Episode 313 - A Roman Comic Book with Marco Cappelli

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Hello everyone and welcome to the History of Byzantium episode 313

A Roman comic book with Marco Capelli

Today I'm going to tell you about a Roman history comic book which made me cry.

It was a big surprise to me.

I rarely get to enjoy books or graphic novels about Roman history.

My brain is so full of Byzantium that I'm not really able to take in more history in my spare time.

But this was so good and brought to life such a profound moment of change that I found myself in tears at the end of it,

unexpectedly.

So, needless to say, this comic book, Ammianus, The Twilight of an Era, gets a very strong recommendation from me.

Go to newbers.live, that's n-u-b-e-s.live, to pick it up in physical or digital form in English, Italian or Latin.

So what is this?

Why am I talking about a comic book on the podcast?

It comes from Marco Capelli, a fellow history podcaster, whose podcast, Story d'Italia, is a history of Italy in Italian.

So if you happen to be listening to this and actually speak Italian, you have a whole treasure trove of history content waiting for you.

As he'll explain in our interview, Marco wanted to convey the amazing change which took place in Italy in the 6th century.

Now you will remember that century pretty well, because it began with the Goths in charge of Italy under King Theodoric, who in many ways preserved the culture of the late Roman Empire.

His death was followed by Justinian's invasions and the disastrous decades-long war which followed, including the bubonic plague breaking out, the Franks invading for no particular reason, and finally the Lombards descending into Italy shortly after Justinian's death.

An incredibly bleak time for those who had to live through it, and a profound change, essentially from one world to another.

Marco summed this all up on his podcast, as you can imagine, but felt that words couldn't quite do justice to the change which people lived through.

And so, Ammianus, the twilight of an era, was born.

It's not quite the graphic novel you might expect.

It doesn't focus on the wars or Belisarius

on the walls of Rome, as

most comic books might.

It focuses instead on one family and one villa as it goes through all these incredible changes.

I will let Marco tell you the rest of the story.

Marco Capelli, welcome back to the history of Byzantium.

It's such a pleasure.

As you know, I'm a fan, so it's always an honor to be here.

Well, as I was talking in our introduction, the last time we spoke to you was three years ago.

And technically, I was a guest on your show, but I did I put it out on

the History of Byzantium feed.

But

for people who may have forgotten, can you remind the listeners who you are and about your podcast?

Yeah, of course, not everyone can listen to my podcast because it's in Italian.

It's called the Storied Italia.

It's

It's very similar in format to yours in the sense that I start in a certain point, which is the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, and I always go forward.

Now, the original plan was to talk about just the history of Italy,

as the name says, but at the end, since there are not as many history podcasts in Italian as there are in English, I tend to cover most of Mediterranean history.

So the Byzantine Empire or Roman Empire as it should be universally called is featuring very prominently.

Actually, usually is the part that my listeners like the most.

But I also have, for example, the Franks or the Visigoths or the Arabs for

what it matters.

Anything that really I can realistically squeeze in

connected to the history of Italy.

So I also put a bit of England when Gregory the Great sent a mission to evangelize the Britons.

So something like that.

So anyway, that, and I have about 170 episodes under my belly.

And I'm currently in the 8th century.

So Lombards and Romans splitting Italy.

And just for those who may not be able to listen but are curious, how do you cover Italy in the 8th century, given that the land is divided between several different states?

Well, it's a problem that will only get worse.

In reality,

I mean, it takes effort to make a coherent narrative.

I try to make it a bit, and I know you are a TV critic, a bit like, you know, a TV series, you know, like Game of Thrones, where you have multiple characters and you touch at the right moment each character, but not randomly, so that it forms a coherent narrative.

So, I'll jump to Constantinople because, you know, Leo III is leading the siege against the Arabs, but then that has an effect in Italy because, you know, somebody rebels in Sicily against Leo III because they think that the Roman Empire is about to collapse.

And then the Lombard king attacks Ravenna because, of course, you know, the Roman Empire is too busy.

And then the Pope intervenes in order to block

Ljutprand, the Lombard king.

So it's all trying to wove in the narrative.

It's not easy, I will say, but I guess I hope it's doable.

Yeah, well,

that is one of the things I've taken for granted, is just having one point of view.

And it makes life easy.

Uh, and you know, when you when you have to tackle a period like that, I can imagine it's a lot more work.

So, I hope some of my listeners can can enjoy your approach and uh and report back to me on how much they enjoy it.

Um,

I should just mention in passing, in case anyone is interested, you've just been to Turkey on a tour.

So,

indeed,

this is an option for any Italian-speaking listeners to the history of Byzantium.

Yeah,

it was fantastic.

I shamefully

got, let's say, it's called inspired by

the tour of Byzantium.

And I thought, yeah, this is something I need to do.

So actually with the same tour guide.

organization

and it was absolutely fantastic.

