Antinoöpolitan trousers

If I have my way, they'll be MY Antinoöpolitan trousers, to be based on the above cotton-and-flax pattern of little roundels with winged horses. It's one of many astonishing Coptic-Roman fabric survivals brought to light on the 13 expeditions to ancient Antinoöpolis, the city founded by Hadrian in memory of his beloved beauty Antinous and more elegantly known as Antonoé in French, under the command of Albert Gayet between 1897 and 1908. Our dear friend Cressida Bell, designer of my prized dressing gown, won't do it as the artwork has to be her own. But wouldn't the jambières look splendid, to judge from the model wearing them behind 'Thaïs' (explanation below) in this leading image for the Musée des Tissus in Lyon, which has just held the most spectacular exhibition of the finds. I don't have credits for all the images, which I think are without exception publicity for the show, though I assume the below is, like the above, by Pierre Verrier.

Returning to the great museum, which we saw on our first visit to Lyon, and discovering this exhibition was serendipitous. It happened to be round the corner from where I'd had my lunch interview with the great violinist Vadim Repin, reason for the visit. I thought I'd look at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs in the same mansion, not having seen it first time round, and asked if there was a special ticket. No, said the incredibly friendly and helpful people at the desk, only a combined one, but when I mentioned how much I'd loved the Coptic fish tapestry in the Tissus, they told me there was a companion piece and much, much more in the exhibition. This still remains the absolute highlight of my four visits to the fabulous French city.

Having just walked round the Viking exhibition at the British Museum, private view last night courtesy of the diplo-mate, I was reminded how selective a view we have of the ancients according to what's survived - for example, I'd love to know if the fierce Norsemen had tattoos, and if so, what they looked like. At least we know they filed and probably dyed their front teeth to look terrible in battle. But the dry middle Eastern climate has preserved not only those sensational encaustic Fayum portraits which are the first painted great ones of their kind (the only labelled specimen from Gayet's expeditions pictured below),

but also the formal and everyday wear of well-to-do Roman Egyptians. Much needs reconstructing, and the Musée des Tissus has done just that with its photographed models,

but the scraps - sometimes more - give an incredible impression of what those people wore. Needless to say I was hooked by the garments of the lady called Thaïs, who may well have been the legendary courtesan - Gayet's sponsor Eduard Guimet certainly liked to think so, as Massenet's heroine was then popular at the Paris Opéra - and above all by the mythological scenes on the shawl belonging to one Sabina, perhaps the most extensive masterwork in the exhibition. Then there were the embroidered slippers.

The last room has three climactic offerings - fabric-wrapped mummies, with hair intact, of three officials including this fonctionnaire à la pourpre (translation, anyone?)

Very well, three mummies may not be as gobsmacking as the largest of all Viking ships, with modern Danish craftsmanship recreating the entire frame, which greets you in the last room of the new exhibition space at the British Museum, but it was an impressively designed way to finish. I have a great deal of digesting to do, as I bought the lavish catalogue, and my French is halting.

The 24 hours in Lyon passed very pleasantly. I went back to my old hotel near the Opéra in the Presqu'ile between the Rhône and the Saône, the very quiet Grand Hotel des Terreaux which I warmly recommend, now rather over-designed but calm and intimate still (even if it's weird to have breakfast in the chlorine-smelling, humid room with the swimming pool). I arrived via the tram from the airport, walking from Part Dieu to the Terreaux, and hit quite by accident the new Les Halles de Lyon, which you'd have to go out of your way to find: shame they knocked the old glass building down in crazy redevelopment in the 1960s, but the smells and the swishness were impressive.

I remedied the bad impression gained from walking down the central Rue Auguste-Comte last time I was here and finding it full of fast-food joints by exploring the parallel streets in the grid plan, full of boucheries, boulangeries and patisseries probably cheaper than the chain names.

I didn't have a great meal this time in the food capital of France, just a good one, but have earmarked places to visit on return. Here are Vadim and I after lunch in his hotel brasserie, photo taken on his phone by the very nice waitress.

Downpours arrived after that, which made the museum a good choice, but my morning stroll took in the usual views. The Place des Jacobins

and the main square, the Place Bellecour, with the not very lovely Notre-Dame de Fourvière on the hill near the Roman remains across the Saône and the statue of Louis XIV by Lemot in the foreground

and the big wheel at the other end.

