Rome wasn't built in a day:Simon Sebag Montefiore in the Eternal City.

"They say Rome wasn't built in a day. But I wasn't on that particular job" - Brian Clough.

Simon Sebag Montefiore has both the name, and the look, of a historian. His freshly pressed cotton sky blue shirts and Panama hats give him a colonial air that's, thankfully, not reflected in his warm, knowledgeable delivery. He is both passionate and curious about his subject, the city of Rome, and its history, and that comes across in droves in his recent BBC4 series, Rome:A History of the Eternal City. You're not gonna watch that by mistake.

Set across three hour long episodes (City of the Sacred, Divine Gamble, and The Rebirth of God's City) it sought to tell a tale not just of the Italian capital but of how it become, over the last three thousand years, a centre for religious devotion, religious piety, and, more often than not, religious infighting. Rome, of course, is a spectacularly pretty city but its story, you'll not be surprised to learn, has been anything but pretty.

These days, Rome hosts thousands of Catholic pilgrims but its origins as a sacred site predate Christianity entirely, Pagan gods dominated Rome for a millennia, the city's churches are built on the site of Pagan temples, and the Pope even has a Pagan precedent.

The creation myth of Rome is these days mined heavily for tourists, you can buy all sorts of tat featuring Remus and Romulus, but in the way it seems to be accepted we discover the roots of religious Rome, and, perhaps, the roots of the gullibility, faith some would say, that allowed Rome to flourish as a religious centre. The kind of city where, each July, a statue of the Virgin Mary is towed along the Tiber by a motorboat in front of an adoring crowd holding balloons and lighting fireworks.

This pomp and circumstance has its roots in the tale of Romulus and Remus, the abandoned twins who were suckled by a she-wolf, before growing up to argue over which hill the city of Rome would be built upon. Romulus favoured the Palatine Hill, Remus the Aventine. They consulted with the gods who proposed a contest of augury, interpreting omens from the observed flight of birds.

Remus saw six birds first but his brother, Romulus, saw twelve thus exacerbating their dispute into a feud which eventually saw Romulus, or perhaps one of his followers, kill Remus and found the city of Rome upon the Palatine Hill in the year 753BC. The mythical story of Rome had begun, as it would continue, with power struggles, with murder, and with both of these things being justified by the invention of deities.

At least that's the creation myth of Rome. The reality is somewhat more prosaic. Rome began as a patchwork of farms on the seven hills overlooking the marshy Tiber valley that slowly expanded to form a more or less unified whole. Romans came to believe that the land within the city limits, inside the 'pomerium' boundary, enjoyed a divine status and, therefore, all wars and burials had to take place outside of it. To break these rules was not just tantamount to sacrilege, it was sacrilege.

It's why the Appian Way, one of the most important Roman roads into the city (from Brindisi), is only lined with tombs up until the Roman city limits. Other bodies were held in catacombs (also outside the city proper). These were impressive but nothing compared to sewers so large that Romans boasted of being able to sail boats through them. Sebag Montefiore, uncharacteristically and somewhat indecorously, describes "penetrating the fecal caverns".

Built in the 6c BC they were the brainchild of the fifth king of Rome, Tarquinius Priscus, and they were believed not only to purify the city practically but also symbolically. The depraved young emperor, Elagabalus, was assassinated and tossed into the sewer. Rome needed to be purged not just of faeces and urine but also of depravity. As we'll discover that turned out be an ongoing process.

The Bocca della Verita, the mouth of truth into which scores of young lovers pose for photographs these days (the legend being that if you've been unfaithful the marble mask bites your hand off), is actually a sewer cover. A marriage of the secular and the sacred at its most blatant.

The Forum, in the heart of Pagan Rome, saw speeches made, laws passed, and trials take place. Temple upon temple was built there and, because this was sanctified ground, all laws had to be passed there where the augurs consulted the heavens. Legend has it that was the direct result of the rule of another legendary king, Romulus' successor Numa Pompilius is the ruler credited with creating the rituals that made the rise of Rome possible.

The Forum was built over many different eras but every building there, during those different eras, was dedicated to God. One of these fine erections, the Regia, served as the office of the Pontifex Maximus, the most important position in ancient Roman religion and the aforesaid papal precursor.

But it was also home to the Vestal Virgins, chosen at the age of six for their moral and physical perfection and tasked with tending the sacred flame. If the flame went out Rome would fall. Like the ravens leaving the Tower of London.

The Haruspices were Etruscan diviners, skilled at interpreting signs from the Gods. Which they did by extracting a liver from a freshly sacrificed sheep and using it as a map in heaven. Sounds legit.

This liver/heavenly atlas would be divided into sixteen regions, each with their own gods. If the region representing the god of war was in any way bruised or damaged this would signify that the war god was not happy and now was not the time to wage war. A clean liver might mean time for war.

This wasn't the only animal cruelty that was going on in ancient Rome. The festival of grain at the Circus Maximus in April drew crowds to witness foxes with torches tied to their tails to protect crops from vermin, dogs were sacrificed to protect against mildew, and to ensure a good harvest, each October, a horse got it in the neck.

While it seems certain that the foxes, dogs, and horses weren't very happy, it turns out some of the people weren't either. In 509BC aristocrats rebelled against King Tarquin the Proud and their success ensured that the Senate would replace the king and that, ultimately, the Roman Republic was born.

Religion, however, remained at the heart of Roman life. The dedication ceremony of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline Hill that year saw, supposedly, all of Rome out to celebrate. The temple was designed to remind people that Jupiter was the source of Roman glory and was, de facto, the first pagan cathedral of Rome. Rome was no longer a town but a city, a sacred capital.

More temples rose, built with the spoils of Roman conquest and expansion. Generals rode around Rome in chariots with their vanquished foes shackled alongside them. These generals were allowed to dress as Jupiter for a day but to ensure they didn't develop a messiah complex, a slave was 'employed' to whisper to the general:- "remember, you are only mortal".

The Roman expansion from city to empire led to an influx of Greeks and Egyptians and they brought their own gods with them. Some, like Isis, were imported into the Roman religion syncretically and one, Magna Mater (great mother, an Anatolian mother goddess), ended up playing a crucial role in the history of Rome.

In 205BC Rome and Carthage (led by Hannibal) found themselves in a power struggle over future control of the Mediterranean and in order to defeat the Carthaginians, the Romans appointed Magna Mater a Roman goddess. When she arrived on the Tiber, like the Virgin Mary thousands of years later, escorted by self-castrated eunuch priests, all of Rome arrived to welcome her. Three years later, Hannibal was defeated. I'd say that's more a case of correlation than causation but logic doesn't go far when discussing religious belief.

