Nice Items in Today's NY Times

Three of them: (1) a story about Bologna, the Lucullan princess of Italy and my childhood home away from home (Santa Maria Maggiore and Santo Stefano are ancient and magnificent); (2) a review of a wonderful looking new translation by John Ashbery of Rimbaud's Illuminations; and (3) a review of a book about a really neat volume by Tacitus, Germania, re-discovered sometime in the 15th century.  Tacitus is the author of the insufficiently well-known Annales, as great a declinist history as has ever been written (post-Augustan Rome was grim). 

From Book I of the Annales: "The histories of Tiberius, Caius [that's Caligula!], Claudius, and Nero, while they were in power, were falsified through terror, and after their death were written under the irritation of a recent hatred.  Hence my purpose is to relate a few facts about Augustus -- more particularly his last acts, then the reign of Tiberius, and all which follows, without either bitterness or partiality, from any motives to which I am far removed."