FLORENCE – Part of the charm of paintings is that they never change. Ever since the artist put their name to it, the painting has stayed the same in space and time. Perhaps this is why ” Modern Art”, with its preoccupation with flux, has moved in favour of the installation. Our art has to move with time, to change form and then change again, always in process, without end.

FURORE– Hidden away in the Lattari mountains high above the Amalfi Drive, the little town of Furore had a visibility problem. With celebrated neighbours like Positano, Vietri and Amalfi spread along Italy’s most spectacular coastline, few tourists ventured up the 7 kms of hairpin bends that led to a string of houses clinging like limpets to the dizzy heights. To add to its disadvantages, Furore had no central piazza where people gathered and no outstanding monuments. Its historic churches contained unsung works of art. Its history was largely undocumented.

ROME– The plot of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal is fairly simple and the chances are you will have heard something like it a hundred times before. Robert (Gianpiero Cognoli) and Jerry (Rinaldo Rocco) are best friends, they both work in the publishing industry and each is married. Robert is married to a woman called Emma (Sandra Paternostro) with whom Jerry enjoys a long affair, which ends at the beginning of the play. This is the first betrayal.

ROME — Relics are an easy target -- David Farley hones in on probably the most bizarre — Christ’s alleged foreskin which for hundreds of years was preserved in Calcata, a township some 45 km (30 miles) north of Rome.

Farley, an American journalist, his wife and dog lived for almost a year in Calcata amid a quirky group of bohemians, artists and dropouts, some of them non-Italians. Several of the locals were just as colourful.