By the 1c BC the whole of Rome had become a shrine to Julius Caesar. Caesar was a gambler, a risk taker, and a master manipulator. He used religion for his own political ends, he claimed descent from the goddess Venus, and on the Ides of March the man his own soldiers called "the balding adulterer" was murdered.

The murder had been intended to save the republic but instead it brought it to an end and Rome became what Caesar had been working towards making it - an autocracy. Future Roman emperors would not just be the most powerful men in the western world, but also the sons of God.

Caesar's heir was his eighteen year old nephew Octavian, a brilliant strategist who anointed his generals and priests with godly status and won a decisive power struggle over his rivals, Mark Antony and his spouse Cleopatra, the last active ruler of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt. Defeated, both committed suicide. Mark Antony by sword. Cleopatra by snake.

Octavian had won a battle between east and west, between the Occident and the Orient, and, in celebration Octavian changed his name to Augustus Caesar, the title of the Eternal City was bestowed upon Rome, and a temple was built to Octavian/Augustus' great uncle Julius Caesar in the Forum.

On 1st January 42BC the Senate declared Julius Caesar 'divine', a god, and that meant that his 'son' (great nephew, really) Augustus, the emperor, was the son of a god. In 12BC Augustus declared himself Pontifex Maximus and built shrines on every street corner in Rome. Augustus Caesar, the arch-propagandist, was creating a new imperial Roman mythology.

When Augustus died a Senate vote declared him, too, to be a god. It set a trend. Emperors would now ascend to a deified status when they died and temples sprang up to celebrate Antonius Pius, Vespasian, and Titus. Vespasian even joked on his deathbed, "I think I'm about to become a god".

Others lacked Vespasian's modesty and humour. The "demented" Caligula dressed as Venus in a dress, Hadrian deified his young gay lover, and Nero erected a 120ft tall statue of himself as the sun god in the heart of Rome.

Perhaps because of the indulgent nature of some of these emperors, foreign sects were gaining pockets of popularity across Rome and one, a belief called Christianity that had arrived from the east, took particular displeasure at the Roman worship of the emperors. This 'sect' had, within three centuries, taken over Rome. The Roman gods would crumble into dust and Christianity would rise in its place. Where it still stands, challenged but unbowed, to this day.

How did this happen? Initially the Christians were seen (correctly) as cranks, their beliefs worthy only of mockery. Graffiti from the time, around 1AD, shows the crucifixion of a Christian with a donkey's head. It's believed to be the oldest ever representation of the crucifixion and, at the time, it would have been seen as a double insult. Not just the donkey, but the cross. Christians, understandably, didn't like the cross. It remains to me a mystery why they do now.

As crosses were used to mock Christians perhaps they were trying to reclaim power of the symbol, invert it in some way. That would certainly fit in with the Roman belief that the Christians practiced magic, indulged in incest, and even partook of cannibalism.

When depression, civil war, and invasion nearly crushed the Roman empire they were saved by the emperor Diocletian who took it upon himself to destroy all the sects that he felt were polluting and destabilising Rome. This he did. With one exception. Christianity remained, and it was the Christians who were blamed when Diocletian's temple was razed to the ground.

The fire had happened, Diocletian declared, because the Christians had been worshipping the wrong god. Christians who did not denounce their belief in this new Christian god were executed yet, while this was happening, Pagan Romans continued to convert to a sect headed by an upstart who had died a criminal's death in the remote Roman outpost of Judea.

The key was that Christianity offered its believers, if they were 'good', eternal life, and with the life expectancy of the average Roman being 29 the appeal is blindingly obvious. Pagan gods may grant the fortunate a great empire - but you can only enjoy it for three decades - the Christian god God offers immortality, and to everyone. Your move next, Pagans!

The message of Jesus had started to travel soon after his crucifixion in Jerusalem, as did his apostles. One of them, Peter, reached Rome but he chose a bad time to arrive (for his life at least, for posterity - he couldn't have timed it better). Following a destructive fire in Rome, the emperor Nero rounded up many of the city's Christians at the Imperial horse racing track and had them executed.

Blaming them for the fire, Nero had some killed by dogs, others set on fire, and a select few crucified. Peter, out of respect for Jesus, requested he be crucified upside down. The Roman state, the Pagan establishment, quite clearly, saw Christianity as a threat. Communion was seen as a, somewhat indirect, form of cannibalism. Sixtus II, the Bishop of Rome (or Pope) was beheaded by Roman soldiers.

303AD saw the bloodiest attack on the Christians up until that point. Churches were destroyed and bishops were decapitated, the body of St Victoria still lies, throat cut, for all to see in modern day Rome. Yet this just led to martyrs and further promotion of Christianity.

The spot where Peter had been crucified was marked by an obelisk which, to this day, still stands in (roughly) the same place, in the middle of St Peter's Square. It's not a horse racing track anymore but the seat of the Roman Catholic church.

The person credited with making the growing, and influential, sect of Christianity the state religion is the emperor Constantine. Constantine was harsh, he was ruthless, he was a warlord who had slashed his way to power, and he showed no pity or remorse, even having both his wife and son executed.

Just the kind of guy to embrace Christianity. When Constantine fell out with his deputy, Maxentius, it led to a civil war. Before going into a crucial battle on the banks of the Tiber, Constantine claimed to have seen a cross silhouetted against the sun accompanied by the legend "by this sign you shall conquer". Constantine fought, and won, under Christian banners.

He had changed the history of Rome, and the history of the world, by gambling on a change of religion. How different the last 1700 years may have been had Maxentius been victorious?

Of course, not everyone in Rome was happy with this turn of events and, battle over, a soft power had to be enacted to ensure transition to Christianity was as smooth as possible. Christian churches were made 'imperial' to attract Romans and Constantine's mother, Helena, was sent to Jerusalem from where she returned with a wealth of Christian relics including, we're led to believe (itchy chin), the very steps of Pontius Pilate's palace that Jesus had walked after being sentenced to death. To this day, pilgrims visiting Rome still ascend these steps on their knees.

Not only was Rome becoming Christian but Christianity was taking on a Roman flavour. Constantine's first seven Christian churches were built on the outskirts of Rome so as not to upset the Pagan temples that dominated the centre. The largest of these basilicas was built over (the now sanctified) Peter's tomb where it stood for one thousand years before it was replaced during the Renaissance. It became, and it remains, the focus of Roman Christian devotion.

But on Constantine's death, Rome was still a city divided between Paganism and Christianity. It was now down to the Popes. Pope Damasus I was a smooth talking adulterer, a 'tickler of the ears of middle aged women', but also a poet who used his poetry to create propaganda for Rome's holy graves and for Christianity itself.

Crowds flocked to see the poems he'd had inscribed on the graves inside the catacombs, perhaps unaware that they were being 'sold' Christianity in doing so. Emboldened by this neat move, Damasus I claimed Rome for St Peter and St Peter for Rome. As Peter had been martyred in Rome this meant he was a Roman (he'd been born in Bethsaida in the Golan Heights in modern day Syria).