After the exhibition, I worked my way back in the pouring rain via a patisserie selling superb cannoli, the Romanesque St Martin-d'Ainay, closed by late afternoon

and an alternative route through Vieux Lyon, accidentally stumbling across the hotel which Vadim told me made the best madeleines (he'd admired my Proust watch). But the receptionist shook her head blankly when I asked, so it was back to tea in the hotel before the tram to the airport and a two-hour-delayed late flight). I'm looking forward very much to returning in April.

Volubilis: an outpost of empire

Sites, shmites: it's easy to become cynical about yet another tourist-attracting antiquity. Actually, when I come to think about it, those that have been worth running varying degrees of the fairground gamut to see are more numerous than I'd casually remembered: the pyramids and sphinx, Ephesus, Nemrut Dag, the Acropolis of Athens, Persepolis, Tyre, Palmyra, Qalaat Samaan, Petra, Thanjavur...probably I've left something spectacular off the list. The point is that Roman Volubilis, about which I'd heard nothing before we went to Morocco, wasn't high on the list: the feeling was, we're in Meknes, we ought to go. And it turned it to be one of the most breathtakingly-located, mosaic-rich set of ruins we'd ever seen. The rains had brought the flowers out in abundance, of course, and even the edge of the site looking over to the basilica and forum was a wonder to behold. The ruins are spread out on a ridge above the high and fertile Zerhoun plateau. Above are abundant olive groves and copper-rich hills forming an amphitheatre, in the middle of which nestles the shrine-town of Moulay Idriss. Volubilis may have been a Berber settlement before the first century BC, when the Romans arrived. Its era of prosperity began when Augustus gave the combined kingdoms of Mauritania and Numidia to the Berber prince Juba II. So Volubilis became the seat of the provincial governor of Mauritania Tingitana (love that name, comes from Tingi which was the original name for equally influential Roman Tangiers). It exported wheat and oil - easy still to see why - as well as wild beasts for Roman games. And just as Lebanon was all but stripped of its cedars to provide timber for ships, so ancient Morocco lost its lions, bears and elephants. They became extinct in 200 years, about the length of the Roman rule here. After it, the mixed population continued to speak Latin well into the seventh century. The city was all but abandoned a century later, with the coming of Islam, and plundered in the eighteenth, when Moulay Ismail plundered the site for its marble. The animals are at least depicted in what for me is the most charming of the many mosaics which still preserve their brilliant colours in full sun and are subjected to only the minimum of cordoning-off (we saw not a single guard, and 1990s plans for expansion with a new museum and visitors' centre seemed to have come to a full stop). The so-called House of Orpheus is a sizeable mansion, formerly of three storeys. Its finest floor has a design I'd want in my own palace: the great musician at the centre, taming the birds and beasts who radiate outwards from the centre. There's also a more basic, black and white marine picture with a stocky Amphitrite in a chariot drawn by a sea horse and sundry exotic sea creatures. The prospect of basilica, capitol and forum then leads you forward - as do the storks nesting peacefully on several of the columns, unperturbed by the sparrows which flit noisily in and out of the twigging beneath them. The complex here seems to have been rebuilt in 217 AD during the reign of the African-born Emperor Septimus Severus. The path then leads onwards to a triumphal arch erected in the year of Caracalla's death. It would have been lavishly adorned with statues, many of which along with bronzes which give their names to some of the houses have gone to the museum in Rabat and seem, given the present building lethargy at Volubilis, unlikely to return here in the near future. The Decumanus Maximus which rises upwards from the arch is lined with many of the more prosperous residences. Most of the mosaics are slightly crudely executed - especially as compared with those in Tunis's splendid Bardo Museum - but the colours, where not over-restored, are very jolly. Bacchus discovers a half-lost Ariadne in the Knight's House while the labours of Hercules are portrayed in roundels to the north and there's an even finer mosaic of Bacchus flanked by the four seasons (only two of them reproduced in full below) and with what is - I think, but the guidebooks can't reach a consensus about this - a Bacchante beneath him. The best-executed mosaics are on the other side of the Decumanus Maximus, in the House of Venus. In the most celebrated of them, Diana is discovered at her bath by Actaeon. The surprised nymph on the left and the love-goddess's Roman hairdo are marvellously executed. And in the next room, Hylas is captured by frolicking nymphs. No doubt more will come to life if the indolent archaeological team can get its act together. But it's a wonderful site to spend an afternoon strolling around, and it certainly wasn't swamped by tour groups when we went. By 5.30 when I returned to the capitol, there was just a handful of visitors and the stork welcomed her hunter-gatherer mate back to the nest. I missed snapping that, but here she is anyway looking haughtily at a cheeky sparrow. There was no time to stop in Moulay Idriss, other than to take a view from above of the camel-humped town with the mausoleum to Morocco's influential sultan-pioneer of Islam in its dip. Then we sped back to Meknes to enjoy the early-evening entertainment on the square.

