Manchester provides another example: there is a ceremonial Lord Mayor of Manchester, while the wider metropolitan area has a directly elected Mayor of Greater Manchester.
So even the word “mayor” means rather different things in the two countries.
None of this means that Italians are necessarily more patriotic than the English or the British, or that an Englishman who does not fly a flag loves his country any less. Nor are the Florence and Birmingham incidents legally equivalent. One involved the deliberate desecration of a national symbol protected by criminal law; the other concerned the unauthorised use of public infrastructure.
But culturally, I think the two stories are revealing.
In Italy, the national flag is generally seen as a straightforward symbol of the country and its institutions. In England, the national flag can sometimes acquire political baggage which makes its display seem like a statement requiring explanation.
A country ought to be able to take pride in itself without believing that it is superior to other countries. Loving your own country does not require disliking somebody else’s, and respecting other people’s national identities should not require being embarrassed by your own.
Perhaps the Florence and Birmingham stories are therefore less about flags than about confidence.
Italy still seems relatively comfortable with the idea of national pride. England, for whatever reasons, seems rather less comfortable with it.
And I think that is something worth thinking about.

I don’t know whether Oriana Fallaci ever described herself as a prophet. I doubt she would have. She was a journalist, a writer and, above all, an extraordinarily fearless observer of the world. But looking back now, twenty years after her death, I sometimes think of her as a modern Cassandra.

Cassandra, in ancient Greek mythology, was given the gift of prophecy by Apollo, but cursed so that nobody would believe her. She could see what was coming; she simply couldn’t persuade anyone else to believe it.

There is something of that in Fallaci.

She was an extraordinary journalist who interviewed some of the most important and dangerous people of her time — Henry Kissinger, Ayatollah Khomeini and many others. Her interview with Khomeini became legendary. Forced to wear a chador before the interview, she challenged him about the position of women under Islam. When he dismissed her objections, she took the chador off and walked away.

That was Oriana Fallaci.

She was not somebody who was easily intimidated.

And yet her later writing transformed the way she was regarded. After 9/11, particularly with La rabbia e l’orgoglio (The Rage and the Pride) and La forza della ragione (The Force of Reason), she became an extraordinarily controversial figure. People who had once admired her began calling her racist, anti-Muslim, reactionary and right-wing.

But this was also rather extraordinary when you consider where she had come from. Fallaci had been a fiercely secular, anti-fascist woman of the Left. Her fundamental passion was not for authoritarianism but for freedom — freedom of thought, freedom of speech, the emancipation of women and the whole Western tradition of individual liberty.

She believed that these things were worth defending.

And she became increasingly alarmed that Western Europe was losing the confidence to defend them.

I don’t think we should exaggerate what she said, and I certainly don’t think that every Muslim immigrant represents some kind of organised Islamic invasion. That would be nonsense.

But the demographic and cultural changes taking place across parts of Western Europe are real. You can see them simply by walking through certain towns, neighbourhoods and schools. The composition of populations is changing, and with it come changes in language, culture, religion and social attitudes.

Fallaci saw that coming.

She was not predicting armies landing on European beaches. The old Islamic invasions came with ships, cavalry and armies. The Ottomans reached the gates of Vienna.

The transformation Fallaci was worried about was something much more complicated: demographic, cultural and generational.

And this is where I think her warnings deserve to be reconsidered.

The term “Eurabia”, incidentally, was not coined by Fallaci; it is associated with the writer Bat Ye’or. But Fallaci became one of the most famous voices warning about what she saw as the consequences of European accommodation of Islam and mass immigration.

Her deeper concern, however, was much larger than immigration.

It was about whether the West still believed in itself.

She believed passionately in the civilisation that had produced the Enlightenment, freedom of expression, secular government, equality before the law and the rights of the individual. She believed these achievements had been fought for over centuries and could not simply be taken for granted.

And she feared that a civilisation which becomes ashamed of its own values eventually becomes incapable of defending them.