Everybody loved it as you say they do in your tour.

I hope we lived

we lived up to the to the example you set.

Um but yeah, uh visiting together.

I'll say visiting together Istanbul and Cappadocia, that's where we went with people that share a passion is definitely a different experience.

Um it's different from you know your visiting places with your family and friends and it's different from visiting places with a group of random people that may or may not be interested in in that instead you know having this shared passion really united all these people from different age different locations even different countries

you know in in a way that was truly amazing

yeah fantastic

If you have the opportunity to go on a history tour,

I definitely recommend it, even if it's not one of ours.

um

but do but do go in the one of the

because it's fun it's surely fantastic absolutely i would love to do it

brilliant well i'm glad to hear story detalia is doing well and uh uh

that the the tour was a success but today we are here to talk about something different which is your first graphic novel your first comic book uh called ammianus the twilight of an era And

listeners may remember, I put out a call saying that the Kickstarter was going on a month or so ago and the Kickstarter succeeded.

It has been funded.

It has been created.

And so we're here to talk to Marco about that.

So let's start with inspiration

because this is sort of multi-layered inspiration

for this.

So let's just talk before it becomes a comic book, where does the idea for the story come from?

So the idea for the story, it was really like a flash.

So I had a problem that

the sixth century for Italian history is, and this is set of course in the sixth century, is an incredibly important passage, rite of passage.

It's it is the bore for Italy.

I believe that for each region of the Mediterranean, the border between antiquity and the Middle Ages is different.

Syria probably is the seventh century, but for Italy it's definitely the sixth century.

And

we have this world of late antiquity which endures under the gods.

And then it's, you know, 50 years later, in the lifespan of

a person, we are in a different world.

It's hard to to stress how much different it is.

And you can see it in archaeology, you know?

And I had explained that in words, you know, of course, you know, as we do as essays on, you know, talking on the on the podcast, but I felt I needed something like a story that will gel it, you know, that would explain this.

And also from the point of view that I care the most, which is the point of view

of

the, I would say, of the poor, of the normal people, of the folks living in the countryside, where that

don't make history usually but are subject to it so that was uh really like a problem i felt because i was telling this incredible story of the gothic wars which of course you covered i went even more details because it was italy um

but you know and and i felt the gothic wars um the the plague uh the famine uh the uh the lombards and the breaking of italy for the first time in history after the Roman conquest, something that will never be put together until 1861, you know, just to put it in context, how important it is,

that needed to be told in some ways.

And then I just

felt this story coming to me when I thought about, you know, this archaeology.

I may go a little bit in a tangent here later by explaining these archaeological finds that I remembered I studied.

No, do

go Go into that now because that'll be key for people to understand.

Yeah.

Because you were kind enough off air to mention a similar thing for me, which was the fictional story I did describing the border conflicts between the Arabs and the Byzantines.

And similarly,

for me, that episode was fantastic.

And it was like immediately when you told that story, fictional story, but rooted in reality, I said, okay i get it i now understood and forever understood what it meant to live in the borderlands in the seventh eighth century so sorry if i interrupted you no so you so it was very generous of you to say that and so obviously like you i'm trying to explain People are asking me, what's the Roman army doing?

What formations are they using?

And I was like, oh no, it's not, they're not fighting battles anymore.

They're fighting guerrilla campaigns.

How do I explain this?

And I ended up explaining it in a novel way.

But I couldn't have done that if Nikki Forus Focas, Nicephorus Focus, hadn't commissioned a text where he described the army tactics like day by day by day, because otherwise we wouldn't know.

And so the question for you is: you're trying to do something similar.

You're trying to explain this vast change that happens over the course of one century.

And so, what is it that you have to hang it on?

What's the inspiration there?

Well, it's mostly in reality archaeology.

Of course, there's also sources.

But the best thing I could find was archaeology.

And so, well, the first inspiration just to have the,

you know, the spark to make the story was that I studied about

this finding, which I felt was extremely moving, that they found in this small village in

northern West Italy,

you know, like a cache that had been hidden, as it often happens,

clearly during the Gothic Wars, because they were all the old marks of the period,

like the coins of the period, and so on.

And

in this cache, you know, in this hidden place,

you had

some jewels, clearly from jewels and precious things, clearly from an important Roman family, but more interestingly um jewels from a noble woman from the gods and even a wedding ring and it's really moving because it's a wedding ring that the two of us could wear today with the names of of the newlyweds uh minted on it and it says Stephanus and Valatrud.

Stephanus, of course, being a Roman name and Valatrud a Gothic name.

And I remembered so clearly that when I was young, they were telling me how the Goths and the Romans never married.

And then I said,

What are you saying?

There's a proof here, actual proof at a high level, because we're talking about here probably senatorial class level from the Roman side, and probably a very important Gothic woman with nice jewelry.