Saint Peter's martyrdom gave his heirs, the Popes, special authority but this would not mean Rome would become an impregnable fortress. In the fifth century the Huns arrived on the Italian peninsula, displacing the Goths who had been living as refugees on the borders of the Roman Empire. Desperate, hungry, Goths exchanged their own children for food but the mean Romans fobbed them off with dog meat

Alaric I, first King of the Visigoths, and his troops besieged Rome and tried to cut a deal with the Romans. They wanted land of their own but the Romans refused. "The thicker the grass, the easier to scythe it down" said Alaric, who began to do just that. It resulted in an impasse, in starvation, and in dead bodies filling the streets of Rome, and, eventually, Alaric and forty thousand Goths bursting in to the Eternal City. Which meant plunder, rape, murder, and all the kinds of things you'd expect from a barbarian horde. These Goths were, after all, Aryan Christians. It wouldn't be the last time in the history of the world that Christians would go round killing each other.

Rome had fallen and St Augustine of Hippo, the theologian from Numidia (roughly modern day Algeria), said it was because the city was steeped in sin from its Pagan past. Yes, he blamed a war between two Christian tribes on the Pagans!

By now the Roman Empire had been split in two and Justinian, who led the Eastern Roman Empire from Constantinople, desired to reunite it. Vigilius was bribed to be Justinian's pope, the first of the Byzantine papacy, but he was ineffectual and weak and was sent back to Rome having failed to do Justinian's bidding for him.

The papacy hit its lowest ebb and the city of Rome soon followed. Within a generation another Germanic tribe, the Lombards, had arrived. Aqueducts were crushed and the Roman water supply flowed away from the city. Rome was down to a population of 90,000. It was a beleaguered outpost. Yet "cometh the hour, cometh the man" (says Sebag Montefiore, warming to his theme).

The man that 'cometh' was the super rich aristocrat Gregory who had made it clear he'd actually prefer a life of quiet contemplation to the hassles of heading up the Catholic church. He was ordained against his will and eventually elected Pope. Going along with my theory that anyone who wants to be a manager, or in charge of anything, should never be allowed to be, Gregory turned out to be excellent at the job in hand.

He excelled in planning, he excelled in finance, and he excelled in diplomacy. He struck a truce with the Lombards and set up welfare centres across the city. He did what most of us would imagine Christians are supposed to do. Which meant missionary work as well!

Gregory had been impressed by an Anglo-Saxon slave boy on sale at a Roman market, a fair bit to unpack in that sentence - different times, eh?, and felt that these people were not so unlike the Romans after all, perhaps they could be converted. Christmas 597AD in England saw ten thousand Angles baptised so, clearly, he was on to something. He brought Christianity to Britain and even though, by papal standards, he seems a good egg, it's him we still have to blame.

Gregory's missionary success meant that pilgrims from northern Europe began arriving in Rome, and these ones weren't coming to see classical monuments. They wanted to see sights relating to martyrdoms and, it seems, the gorier that martyrdom the better. A black market began offering the wizened body parts of dead saints even though Gregory himself had decreed that contact with the bones of saints would bring about instant death. Most of them would have been forgeries anyway, so it turned out not to be such a big deal.

On this Gregory was a tad hypocritical. Gregory himself had relics sent to faraway bishops to strengthen papal authority. When Gregory died in 604AD he was interred in St Peter's, his epitaph read "God's consul". He'd left Roman Catholicism the most powerful institution in western Europe and was now 'free' for as much 'quiet contemplation' as he wanted. Blissfully unaware of the new threat that faced Rome, and Christianity. You knew it was coming. Islam.

Arab forces had captured Jerusalem in 637AD and Rome feared it was next. To strengthen itself against the Abrahamic upstarts the Romans made an alliance with the Frankish king Charlemagne who, in 800AD, was made Holy Roman Emperor. In 846AD the fears that had begun nearly two centuries ago were made real. Arab forces attacked Rome and looted St Peter's basilica.

In response, Pope Leo IV erected the 40ft high, 12ft deep Leonine Walls and, as often with a city or culture under siege, the Romans within these walls started to turn on each other. Popes began torturing and killing each other (honestly, these Christians, you can't trust them anywhere). In 879 Pope Stephen VI ordered the exhumation of a previous pope, Formosus. Stephen had not been a fan of Formosus so he had his corpse tried for 'violation of canon law'.

Found guilty (no shit), Formosus's dead body was stripped naked, his fingers were chopped off, and he was tossed unceremoniously in to the Tiber. This was the new normal. Both in Rome and in Christianity

By the time of the early tenth century, the Theophylact family dominated papal Rome. There were a confusing large number of them, too many even for Sebag Montefiore to focus on individually. He focuses instead on the female Theophylacts, who were seen as depraved maneaters who dominated numerous kings and emperors. Blame the women, that's the way!

Popes were strangled, family members murdered each other, plotting thrived, morality was corrupted, and things, as they do, fell apart. The holy city was, yet again - this is as repetitive as counting rosary beads, on its knees. Charlemagne's successors marched south from France to attack Rome. The pope at the time, Gregory VII, published the Dictatus papae which declared that papal authority was absolute.

It caused the Investiture Controversy, a dispute between Gregory VII and the Holy Roman Emperor, the Saxony born Henry IV (yes, the regicidal numbers can get a bit confusing, welcome to the world of privilege) who wasn't keen on this absolute authority business at all. Gregory VII forged an alliance with the Normans and that too backfired. The Normans occupied Rome, Rome soon became, again, a blazing inferno (has any city been burnt down more often?), and the popes abandoned Rome to seek the protection of the kings of France.

By 1350AD, Rome was a desperate backwater dominated by French kings who forced the election of a French pope, Clement V, who then daringly moved his residence to France. Avignon? No, deadly serious.

Crime thrived in the near abandoned city of Rome. Aristocratic gangsters, principally from the feuding Orsini and Colonna families, dominated. The population fell to 30,000, it had been one million strong in its Imperial heyday, and the poet Petrarch called the place "the rubbish heap of history".

Salvation came from St Catherine of Siena. St Catherine was so devout it was said that Jesus' wounds bled from her body. She believed the pope had betrayed Christianity by abandoning Rome and she made it her life's mission to bring the papal seat back to Rome, to save both the church and the city. After a multitude of letters to Avignon had received no reply, Catherine travelled there herself to confront, directly, the pope. Whatever she said worked because, in 1377, she returned to Rome with the pope in a triumphant procession.