That, I think, is the part of Fallaci that remains particularly relevant.

Was she right about everything? Of course not. She could be excessive, sweeping and deliberately provocative. But being wrong about some things does not mean that the questions she asked were wrong.

I was reminded of all this when I visited her grave in Florence shortly after her death.

Her grave is in the Cimitero degli Allori, the non-Catholic cemetery on the road towards the Certosa. I went there because I wanted to see where this extraordinary woman had been laid to rest. My wife couldn’t come with me, so I took a photograph of the tomb to show her.

The cemetery keeper had specifically told me not to photograph it.

He somehow discovered that I had done so. I explained that it was only for my wife, and fortunately he let me off. I later discovered that there are rules in Italy concerning the photographing of graves and respect for the privacy of the families, so perhaps he was quite right.

But what I remember most is standing there beside Fallaci’s grave and thinking about her life.

A woman who had spent her career asking powerful people questions they didn’t want to answer.

A woman who had spent her life refusing to be intimidated.

A woman who eventually found herself treated almost as an enemy by many of the people who had once admired her.

And now, twenty years later, I find myself thinking again about Cassandra.

Cassandra’s tragedy was not that nobody heard her.

They heard her perfectly well.

Her tragedy was that nobody wanted to believe her.

Perhaps that is the most interesting thing about Oriana Fallaci.

Perhaps she was our Cassandra.

***

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Situated in the fields of the Marca Trevigiana is a beautiful little church with a rather wonderful secret inside it which we first visited in 2017. (https://wp.me/p4KnVs-ayp)

It is marked at the roadside as a ninth-century Lombard church, although if there was a Lombard church here, there certainly isn’t one there now. Most of what we can see dates from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It is really more like a little chapel, called La Mattarella, after one of the people who sponsored what is inside.

And what is inside that humble exterior is the real treasure: a lovely sequence of frescoes only discovered relatively recently when an earthquake shook off the plaster covering them.

They may not be as majestic and grandiloquent as the Sistine Chapel, and they certainly aren’t as refined as Giotto’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel at Padua, but they are nevertheless very fine examples of sophisticated rural Renaissance art. And, more importantly, they are still there.

We were shown around by a very knowledgeable young lady from the local council who is an art student herself. She knew the church extremely well and, rather usefully, knew what we were looking at. There is nothing quite like having somebody who can point at a tiny figure in the corner and say, “Ah, look at this…” and suddenly you realise that you would otherwise have walked straight past it.

The apse has an extraordinary Crucifixion. She pointed out all the different characters: the sorrowful women, Pontius Pilate, and the two people being crucified alongside Christ. The good thief is on Jesus’s right and is looking towards Him, while the bad thief is on the left and is looking away. And, of course, the left-hand side is the sinister side. The Latin word for left was sinister, which has rather given the English language its own little prejudice against being left-handed.

Then you look upwards and there are more frescoes covering the vaulting: the Evangelists, the Doctors of the Church and all sorts of other figures. Everywhere you look there is something going on.

And really, this was the medieval and Renaissance equivalent of a cartoon book, although “picture book” is probably a little kinder. The people who came into these churches were, for the most part, unable to read. So the walls told them the stories. The Bible was there in pictures. They could see who was good, who was bad, who was suffering, who was being rewarded and who was being punished. It was religious education without anybody having to pick up a book.

And they did it very well.

What struck me afterwards was how many of these little churches there must be scattered all over Italy. You can drive through a village, see a tiny chapel by the roadside and think, “Oh, that’s nice,” and carry on. Yet inside there may be frescoes which have been there for five or six hundred years. There must be thousands of these places, many of them known only to the local people and a handful of art historians.

It also made me think about England, and what we have lost.

When you go into an English medieval church today, you often see white walls and bare stone and perhaps a few fragments of medieval painting. But that isn’t how these churches originally looked. The English churches were painted too. They were full of colour and images.

Then came the Reformation.