But then, you know, besides that, I realized when I was thinking about that, you know, they found it.

So, you know, they would have retrieved it if they were alive.

So if they found it, both are dead, or something happened to them, or something happened to the place where

they, you know, where they lived.

Something serious.

So

then I started thinking about a story that will go around this.

And also archaeological, so not only this, but another archaeological, important archaeological fact is that basically all Italian villas, no, so what is a villa?

A villa is basically a

you know, a farm, a Roman farm, usually very large estates.

They could be very large, a bit smaller, but they're sizable estates almost always.

And these Roman villas are really the backbone of Roman agriculture in Italy, and they all disappear in the sixth century.

So not a single one,

you know, with very, very few exceptions, is active as an organized centralized farm at the end of the sixth century.

And several of them, we know that they were turned into villages.

So there are actual villas that have been excavated.

And what it means is a village, of course, a villa is, you know, there's an owner

and everything

you know turns around these the masters and

they have slaves the majority of the people actually are not slaves, they are just farmers, but it's a very centralized, organized structure.

Whereas a village is more like a community, which we associate automatically to the

medieval time, you know.

And the village is more like a community, which together basically acts towards the authorities as a.

but it's composed mostly of villagers.

They are not, it's not an equal communist society by any means.

There are clear rankings in the village too,

but there is not one master.

So that's, and this is the typical passage that you can see in archaeology.

And again, I wanted to show that.

You know, I want to show how a villa turns into a village, because this is also the big difference between ancient

countryside and really modern countryside.

If we think about the modern countryside, how do we think it?

We think We don't think it as it was in Roman times.

In Roman times, really, you had a city which owned the entire countryside around.

And the entire countryside was organized in villas.

And often the owners of the villa sat in the council of the city.

So really, there was no difference between the countryside and the city.

They were one thing,

one the extension of the other.

Whereas the modern countryside is made of

several

hamlets you know in between so you have the city you know the provincial city you know that today

think about north italy there would be I don't know probably your I'll say Bologna you know it's like a it's sizable city of North Italy or Venice Venice no Verona you know like okay capitalate so think about that

But now between Verona and the farm, you have a village that organizes the life of the countryside around it.

So that's a focus of that community, which didn't exist in Roman times.

So I wanted also to show, in a way, how you go from

that model to basically what is, to all intents and purposes, the modern model still today.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's so interesting because

obviously this is a period of

very dramatic

wars.

So, you know, from the point of view of my podcast,

Belisarius's campaigns are somewhat glamorous because of the way Procopius writes them up.

And this is a completely different perspective, obviously, from the people kind of suffering on the ground.

So, you know,

when I read the novel, I see exactly why you chose to tell the story in a graphic novel because the villa is the main character in a way,

is the setting.

And we see the changes over time.

But when did that occur to you?

Because obviously you could have gone, I'll do this as a podcast narrative.

I'll write a screenplay.

I'll write, you know what I mean?

When did it occur to you?

No, this has to be visual and a graphic novel is the best way to do it.

So to be fair, the first version of this was actually podcast.

So I did make a podcast about it so describing what was going on but i did feel it you know the story deserved a vision visual version a visual version because for the reason you said you know the villa is one of the main characters and in fact when we chose um um uh you know designer you know uh because of course i don't do the design so that's not something i can do uh but when we chose her um you know, I really explained to her, you know, because at the beginning of a graphic novel, usually you do a study of the character.

So going through the, and in this case, especially because it's a lifetime story, so it's for an entire lifetime.

You need to show the character when he's young, middle, you know, middle-aged and old.

So you do that.

And I said, you know, you need to really do a...

study of the character for the villa.

The villa is a major, maybe the most important character here and so that so and and this is exactly for the reason you said this really this kind of story really lends to a visual format uh in showing uh what is going on of course it requires a lot of research because because believe you know probably but believe me

whoever is listening uh all the listeners believe me it's a lot of work to figure out how everything should look like so that to be you know realistic

but i felt the this story such a deep connection to this story that i really wanted to make it into a visual format and i was very lucky because i got in contact with this uh the you know the founder of of the publishing company or listeners of the podcast and um they they are fantastic people that are doing uh you know graphic novels also in Latin, which apparently has a global market.

And you know, they do Latin, Italian, and English.

I said, Okay, perfect, this is exactly what I want to do.

So, that's that's how it went.

But yes, it could have been any other visual format, but I think it lends really well to graphic novel.

It's

you know, it's less expensive to make, so you don't have too many cooks

as you will do in

a TV series, for example.

and

it's a way of telling the story that I particularly like.

I really love comic books.

I do.

And I think they lend particularly well to history.

It's a bit also because I live in Belgium, where, you know, I don't know if you know, but the French-speaking world is in love with comic books and especially historic comic books, you know, with, you know, about history.