That wasn't the end of it though. In Avignon the French king elected his own pope, the 'antipope'. The papal line got confusing. There were the popes in Rome, the antipopes in Avignon, and, at times, even a third 'pope' - in Pisa. They called it the Western Schism and, notwithstanding the fact there are still rival popes/antipopes out there now, it was, perhaps surprisingly, the feuding gangsters of the Colonna family who, in 1417, resolved it in Rome's favour.

Oddone Colona was elected, by his own family, as pope and became Martin V (not sure what's wrong with being Pope Oddone?). Martin V is often viewed as the first truly Renaissance pope but he inherited a city that was still in an awful mess and a papacy that was terribly vulnerable. Martin V, and his successors, had much to do.

They rebuilt Rome on an epic scale. The aim was to make it the most magnificent city on Earth, the capital of the world. Grandiose domes rose and sumptuous palaces were built all, presumably, on the ill gotten gains of gangsterism. The most merciless of the Renaissance popes was Alexander VI, a member of the notorious Borgia family, a family who'd murder their own for power. This is Rome. This is Christianity.

Machhiavelli's favourite was Cesare Borgia, Alexander VI's son and henchman, whose victims could be found floating dead in the Tiber each morning. Cesare inspired Machiavelli's The Prince. Other Borgia popes were notorious for their adultery and for fathering many different children with many different women. Orgies were held and the man who fornicated with the most women was awarded the prize of a pair of gloves!

To these popes, power was the point of the papacy, not piety. Julius II, who took control of the papacy in 1503, wanted to restore Rome to its ancient splendour, to be its Julius Caesar. It's the reason he chose the name Julius. He became known as the fearsome pope or the warrior pope but as well as his military might, he also assembled an army of artists.

Raphael incorporated philosophers and mathematicians like Aristotle, Plato, and Euclid into his paintings to show how the new Rome was equal to the great civilisations of antiquity. Michelangelo, with the Sistine Chapel ceiling, usurped even Raphael. For his troubles, Julius II beat Michelangelo with a stick. Michelangelo gave as good back.

As Harry Lime said in 1949's The Third Man:- "In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock".

Sebag Montefiore is so awed by the beauty of the Sistine Chapel ceiling he starts narrating in sotto voce. For Julius II, however, it appears to be simply part of an ongoing process to refurbish Rome in Renaissance glory. In 1505 he had the basilica of St Peter's destroyed. His plan was to build a bigger and better one in its place - but demolishing Rome's most beloved building? The one that made Rome the seat of Christianity!

The rebuilding lasted one hundred and twenty years and another twenty popes and it cost, of course, an absolute fortune. But how did they pay for it? The selling of induglences was a practice that had been around since the 6c, but now they were beginning to seriously monetize it. You could even cough up for sins you'd not committed yet, giving carte blanche, no doubt, to all sorts of ungodly behaviour.

Many Christians were outraged. They'd been relatively silent about all the murder and orgies but the absolution of sins through financial recompense was a step too far. The German theologian professor and monk Martin Luther loathed these Roman ways, their forgiveness of sin, their lack of chastity, and their admiration for Pagan art. He called the pope an 'agent of the devil' and his protest, the Ninety-five Theses, was nailed to the door of the All Saints' Church in Wittenberg, Germany.

An act that gave the world Protestantism, the greatest ever challenge to papal supremacy. So quickly did this particular, and still extant, schism accelerate that by 1527 the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, had threatened to slice the pope, Clement VII, into pieces. After a spell imprisoned in Castel Sant'Angelo (formerly Hadrian's mausoleum), Clement, by now starving, blind in one eye, and afflicted by liver disease, escaped to Orvieto.

Rome diminished further in the following two decades until, in 1546, the Sack of Rome took place. Rome fell into the hands of the Ostrogothic king Totila. The city's greatest ever catastrophe had been brought about by the follies of the Renaissance popes. They'd both built, and destroyed, a great city and now Romans were reduced to eating nettles, dogs, mice, and even each other's shit.

Even Pope Paul III, the then current pontiff, agreed that Rome had to take responsibility for its own undoing. A reformation needed to take place and that reformation needed to be underpinned by a somewhat dull and dutiful adherence to both austerity and chastity.

Paul III's successor, Paul IV, wanted to tear down ancient monuments and had nude Renaissance artworks and statues covered up with fig leaves, giving him the sobriquet the fig leaf king. Under these new puritans, homoesexuals were burnt alive, Jews were confined to the ghetto, and the fight against the growing Protestant movement took place on the battlefield as much as in the pulpit or the art galleries.

The Roman Catholic church created a new military wing, the Jesuits (inspired by the preachings of the Basque nobleman, Ignatius of Loyola), whose mission it was to take the Catholic message across the world, as far as America and Africa. Everyone who could not be converted could simply be killed. If you've ever wondered where ISIS get their ideas from you need only look at the history of their fellow Abrahamic travellers.

While their murderous doctrine spread out around the globe, the bishops of Rome were busy prettifying their city again and, following the Renaissance, the new style was the Baroque. The most feted Baroque artist was Gian Lorenzo Bernini, a man who had proved his Christian credentials by permanently scarring his unfaithful partner's face with a razor blade. Turn the other cheek, but only so you can get sliced up.

Bernini and his pope, Urban VIII, built much of what we see when we visit Rome now. Bernini's 'best bits' were considered to be The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa in the Santa Maria della Vittoria and, in the new, and now finally completed, St Peter's Palace, the Baldacchino. Inspired by the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem (and later to inspire Nicholas Hawksmoor's St Mary Woolnoth), as if to say Rome is the new Jerusalem, this is the holiest city on Earth. St Peter's, even today, remains the largest church on the entire planet.

The next big challenge to Christianity and Catholicism came in the form of rising 19c ideologies, Republicanism and Nationalism. France had become a secular republic and the Genoese activist Giuseppe Mazzini was leading a campaign for Italian unification. Mazzini wanted Rome as the new Italian capital and if he was to succeed, he would end papal rule forever.

In 1849 Mazzini's troops, led by General Giuseppe Garibaldi, descended upon Rome. But Pope Pius IX had, of all people, the French emperor Napoleon III on his side and was able to, almost immediately wrest back control of Rome from Garibaldi. Italy was unified but Rome remained separate, independent.

But when Napoleon III fell, in 1870, the French withdrew and Italy entered Rome. The new, and first ever, king of Italy, Victor Emmanuel II made Rome his capital. Secularism had finally taken, at least nominal, control of Rome. On the king's death the huge, and much unloved by Romans (they call it the typewriter, it reminded me of a wedding cake), Altare della Patria monument was built in the centre of Rome, where it dominates to this day, to honour him.

The stand off between state and church lasted until Mussolini took power. When you consider the church's historic, two thousand year long, abuse of power it comes as no surprise that they didn't see fascism as a problem. As Doug Stanhope once joked Pope Benedict XVI's Nazi past shouldn't have been the issue, but his Christian one. People shouldn't say "that new pope's a Nazi" but "that new Nazi's a pope".