Henry VIII began the destruction, but it didn’t stop with Henry. Under Edward VI the Protestant attack on religious images became even more severe. Statues were smashed, paintings destroyed and walls were whitewashed. In many cases the paintings simply disappeared from view. Fortunately, some survived underneath the whitewash and have been uncovered in more recent times.

It is rather like the difference between looking at a black-and-white photograph and a colour one. You are looking at the same thing, but somehow it is an entirely different world.

And that is one of the things I particularly like about these Italian churches. You suddenly realise just how colourful the past was. We tend to imagine the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in rather sombre colours because so much of what survives in northern Europe has lost its paint. Here, you walk into a little chapel and suddenly there are blues, reds, golds and all these faces staring down at you.

Of course, Italy has had its own destroyer of churches and frescoes: earthquakes. There is nothing particularly ideological about an earthquake, but it can be just as effective. Add damp, neglect, war and the ordinary passage of time and it is remarkable that any of these paintings have survived at all.

So there we were, in the middle of the fields, looking at this little church with its wonderful frescoes, while our young art student patiently explained everything to us.

And that, really, was the pleasure of it.

It wasn’t the Sistine Chapel. It wasn’t the Scrovegni Chapel. It wasn’t even particularly famous. It was simply a little church in the countryside, with somebody knowledgeable enough to open its secrets to us.

And perhaps that is what makes these places so enjoyable. You never quite know what is behind the next little door in Italy.

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The third farmhouse external fresco is to the right of ghe one depicting the King of Hungary.

Looking closer at the details and context of this piece, here is an explanation of what it depicts.

• Iconographic Type: It is a traditional Sacra Conversazione (sacred conversation) composition, which places the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child in direct visual and spiritual dialogue with accompanying saints.
• The Central Figures:
  • S. Maria Mater Dei (The Virgin Mary): Seated centrally in a rich red gown with a blue mantle, holding the Christ Child who stands energetically on her lap.
  • The Christ Child: Depicted standing upright rather than as an infant in arms, extending his hand outward toward Saint Francis.
• The Accompanying Saints:
  • S. Franciscus (Saint Francis of Assisi): Positioned on the left, wearing his characteristic Franciscan habit, tonsure, and a halo. He is holding a blossoming stem (often a lily, symbolizing purity).
  • S. Catharina (Saint Catherine): Positioned on the right, distinguished by her royal crown and holding a martyr’s palm branch.
• Celestial Elements: Two winged seraphim or cherub heads float in the upper registers of the sky, framing the central divine group.
• Epigraphy: The painted titulus at the lower right clearly labels the figures (S. MARIA MATER DEI – S. FRANCISCUS / S. FRANCISCUS – S. CATHARINA), indicating a deliberate dedication to these specific intercessors, often painted as a roadside shrine or votive fresco (tabernacolo) characteristic of Tuscan architecture.

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To the left of the fresco depicting the Hungarian king described in my previous post is this one:

This fresco, positioned precisely over a wooden doorway lintel, depicts Saint John the Baptist resting in the wilderness.

Here is a full breakdown of the artwork from both historical-iconographic and aesthetic perspectives:

Historical and Iconographic Context

• The Subject: The central figure is Saint John the Baptist, instantly recognizable by his traditional camel-skin garment, the halo indicating his sanctity, and a long slender reed cross (cruciform staff) held loosely in his hand.
• The Lamb (Agnus Dei): To the right, a small white lamb lies peacefully on the ground. Symbolizing Jesus Christ (“Behold the Lamb of God”), the lamb connects John’s ascetic desert life with his prophetic mission to announce the coming of the Savior.
• The Setting: The scene depicts the Judean desert where John lived a life of intense spiritual penance and isolation during his youth, as described in the Gospels. The vertical plant stalks and trees on the left signify the sparse flora of the wilderness.
• Architectural Function: Placed directly above a door lintel, this type of vernacular or regional sacred art served a protective and devotional purpose. Entering or leaving the building meant passing underneath the gaze of the patron saint and his symbolic animal guard, invoking spiritual safety and blessing.

