* John Martin and Dennis Romano, Venice Reconsidered.

* The word quadriga could be used of either the chariot with its four horses or the team of horses alone.

* Winckelmann’s theory is explored on pp. 180–85.

* In the Colosseum the emperor had some relationship with the crowd; but the hippodrome was much larger and more directly associated with the imperial palace, and so became the main political arena in Rome.

* This obelisk was found many centuries later buried on the site and is now re-erected in Rome in the Piazza del Popolo.

* In some hippodromes the eggs were replaced by model dolphins, believed to be the fastest living animals.

* The word ‘kudos’ comes directly from the original Greek for ‘honour and glory’.

* The name ‘Choniates’ comes from his home town Chonai in Phrygia.

* I am grateful to Michael Vickers for this suggestion.

* Phidias is normally given credit for the inspiration of the Parthenon marbles, even if the actual sculpting of them was not his. He is known to have sculpted the huge cult statue of Athena that stood inside the Parthenon.

* Laocoön was a Trojan priest who warned the Trojans against admitting the Wooden Horse into their city. He and his two sons were attacked and strangled by snakes, sent by Athena, supporter of the Greeks. Their frenzied struggle with the snakes is the subject of the sculpture.

* Corsica became French in 1768, just a year before Napoleon’s birth.

* It has not survived, having been destroyed in a fire in 1868.

* As the Arc du Carrousel where the horses were eventually to stand had not even been imagined in 1798, this, together with Napoleon’s presence, was a piece of poetic licence.

* This was how the Salon, the exhibition of approved French art which was so impressively boycotted by the Impressionists, originated.

* The Rosetta Stone, now in the British Museum, was inscribed with a text in hieroglyphics, Greek and demotic Egyptian and provided the key to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics by Jean-François Champollion.

* Prince Borghese was rumoured to be impotent, and Pauline gained her reputation as Venus Victrix by her adventures in other beds than his.

* In fact, quite the opposite. There was an assumption that Greek sculpture had originally been left in its white marble and unpainted. In the 1930s a misguided attempt to recreate originality led to some of the marbles being scraped down to improve their whiteness!

* Memories of Venetian independence still linger. On 12 May 1997, the bicentenary of the death of the republic, the Campanile was captured by eight men and a new Serenissima declared, albeit only briefly, before the authorities regained control.

* One can see the same effect on Ghiberti’s celebrated Gates of Paradise in the baptistery in Florence (1425–37). Here the gilding has been scraped away on the plainer empty surfaces, the sky and the walls.

* ‘Augustus’ and ‘Caesar’ reflected the imperial hierarchy, the former title carrying more prestige than the latter.

* Zanella (1820–88) was a priest, an Italian nationalist, a poet and a scholar who taught at the University of Padua, a hotbed of nationalism, until thrown out by the Austrians in 1853. On the liberation of Venice in 1866 he returned to Padua as professor of Italian literature. The poem was written to commemorate the marriage of Giovanni Rossi, the son of a friend, to one Signorina Maria Bozzotti in April 1877.