Mussolini understood that the Roman Catholic church could add authority to his fascism and, both desperate and, as ever, bereft of moral fibre, the church was happy to go along with this. The Lateran Pact was signed by both the new Kingdom of Italy and The Holy See, and the Vatican, the world's smallest state, was created. A country within a city. An anomaly borne from years of power games, lying, killing, and murder and yet one that exists within the confines of one of Earth's most fascinating, most beautiful, most evocative, and most historical cities. A place I would dearly love to visit again.

Christianity is revealed not to have become the world's most dominant religion through piety, adherence to morality, or even charitable acts but, in fact, due to two millennia of murder, power games, corruption, torture, forced conversion, and striking deals with some of the most nefarious people that ever lived. Let's leave its monuments standing but, slowly, dismantle the medieval blood lust it has allowed to seep into both out lives and our discourse. Let's look at Baroque and Renaissance churches, let's listen to gospel music, and let's admire the art of Michelangelo and Leonardo - but let's not believe all the bullshit in the bible anymore. We're too good for that.

Sebag Montefiore did a good job, a very academic one - and one, thankfully, with no historical reconstructions - leave that to the Sealed Knot, of telling, simplifying even, the complicated, twisting, turning, oft-repeating itself story of the Eternal City. It may have looked a cushy gig but he still dealt with it in style - and, surely, any Roman worth their salt would appreciate that. Sono pazzi questi Romani.

Fleapit revisited:The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

"Well, folks, things have a way of escalating out here in the West" - Buster Scruggs.

The Coen brothers latest film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, is, nominally, a Western. But, this being the Coen brothers, it's also, in places, a musical, a horror, and a heist movie. There's even, if you squint a bit, a tiny bit of romance on offer.

Love's not the over-riding theme though. No danger of that. Disloyalty, opportunism, morbidity, death, and murder all feature far more prominently. It doesn't seem to matter much if you're good or bad in the world of the Coens. If a bullet's got your name on it, it's got your name on it.

Often the twists are pretty dark but the film itself is sumptuously shot, making great use of the wide open vistas of the American west. This can give it an otherworldly air, one that is only intensified by the Coen brothers penchant for the weird, and their exquisite attention to detail.

It's not one story, but a selection box of tales. A portmanteau presented to us in the form of the flicked pages of a dusty old tome with a color-plate introducing each individual segment. None are bad but some work better than others, as is the nature with these type of films. Films we see less of in the multiplexes these days.

As the movie progresses the stories get, for the most part, darker. That's saying something considering the first two sections include Tim Blake Nelson as a sharp-shooting, homicidal Roy Rogers gone bad cowboy, singing and killing his way through bars and poker halls. He yodels deep into Monument Valley (not a euphemism for cunnilingus) and leads rowdy saloons in singalongs about vanquished foes but, despite the violence, it's played pretty much for laughs.

James Franco, in Near Algodones, gets the film's biggest laugh though - and it comes when he's got a noose around his neck. That's not too surprising. Franco spends a fair amount of his screen time waiting to hang after a botched bank robbery, running into murderous Comanche 'injuns', and either double crossing someone or being double crossed.

There's certainly a lot less to laugh about in Meal Ticket. Boozy Irish impresario Harrison (Liam Neeson) tours the west with his quadriplegic, and seemingly nameless, assistant (Harry Melling, Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films for you non-muggles). They rock up at various makeshift western outposts where the previously taciturn assistant, Harrison's 'turn', delivers fruity accented recitals from Shakespeare, Shelley, and even the Bible. We see Harrison passing the hat round and each night the pennies seem to amount to less than the night before. One evening, Harrison spots a frenzied crowd virtually throwing money at a rival carnival barker who's got a chicken that can do sums. What to do?

If Harrison and his turn appear to live a lonely life it's as nothing compared to Tom Waits' grizzled prospector, in All Gold Canyon. He lives off fish he's caught in a babbling brook, and eggs he's pilfered from the nest of a great horned owl. The owl, a splendid deer, butterfly, and fish all share the valley with Waits' unnamed gold digger and the verdant paradise stands at odds with the greedy humanity that will soon despoil it. 

This section is particularly captivating visually. When I was a kid they used to show Disney programmes on television which mixed clips with the films we all knew and loved (Dumbo, Bambi, Lady and the Tramp) with scenes from the great American wilderness and clips from sanitised imaginings of Mark Twain novels. All Gold Canyon reminded me of that. I half expected Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer to come sailing up the river in threadbare straw hats biting into juicy red apples.

In The Gal Who Got Rattled, Zoe Kazan plays Alice Longabaugh. Alice sets off with her brother Gilbert (Jefferson Mays) and his dog, the excellently named President Pierce, on a wagon train to Oregon. Along the way they're beset by disease, tomahawk welding Indian war parties, and the prospect of a very uncertain future once they arrive in the Beaver State. There's also a will they/won't they love story that sits at odds with the rest of the film, even if it is resolved in a typically bizarre fashion.

The final segment, The Mortal Remains, features a Frenchman, an Irishman, an Englishman, and an American, and a lady in a stagecoach. Although that may sound like a premise for a joke, it turns out be anything but. The American (Chelcie Ross) is a tedious trapper, the Frenchman (Saul Rubinek) seems to operate as a professional know-it-all, and the Lady (Tyne Daly, Lacey in Cagney & Lacey) is a devout Christian, obviously unhappy at sharing her journey with people she considers slightly less than upstanding.

But it's the Irishman (Brendan Gleeson) and the Englishman (Jonjo O'Neill) who hold the key to this story, and possibly, the whole film. They're bounty hunters and they're escorting their latest 'cargo' to his final destination. Everyone in the stagecoach is heading to Fort Morgan in Colorado, a desolate and creepy place, but are they also, perhaps, all on their final journey?

There's a lot of death in this film and if you were looking to find a thread to wind through the entire film it'd be the mortal coil of life itself. The stagecoach to Fort Morgan appears to have crossed the Rainbow Bridge and, the Coen brothers insinuate, we all must take this journey one day. We'll all ride that last train to glory, we'll all join the whisperers down in Davy Jones' locker, we'll all assume room temperature.

It's not the Coen brothers best film (far from it, why would it be? Death rarely is the best thing that happens to us in our lives) but it's a worthy addition to a canon that has long been equal to any of that in all film making, and if we are to come to terms with crossing the Jordan, hopping on the last rattler, or being promoted to glory then we may as well do it with it a smile on our face and a song in our hearts. That's what Buster Scruggs himself would say. In a brief respite from shooting a man's fingers individually clean off.

We Are Family:Louis Theroux, Altered States.

"Woe is me. Shame and scandal in the family" - Shame and Scandal in the Family, Sir Lancelot.