Aesthetic and Stylistic Qualities

• Compositional 8Adaptation: Because it is painted across a wide, horizontally constrained octagonal lunette frame, the artist artfully arranged John’s body in a reclining, semi-reclining posture that mirrors the elongated shape of the architectural space.
• Colour Palette and Medium: Executed as a fresco (pigment applied to wet lime plaster), the work features soft, earthy tones—ochres, muted browns, dusty greens, and fading blues—that have naturally weathered over time, blending harmoniously with the rough, aged stone facade.
• Lighting and Form: The figure is modeled with gentle chiaroscuro (light and shadow), giving volume to the saint’s anatomy, limbs, and facial expression. His head rests pensively on his hand, imparting a mood of deep introspection, weariness, or quiet contemplation.
• Integration with Architecture: The framing border matches the architectural geometry of the lintel, creating an illusion that the scene is framed within a window looking out onto the biblical desert.

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I have become fascinated by traditional frescoes appearing on old Veneto farmhouses. Here is one I’ve looked at.

Researching into it here is a comprehensive look at the entire composition, weaving together the historical figures, the iconography, and the unique cultural tradition behind this remarkable exterior fresco:

1. The Divine Canopy (The Upper Register)

At the pinnacle of the composition, the scene is anchored by the representation of God the Father. Rendered with outstretched hands and a benevolent, watchful gaze, the divine figure looks down from the heavens to bless and superintend the mortal world below. This vertical axis—stretching from heaven down to temporal authority—was a cornerstone of Renaissance visual theology, reassuring viewers that earthly power and protection ultimately derived from divine sanction.

2. The Central Figures (The Earthly Realm)

Flanking the central narrative are two primary defenders who bridge the gap between heavenly grace and earthly duty:

• Matthias Corvinus: The 15th-century King of Hungary is instantly recognizable by his signature raven emblem (corvus), a nod to his legendary dynastic nickname. During the Renaissance, Corvinus was celebrated across northern Italy as a patron of humanism, a formidable military leader, and a key diplomatic figure linked to the Republic of Venice’s trade and political networks. Including him in a local fresco was a powerful statement of prestige, alignment with enlightened rule, and historic alliance.
• The Armoured Soldier: Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the king, the soldier is typically depicted in period plate armour and carrying a standard or banner. He represents the tangible force of defense, vigilance, and worldly order—the physical shield protecting the community.

3. The Function: A Threshold Guardian

Beyond its political and historical storytelling, this artwork belongs to a rich tradition of rural exterior votive frescoes found across the Veneto foothills. Rather than being housed inside a grand church or museum, these pieces were painted directly onto the plastered exterior walls of historic rural estates and homes.

• Protection and Apotropaic Intent: Acting as spiritual guardians for the household, these frescoes were placed near entryways to ward off misfortune, pestilence, and malevolent forces.
• The Itinerant Hand: Executed by skilled regional or itinerant painters working in a vibrant vernacular style, the artwork blends local devotional customs with grand historical motifs, turning an ordinary domestic facade into a landmark of civic pride and spiritual security.

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Prime Beef, pile dwellings and Peter Pan. It sounds like a rather unlikely combination, but that was more or less our day around the Revine Lakes. We have been coming to know these two lakes near us one called Santa Maria and the other just as The Lake. They are connected by a canal, and this time we managed to combine lunch, a prehistoric settlement and a performance of Peter Pan.

First of all, the prime beef. We found Trattoria Vanzella, a really nice trattoria a little way away, and we can thoroughly recommend it. I had my prime beef with potatoes, while Sandra had white polenta with greens, sopressa and mushrooms. Both dishes arrived in very ample servings — so ample, in fact, that we eventually had to ask for a doggy bag. Really, really good food, excellent portions and very well priced.

