nEU-MED 2: Vetricella: An Early Medieval Royal Property in Tuscany’s Mediterranean, edited by Giovanna Bianchi & Richard Hodges The second volume of our ERC project in Tuscany’s Maremma has just appeared as an open access monograph, published by Insegna del Giglio of Florence: https://www.insegnadelgiglio.it/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/bsam28-neumed-2-ebook.pdf The volume is largely devoted to the remarkable site of Vetricella in the Val Pecora, close to the reclaimed Follonic

Darkness had descended on another glorious spring evening. Then a disturbing surprise. A vehicle was slowly grinding its way down the back lane with a loudspeaker, repeating information that at first was incomprehensible. Garbled, fast instructions, momentarily intimidating. Had we been invaded? Then I grasped the tenor if not the detail of what was intended. Every villager was being summoned. But to what? I rushed outside and like a shadow passing through the far trees was t

Twenty years ago today, on the first of May 2000, the Butrint Foundation trustees and directors were generously invited by the Averoff family to spend Greek Easter in their home at Metsovo, in the Pindus mountains of Greece. We were discussing future collaborations in this celebrated Aromanian (Vlach) shepherds’ town that might help Albania as it inched out of a distressing decade of struggle. Metsovo is a mountain town, full of tightly arranged Ottoman houses around a large