The judiciously edited minor key music seeps in and Louis Theroux raises a quizzical eyebrow, now a trademark move, before lowering his tone and asking how you are. You can almost see his brain working. Does he now ask a pertinent question? What about an impertinent one? Maybe now is the time for sympathy?

We've all been there when confronted with a friend undergoing something of an emotional crisis, often unsure of exactly how best to respond. But for Louis, this has a couple of extra dimensions. Firstly, these people aren't really his friends. Whilst relationships tend to be amicable and I don't doubt Louis' sincerity in wanting the best for them, this does lead us to what must surely be another thing running through Theroux's mind. Will this make good television?

Mostly, it does and, mostly, he gets the balance right by allowing his subjects to tell their own stories. He tends to gently prod them to open up rather than force them and it's a technique that pays handsome dividends. Most people are quite keen to talk about their own lives, their own fears, and their own desires if only you provide a sympathetic, or empathetic, ear and it's to Louis Thereoux's credit that he very much does that.

In his new BBC2 series, Louis Theroux, Altered States, he goes straight for some of the most divisive, and emotional, topics of our time. Polyamory in 'Love without Limits', assisted suicide in 'Choosing Death', and open adoption in 'Take my Baby'. As Louis drives up and down the West Coast, mostly California and Oregon, popping in to take the emotional temperature of his subjects/guests, those of us at home watching inevitably and unsurprisingly well up with tears.

I do anyway. I got through 'Love without Limits' without a tear but it was only thirteen minutes into 'Take my Baby' before I was off and the metaphorical handkerchief was out after only eleven during 'Choosing Death'. I used to have a friend who loathed Theroux (to be honest, this ex-friend loathed pretty much everything and everybody, part of the reason he is no longer a friend) but I've always warmed to his style. It's tender, it's tinged with sadness and awareness, and it's occasionally funny too. He gets involved.

During 'Love without Limits' we see Louis join a 'sex-positive Portland' event. A blindfolded sensual dinner in which complete strangers fondle each other's naked, or at least partly dressed, bodies. Louis describes it as being both liberating and embarrassing at the same time. Which sounds about right. He is a Brit, after all.

This is towards the end of the episode and by then we've met several people who are in polyamorous relationships. They're pretty ordinary types. IT analysts, therapists, and hippies (hey, it's California) are all united in their hope of finding 'pleasure without guilt' or 'ethical non-monogamy', something that is very much on the upswing in the US at the moment.

Many of the people involved are married or in long term relationships and even have kids. Which leads to the rather cute, if somewhat awkward, explanation to one child that "grown ups have sleepovers" too! There's lots of other amusing stuff too. The concept of 'thrupples', the dynamics of spooning, and a guy called Q (possibly not his real name) who rocks up at a class to teach the curious how best to use sex toys.

But, obviously, Louis wants to crack open this egg (something he does literally as he dons an apron and helps out making omelettes ready for dinner) and find out what underpins the decision to go polyamorous, how people broach the idea of 'opening up' their relationship, and if polyamory is really just a form of 'slow divorce'.

Amanda, Nick, and Bob live together as a 'thrupple'. Threesomes didn't work for them so now they work to their strengths. The boys work different hours so Amanda gets intimacy with Nick and Bob at different times. Nick was already on the scene but Bob "lasts a really long time" so now Nick tends to focus on foreplay, which is his strength. When Bob takes over, Nick goes off to play video games. Sometimes the three of them get together to play Dungeons & Dragons. They all sleep in a big bed together.

Q is with AJ who's having a baby with Mattias. Mattias would appear to be slightly in denial about the whole situation. Love gets dangerous, for sure, but then love can, even in monogamous relationships. As with any ever other relationship, it can feel like one person is more in control than the other (or others). There are gambles and compromises involved. You might get more love, you may end up lonely, or jealous.

When the resigned looking, and softly spoken, Jerry talks of the period of "adjustment" he underwent when his wife Heidi first decided to take Joe as a lover I was reminded of a couplet Leonard Cohen penned for Famous Blue Raincoat:-

"Thanks, for the trouble you took from her eyes, I thought it was there for good so I never tried"

If love can often be very uncertain then death is, for all of us, absolutely certain. The only thing we don't know is when, or how, it will arrive. So, perhaps it's no surprise that some seek to take control of that decision for themselves.

In 'Choosing Death' we meet some who are doing just that. Gus, a retiree in San Luis Obispo, is about as likeable as anyone you've ever seen on television. He's got two daughters and a wife who clearly dote on him as much as he does them, and he's just become a grandad. It's also estimated that he has less than six months to live having been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer.

The adorable, affable Gus seems content with his decision and describes his new grandson as his 'immortality'. Sixty-five year old Deborah's decision seems to have come from a darker place. She's wheelchair bound and still, clearly, processing a huge amount of grief following the death of her beloved husband, David.

Both her brain and her body are beginning to fail her and the only medicine that could help her is beyond her price range, the lack of affordable health care in America drives people to early deaths in indirect ways as well as direct ones. Deborah wants to die looking out across the beautiful Oregon coastline to the seemingly endless Pacific beyond.

Deborah's got 'broken heart syndrome', she's thrown away all her family photos saying "who's gonna want to see my photos if I don't have a family", and she's reached that point where society says it doesn't want her to die but does nothing to help her stay alive.

But there are people who want to help her die. Deborah gets in touch with Lowrey and Brian from the Final Exit Network who are keen to give people the tools to end their lives should they be in such intense physical pain that life has become unbearable. Not just physical pain either. The Final Exit Network consider dementia and Alzheimer's to cause a psychological pain so extreme that death can be preferable.

Lowrey and Brian can't actually assist people in their suicide. But they can offer 'technical advice' to the terminally ill (or even, a tacit contention suggests, the heartbroken) and that technical advice, protected in law by the First Amendment, is pretty full on. They show Deborah what kind of kit she could use if she was to decide to do herself in.

There's something a little over zealous about Lowrey and Brian, almost evangelical. At times I'd go as far as saying they're a little creepy, as if they're enjoying playing god with other people's lives. But the sad truth is that capitalist society prefers the fond memory of a dead loved one to the complicated reality, or burden, of a living problem.

This is even true in Gus's loving family. As Gus reads the instruction on the pills he's taking to kill him (which, paradoxically, may extend his life) he jokes that the instructions read simply:-

1. Swallow
2. Die
3. Repeat if necessary  

Gus also joshes about washing them down with a glass of Dom Perignon but as his family gather round his bedside to say their final goodbyes the laughter soon turns to tears. In Grayson Perry's recent Rites of Passage series we were introduced to terminally ill people who had taken control of their own funerals. Here we went a step further and met people taking control of, if not exactly embracing, their own deaths.

