Splendours

But their usual propensity to laugh at the city’s notorious dysfunction and accept its warts along with its many splendours has gone missing.

In these times of lockdown, it’s probably as close to travel as many of us will get for the moment but what a magnificent way to be treated to the splendours and less salubrious aspects of the world around us.

Michael Portillo continues his amiably engaging rail trip, this week travelling through the “wet tropics” of the North Queensland coast, taking in everything from primal rainforest to Art Deco splendours, boomerang lessons and the Great Barrier Reef.

In a third account, also by Petrus Olai, in Danmarks Tolv Herligheder ("Twelve Splendours of Denmark"), in splendour number nine, the same story is re-told almost verbatim, with a paragraph inserted correcting the year to 1219.

None of these splendours have any place in the work which Michelangelo created.

The many incidents of murder, rape, and vandalism that followed ended the splendours of Renaissance Rome forever.