Triestine temples

That's to say, of worship, commerce, consumerism, refreshment and feline sanctuary. Where better to start than the west front of Trieste's Duomo on the hill and down to the synagogue, one of the biggest in Europe and flamboyantly constructed in 1910?

Ancient Trieste plays little part in Jan Morris's inspirational meditation on city and self because, as she fairly says, 'I long ago conceived my own idea of this city's real purpose', and that essentially begins with Maria Theresa's Hapsburgian free port. The Romans do of course briefly come into it, because Mussolini's Fascists made quite certain to draw parallels with their own regime, restoring the forum in front of the cathedral and plonking their giant headquarters bang opposite the similarly reconstructed Roman theatre. Most Triestine's favourite ancient sight is the misleadingly called the Arco di Riccardo - but the Lionheart never was confined here, apparently - put up to honour Augustus in 33 AD.


Anyway, since Morris doesn't purport to be a guidebook, you won't learn from her that the Duomo boasts, either side of its hideous 1930s-decorated chancel apse, two of the loveliest old mosaics in Italy. This one, from the 13th century, depicts Christ flanked by one of Trieste's two resident Saints, Giusto, drowned in the bay with a lead weight attached to his neck, and St. Servulus.


Note the fabulously pretty decorated border, especially the bit beneath Christ's dove-refreshed feet:


Like everything else in Trieste, the Duomo is a bit of this, a bit of that. Essentially its Byzantine pillars are fine and its atmosphere, at least when we visited on a warm evening, very peaceful (oh dear, yes, the word everyone writes in church visitors' books, but isn't it what many of us agnostics want from a space like this?)


There's a chapel with a tomb for the last of the Spanish pretenders - the Carlists were here - and an eccentric bit of 20th century composite work on the west front, incorporating - rather brilliantly, I think - six busts from a Roman tomb, three on either side of the entrance.


Winckelmann's monument next door I'd better save for another entry: its surrounding sculpture garden is surely the most enchanting corner in all Trieste.

And what of the synagogue? It holds itself proudly, not hidden away as it would be in other cities, symbol of an unusually proud and happy diaspora, an invaluable mercantile input, for 150 years.



Sadly, a civic committee which tried to get them all out to Palestine in the early 1930s went unheeded by many, and 700 were deported and/or killed. But there's now a thriving Jewish community in Trieste which helps to keep the massive synagogue going (and millions must have been spent on the restoration, which looks as new). A Greek congregation also packs out the Church of San Nicolo on Sunday mornings, a favourite ritual for James Joyce to attend when he was here. We popped in briefly on our way to the station, but the previous day we'd inspected and been made very welcome by the attendant.


Within a couple of hundred yards there's also the Serbian Orthodox church of San Spiridione and the neoclassical Sant'Antonio, another thriving hub of worship when we visited and closing the view up the Canal Grande.


We broke up our tour of this part of town with a coffee and tramezzini in one of Trieste's two most celebrated cafes, the Tommaseo.


It's the earlier of two major irredentist haunts and named after the celebrated patriot who launched many of his most impassioned speeches here.



Despite the presence of a few old locals here, I much preferred the darker haven of the Cafe San Marco just around the corner from the synagogue (many of whose worshippers were welcome here).


It was opened in 1914, burnt down in an anti-Austrian protest and now retains its atmosphere, again a little bit for tourists but mostly for the residents, who enjoy film shows and concerts in one of its long halls.


The San Marco feels very Viennese, partly by virtue of the Klimtian gilding but also because of the celebration of world theatre in its little round panels.



Svevo and Joyce both loved it, and so did I.

A quick whizz, then, through other churches of sorts: mercantile splendour


furs with reflected art nouveau extravagance in the heart of the shopping district


and finally sanctuary for the city's enormous cat population. We saw a number of little old ladies, one very elegantly dressed in twinset and pearls, putting out lavish fish and pasta suppers in bowls. In the courtyard of the huge old Hapsburgian hospital, still in run-down use, numerous shelters have been made for the feline inhabitants - do they keep the mouse and rat population down, I wonder? - and food is never short.


And this complacent puss was to be seen night and day basking beneath his protector's shrine high on the hill every time we walked past.


Morris has got it exactly right, I think: 'in Trieste animals are rarely scared of humans, to my mind a sure sign of civic integrity, come wealth or poverty, fame or ignominy, empire or dictatorship or Autonomous Region'. Brava.