We're all painfully aware that one day we must die, one day we must say goodbye to everything and everybody we know, but if we can, in some way, influence how this happens in our own lives then why begrudge, or ban, that. Although, I'd suggest keeping an eye on the Final Exit Network.

Birth, however, is something none of us ever have control of. It just happens to us and most of us pretty much take it for granted. Our brains haven't developed enough to do otherwise. But, for some, for many in fact, it's not so straightforward. 'Take my Baby' looks at the burgeoning open adoption industry in southern California.

Irene and Mel run the open adoption agency Rainbow's End with the aim of facilitating the 'exchange' of children from parents who are unable to, or feel they are unable to, look after them to those who are either unable to have their own biologically or to those who already have but both love kids so much and have the resources to look after them that they want more.

The brochures Rainbow's End use are highly professional looking (open adoption is a billion dollar industry in the US) but, sometimes, the people they deal with are only professional in their criminality. Most women who give up their babies do so because they have drug problems, because they're in and out of prison, or, simply, this is America, for money and most are very honest about their motivation.

Amy and Ari in Dallas, Texas already have three kids but they're hoping for another. In fact they've paid a quite significant sum to give Patricia's new baby a home and a good start in life. Unfortunately, Patricia, who has met with and wooed Amy and Ari, has other ideas. She does a runner with the cash and leaves Amy and Ari financially depleted but, far more importantly, emotionally devastated - and, as it turns out, not for the first time. A lingering image of an empty cot is enough to render you a weeping wreck.

That's the bleakest scenario played out and one that touches on the grey areas that this programme, and all recent Louis Theroux programmes, set out to explore. Elsewhere, the stories of open adoption are more positive, if equally affecting. Jessica is twenty, she doesn't drink, she doesn't do drugs, she's got no criminal record, and she's in a relationship. But she's giving up her baby to Kat, who is unable to conceive herself, and Kat is even there at Jessica's eight month scan.

Jessica's mother is clearly struggling to come to terms that she won't be involved with her grandchild but perhaps in the story of Isaiah and his adoptive mother Joanne there is hope. They seem to have a healthy mom'n'son relationship, dad seems a good 'un too, there's a much elder, also adopted, brother, and, most heartwarming of all, both Isaiah and his elder brother's birth mothers occasionally pop round for big, extended, family days.

It takes a lot of steeliness and no little inner fortitude to get to that place, I'm sure, but it seems like a journey worth making. Of course, for some, it's not possible but in this open adoption is no different from more traditional forms of adoption or bringing up children in any circumstances whatsoever.

There's lots of looking for doubt in this series but, for the most part, Louis doesn't find any more doubt than you'd find in more traditional families, more conventional relationships. Louis Theroux may have been looking to unearth weirdness but what he really discovered was normality. Birth, love, and death are scary and concerning for all of us, conventional or not, and in taking a magnifying glass to some of the more unorthodox, or simply newer, approaches to some of life's most important issues he didn't reveal anything particularly new.

In fact that magnifying glass, if looked through for long enough, starts to look like a mirror. These people may or may not be different to us in the way they approach life but in their desires, their wishes, their hearts, and their souls they look remarkably similar. Mostly, they just want love.

"The hardest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and to be loved in return" - Orchestra of Wolves, Gallows. 

Poison in the Water:Jameel Prize 2018.

"Mixing culture with Islam is like mixing poison with water" is a quote you'll find coming up time and again if you Google Islamic art. I'm not sure if it's from the Qur'an or not but it's not really necessary to worry about such things. All you need to know is that somebody, at some time, made that up and now it speaks to people enough that some other people have made little illustrations to go with it.

I don't think it's trying to say that Muslims have to forego any form of culture (though, no doubt some interpret it that way). Instead, what I think they're trying to say is not to mix up religion and culture. I'd agree with that. Culture's far too important. Religion (Christianity as much as Islam) is just a throwback to medieval health and safety manuals that are no longer fit for purpose.

But, evidently, many people disagree with me on this and there's not enough mental hospitals in the world to treat all those suffering with religion so I guess we're just gonna have to try to get along. Maybe the religious people would like to meet us non-believers halfway and stop fucking killing everyone. That'd be progress. But then, religion isn't about progress. Sometimes even culture isn't.

Hayv Kahraman - The Translator from the series How Iraqi are you? (2015)

I'm being intentionally provocative (but still true to myself) with these contentions and of course I don't want all religious police interred for their own mental health. Some of my friends are believers. Not many, admittedly, but then, for the most part, religion is dying in the West - and I live in the West.

Also, it's not that easy to unpick religion and culture so long have they been intertwined. Think of all the great great Renaissance art, awesome Gothic architecture, beautiful gospel music, or, indeed, the hypnotic Qawwali music of Nusrat Fateh ali Khan and the splendour of many of the world's mosques.

How can I square my appreciation of them with my complete lack of faith in the beliefs that inspired them? Initially, with some difficulty. When I was younger I thought about refusing to celebrate Christmas, I graffitied cocks on the Gideon bibles handed out at school (as did most of the boys, to be fair), and I wanted to destroy religion.

Even though I'd never have the power to even dent it! But telling people who think differently to you they're stupid or wrong isn't a very good way to either change things or get through life. Not unless you actually enjoy being physically assaulted and losing all your friends. So, instead, my coping mechanism was to consider that these great buildings, these stunning works of act, these heartfelt songs were created by humans but such was the modesty of these talented humans they credited it to God.

It's not exactly right, but it's a workaround for me and it means I no longer feel conflicted visiting churches, mosques, or synagogues and why a visit to the annual Jameel Prize at the V&A meant I didn't have to broker a deal between my ethical, inflexible self and my curious, exploring self. I just jumped on the tube to South Kensington and bowled right in. As if it was the most natural thing in the world.

Hala Kaiksow - Thoub Nashal Jumpsuit from the collection Wandress (2015)

I'm glad I did too. The Jameel Prize is in its fifth year (although I'd never heard of it before) and it aims to celebrate, a little sketchily, "art and design inspired by Islamic tradition". The V&A make great play of their Islamic collection and if there's something a little, er, colonial about the whole enterprise then that's hardly surprising. Just remember who V is.

To be fair to them, they're doing their best to be inclusive and with free membership and collections that tell a global, rather than purely 'empire' story, there is no excuse for anyone to feel they'd not be welcome down on Cromwell Road. With a Dundee outpost opening two months ago, they're even making it easier for people very far from London to visit.

When I think of the V&A, I often think of huge Roman columns, statues, architectural models, and overpriced but tasty cakes. But there's a lot of other stuff on show too. Not least dresses. So perhaps it's appropriate that on entering the Porter Gallery, where the Jameel Prize 'competitors' are exhibiting, the first thing you see is, indeed, a dress.