Then there were the pile dwellings. The actual archaeological site is at Colmaggiore di Tarzo, on the isthmus between the two lakes. It is there that archaeologists have found the remains of the prehistoric settlement. Livelet, at Revine Lago, is the open-air archaeological park where three full-size dwellings have been reconstructed, using evidence from Colmaggiore and other prehistoric wetland settlements in the Alpine region.

There are three reconstructed dwellings at Livelet, representing the Neolithic, the Copper Age and the Bronze Age. They are not exact copies of houses that stood at Colmaggiore, but reconstructions showing different types of prehistoric wetland settlement.

Our guide was excellent, explaining the flint tools, pottery, arrowheads, animal bones and evidence of spinning and weaving. There were also some wonderfully ordinary details. Fungi, for example, could be dried and used as tinder, while the archaeological remains show that people cultivated cereals, gathered hazelnuts and wild fruits, hunted, kept animals and fished in the lakes. They were clearly doing a bit of everything.

The archaeological story goes back rather further than I had realised. Finds were being made around the lakes as early as the 1920s, but the prehistoric settlement at Colmaggiore came properly to light in 1987, when peat extraction exposed wooden structures and other remains. Archaeological investigations followed in 1989, with excavations in 1992 and 1997, and research resumed between 2020 and 2023.

The survival of the wooden posts is particularly remarkable. They were preserved because they had been buried in wet, oxygen-poor ground — conditions which can protect wood for thousands of years. Standing beside one of them, you suddenly have a very direct connection with people who were living here long before the Etruscans, the Romans, the Celts, the Venetians or anybody else we normally associate with the history of the region.

Our guide was particularly good at explaining where the archaeological evidence ended and the reconstruction began. He was also very good with the children in the group, which is not always an easy thing to achieve with six-thousand-year-old wooden posts.

And then there was Peter Pan.

Peter Pan, of course, is the famous play by the Scottish dramatist and author J. M. Barrie, about the boy who never wanted to grow up. This particular production was performed by a very lively young theatrical company, and rather than sitting in one place, we were led around another part of the park beside the Revine Lakes. Each scene took place somewhere different, so we followed the actors from one location to another.

It reminded us of an occasion many years ago when we saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream performed in the woods at Welling, London. The principle was much the same: the landscape became part of the theatre.

It was very well done, although by the end we found ourselves becoming slightly exhausted. Not because of the play, which was lively enough, but because of all the walking between the different scenes. And what is Tinkerbell in Italian? Campanellino of course!

What struck me particularly was the character of Barrie’s Peter Pan. He is not simply a charming, mischievous boy, but disobedient, selfish, capricious and sometimes cruel — a rather disturbing embodiment of someone who refuses to grow up. Even his name has an interesting resonance: Peter comes from Peter Llewelyn Davies, one of the boys Barrie knew, while Pan is the Greek god of the wild, suggesting something much more primitive and mischievous.

And Barrie himself is much more interesting than his most famous creation might suggest. He wrote an enormous amount of other material — plays, novels, short stories and journalism — and The Admirable Crichton, for example, is a witty and rather sharp examination of class and social hierarchy.

But the real story of the five Llewelyn Davies boys is much less magical. George, the eldest, was killed on the Western Front in 1915. Michael drowned at Oxford in 1921 with his close friend Rupert Buxton; whether their deaths were accidental or a suicide pact has never been conclusively established. Jack died in 1959, while Peter, whose name Barrie gave to his most famous creation, killed himself in 1960 by throwing himself in front of a London Underground train. Nico, the youngest, lived until 1980.

It is extraordinary to think that one of the actual boys who knew Barrie and helped inspire Peter Pan was still alive as recently as 1980. The story of eternal childhood therefore has a rather poignant counterpoint in the lives of the real children, who were inevitably caught by the passage of time.

And perhaps that is what made this particular performance beside the Revine Lakes so interesting. We were watching a story about a boy who refuses to grow up while standing in a landscape where people were already living, farming, fishing and raising families six thousand years ago.

Time, in other words, was very much the subject of the day.