A selection of historical conundrums answered by experts
When did Roman Italy cease to be Roman and become Italian?
The first half of this question is relatively simple to answer. Following the sack of Rome by the Visigoth king Alaric in AD 410, Roman Italy began to disintegrate, a process that continued over the next century under the onslaught of repeated invasions of armies from the north. The peninsula then fragmented into numerous independent states, each of which trumpeted their sense of identity by adopting their own currencies, dialects and patron saints.
The answer to the second half of this question can be found by looking at the 15th and 16th centuries, when the rulers of these states revived the artistic traditions of their Roman forebears to create what we now call the Renaissance. This era of great artists and writers, as well as the first opera, cemented the peninsula’s reputation as a centre of cultural excellence and, by 1700, a magnet for wealthy foreign tourists.
Despite this, Italy still did not exist as a country: Venice was the capital of a republic; Naples was a kingdom subject to Spain; Florence was the capital of the grand duchy of Tuscany; and Rome was the capital of the Papal States. As the Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich remarked in 1814, Italy was merely a “geographical expression”.
It was not until 1861 that the principalities agreed to unification, initially under the king of Savoy, though the monarchy was abolished when Italy was declared a republic in 1946.
Mary Hollingsworth, author of Princes of the Renaissance (Apollo, 2021)
How did people store clothes before the invention of coat hangers?
The first modern coat hanger is said to be an 1869 design for a ‘clothes hook’, which was filed with the US Patent Office. Previously, the way that garments were stored depended on the type of item and quantity of clothing a person owned: an 18th-century royal would have had dedicated rooms for their fine silks, whereas a typical British family might have owned only a few changes of clothes.
For the latter, a lockable chest, chest of drawers or closet containing shelves and hooks provided the best storage. As resalable assets, it was important to make sure that garments were both clean and secure, especially in shared homes. Storing clothes with herbs r
