Underbelly

Here's the best explanation of the background to the late uproar that I've seen anywhere: Michael Hudson on rentiers .  I hesitate ...

I've been fussing all week about the rapacity of the Renaissance Popes who seemed to regard the assumption of the tiara as a license to ...

Idling around Rome one day last week, we found ourselves at the (overblown) public piazza in front of the (oveblown) presidential palace, th...

Meditating further on the phenomenon of persistent wealth, I just thought of another great example: Venice.  Seems to me that most of what w...

Followup on the Barberini and the rentier  class .   As with several other of the great Palazzi, the Barberini has reinvented itself as a ki...

Following up on the rentier class (cf. link ), Geert Mak in his history of Amsterdam offers some fascinating insight into the long traject...

In Rome last week, we made a project out of exploring the palaces of the great papal families, guided in large part by Anthony Majanlahti...