Well, a jumpsuit. But it looked like a dress to me at first sight. Bahrain born and based, Hala Kaiksow launched her own sustainable womenswear label two years back. She's tried to blur the lines between fashion and uniform, between east and west, and between antiquity and modernity. She's also employed local Bahrani weavers and used, where possible, recycled fabrics.

It's quite a lot to fit in but she's not stopped there. Her Thoub Nashal Jumpsuit is also inspired by the simplicity of traditional Japanese kimonos and the water bags of Cypriot shepherds. There's a lot going on but that's not readily apparent when you first set eyes on her work. In that, it is not unalike much in this show, a show that is best appreciated by employing patience and reflection.

Hayv Kahraman was born in Iraq and studied in Florence. In Italy she was taught that European art history was, essentially, all art history. A tacit expression of Western privilege and incuriosity - and one that Kahrman soon rejected. Not only did she start mixing European styles with Islamic art but she also added the influence of other non-Western forms like Japanese woodblock printing.

How Iraqi are you? (top of this blog) is inspired by 13c Arabic manuscripts showing, supposedly humorous episodes, from the lives of women living lives in patriarchal societies, which is, in itself, another unfortunate byproduct of two thousand years of living under the yoke of the Abrahamic faiths.

House in Gaylani, from her 2014 series Let the Guest be the Master, was prompted by the sale of her childhood home in Baghdad. Men would meet in the courtyard and women would stay indoors, another way of reinforcing the gender imbalance. Kahraman's paintings manage to, simultaneously, both celebrate and criticize, or at least poke gentle fun, at Islamic culture. Other works focus on the migrant experience and the warmth with which she depicts all humanity leaves us in no doubt that Kahraman is on the side of, first and foremost, humanity. They're really nice paintings too.

Hayv Kahraman - House in Gaylani from the series Let the Guest be the Master (2014)

Marina Tabassum - Model of Bait ur Rouf (2018)

Great paintings sit alongside examples of great architecture. The Bangladeshi architect Marina Tabassum designed the Bait ur Rouf mosque in the suburbs of Dhaka as not just a place of worship, but also a social spaces. Something, so many religious buildings fail to do. To see signs on London churches warning homeless people away is to wonder what part of Jesus's message does the church not get? All of it?  

The light that penetrates the mosque from seemingly oblique angles may give believers a sense of the sacred, a dollop of the divine, or a taste of the transcendental. This non-believer gets that. I too get a lovely feeling looking at such exquisite buildings. But even though that feeling can, at times, feel transcendental it never seems likely to come from a higher power, but from great design and, most importantly of all, the power of nature. That light is the light of the sun. People used to worship the sun and it would make a great deal more sense if they still did. For without the sun we would not be here. It is the sun that gives us life and that life gave us the freedom to create, and worship, other gods. Good job the sun isn't a jealous god.

Marina Tabassum - Bait ur Rouf Mosque (2012)

Marina Tabassum - Bait ur Rouf Mosque (2012)

Great design can be epic in scale like the Bait ur Rouf Mosque, but it can also be served up in more human sized proportions. Kamrooz Aram was born in Iran and now lives and works in NYC. His mission is to challenge the western modernist view of Islamic art as purely decorative and, initially, for me, he'd failed.

The first thing I thought when I saw his work was how pretty it was, how well designed. Practical concerns were not on my mind at all and, I must add, that even after some consideration I still felt that, yes, these works were very aesthetically pleasing - but that was all. It made me think that I am exactly the kind of western museum visitor that Aram is hoping to 'punk' and all I can say to that is "fair play, you win". I'll place Aram third behind Tabassum and Kahraman (a tie for winner) in this contest.

Kamrooz Aram - Ephesian Fog (2016)

Kamrooz Aram - Ancient through Modern (2016)

Kamrooz Aram - Ancient through Modern (2016)

Younes Rahmoun - Taqiya Nor (Hat-light) (2016)

For Morocco, it was time for Younes Rahmoun to step up to the plate. I had to go inside a slightly darkened room to look at Rahmoun's contribution. Each hat, nicely lit up as they are, represents a major grouping of Islam (showing how daft it is for non-affiliates like myself to try to understand the multiple, and confusing, interpretations of Islam) and they're all hand knitted using recycled wool from Rahmoun's hometown of Tetouan. It's a nice idea but it didn't detain me long.

Much the same could be said for the wall based geometric concoctions of the Iraqi born, Arles based, Mehdi Moutashar. It was in France that Moutashar encountered abstraction and minimalism and he soon set about incorporating them into his own work. To the extent, perhaps, that it's hard now to see anything specifically 'Islamic' about his art. Unless you consider the belief that to make representational art is in some way offensive to Allah and, therefore, all Islamic art has to be abstract. In which case it's odd that Moutashar had to move to Paris to discover this. Guess we sometimes learn more about our essence when we're taken out of our comfort zones.

Mehdi Moutashar - Un plus a 120 et un carre (A fold at 120 degrees and a square) (2014)

Mehdi Moutashar - Deux carres dont un encadre (Two squares, one of them framed) (2017)

They're as pleasant as their titles are dry and academic. I was, alas, less impressed with the miniature paintings of Pakistan's Wardha Shabbir. There was a film on show at the front of the exhibition in which you could see how much work went in to, and how much detail there is in, Shabbir's paintings. But even with one of the magnifying glasses provided I didn't get much out of it. I felt a bit disappointed and I felt a bit sorry for Wardha Shabbir - though the chances of her ever reading this are pretty remote. It's like feeling sorry for an inanimate object. Something else I actually do.

Wardha Shabbir -A Wall-1 and 2 (2017)

The text that accompanies Shabbir's work bangs on about "different configurations of hedges" representing "the barriers that block our development, the path we follow through life, or the destination we aim for". It's all a bit Chicken Soup for the Soul and it doesn't make me feel any more favourable about her work. Which made me feel old and cynical. I have to learn accept aging and to continue the good fight against cynicism.

Sisters Nisreen (an architect) and Nermeen (a graphic designer) Abudail are the founders of naqsh collective and their sculptures are influenced from their native Jordan's tradition of embroidery as well as the outfits of Palestinian women. It's not easy for an outsider like me to really see that, or understand that, but I could certainly appreciate that their Shawl was a thing of beauty and, of course, things of beauty are not there just for religious people. Or just for irreligious people. Things of beauty can be shared among us all even as they are interpreted completely differently.

With that I make my final contention that culture is more powerful, more important, and more positive than religion. If religion (Islam, in this case) mixing with culture is like pouring poison into water then please fill my glass of H20 to the brim with polonium and novichok and bring it sweetly to my lips. A world without religion I could not only survive in but thrive in. A world without culture, a world without self-expression, would be no fun at all. Praise be!

naqsh collective - Shawl (?)