So I really felt this was the perfect match.

Yeah, that's really interesting.

Um,

I have the problem that you know, people recommend books and other Roman media all the time, and I've got to a point where I can't enjoy anything in my free time that's history related, pretty much, because I'm so saturated with it.

Um,

so yeah, I found it really interesting.

I

feel like you found the perfect medium because because

with

the villa and the changes going on in and around it being the story, too much focus on the human characters, as you'd have to do if you wrote a book or, you know, whatever,

would lose the power I felt it had in seeing the changes happening, you know, step by step.

And for those, you know, for those listening, this book is very much aimed at you in the sense that if you already know the story of Justinian's wars, you are not taking, you don't need to have it explained to you why we have Goths, we have Franks, we have Byzantines, we have Lombards.

Obviously, someone brand new might be, might need some of that explained to them.

But for me, I was just like, oh, okay, I have a sense of what's happening here.

I have a sense of what's coming next.

And it was really powerful to see.

the changes and to appreciate that.

I'm trying to avoid spoilers.

This is a problem.

You You know, I want to say, oh, I loved it when this happened, but

I don't want to spoil that.

So

you've kind of talked already about how you got hold of people who could help you bring the story to life.

Was there anything beyond, like you were saying, the

visual history of the villa?

Was there anything else they added that you hadn't thought of in kind of bringing this to life?

Well, you know, when you make a graphic novel, everyone adds a layer.

This is what I discovered.

So first of all, I did make, I had a storyboard, let's say, made, but then there was a professional

graphic novel

writer that, you know, rewrote it for graphic novels.

And already they are saying, ah, there is that little tweak that I would like to make because you put it that well and he did something that I didn't think.

So

it's always,

you know,

I don't want to say it's 100% my story because it's not.

There is work done.

It's a team.

And

we also added, because in my original podcast, I gave for granted a lot of things because of course the listeners.

knew all about

but we added a little more a few information so that even people that are, you know, if you are really not into history, you probably won't understand it.

But, you know, I felt I hoped that you could read it even without

too much history knowledge, although that helps.

And at the end, we did put like a,

you know, an explanation of what's going on in the wider world because we tried also to be really focused.

on you know we didn't want we added a a few um events of the big history with with the big H in order to understand what's going on, but not too many, and trying to woven that into

the story so

it didn't have to feel unnatural.

Like, okay, I'm telling you now what's going on.

You know,

somebody's writing a letter to a loved one explaining what he's doing in the capital in Ravenna.

That part is added, for example,

that you have read it.

And this is part of the creative process of writing.

But then there's the creative process of bringing to life.

I created an entire um explanations, you know, you know, I had to create all references for everything, you know, like the bed, the chariot, uh, the villa, how does it look at the plans?

I drew the plan of the villa myself, you know, like all the places and the evolution over time.

But then Martina,

our designer, came in and she started creating and by the act of creating she added a lot of things that I didn't think.

And the light, for example, the use of the light and the colors,

which really lends to the mood of each scene, that's phenomenal.

I didn't think about it, but you know, you have different weather depending on where we are in the hit in the story, and I felt that was really powerful.

And she also added a lot of little details that's hard to explain in a sentence, you know.

But believe me, there's a lot of

creativity also there.

So it's really nice to see.

It's a lot of work, I must say.

I discovered that making a graphic novel is a lot of work,

but it's really rewarding.

It was extremely fun.

a lot of work but but a lot of fun also

yeah fantastic i um

it's sort of like you know, you being a podcaster, you are like a

guitar player who writes his own songs.

And then when you bring in people, it's like, yeah, it's like you're forming a band and suddenly

they want to play different bits of music and your songs transform into something different.

And also, we don't have to worry usually about the visual part, right?

You know, we can tell about things, but we don't have to show them.

So, and suddenly, having to show them, I realized I had to do another level of research which I don't tend to do I don't care how you know the bed the Romans slept in looked like you know I didn't really have to think about it

but yeah to make a comic you know a graphic novel you do have to do that yeah of course no it's it's interesting I'm still amazed at your productivity to create this on top of everything else you do

Oh, God.

Again, I'm trying to avoid spoilers, but the ending I found very moving.

And

obviously, you,

the ring as the inspiration, you thought was

quite a moving artifact.

But

did you always have this idea that

the story of how much change happened in that century was in itself moving?

Or did that kind of emerge as you created the story?

Yeah, it did come as I created the story.

I confess to you, now I never said it, but I confess to you that when I thought about the story, and there are some elements, there's not only the ring, there's this book which is really dear to me that I insert in the story and how it is passed on.

You know, that's really important in the story.

When I thought about

this story at the end, I thought about the end and I cried.

And I really i cried like a baby you know like like i uh like it was real you know and that's why it was so dear to me this story because i felt the emotion and i wanted to try to to to pass it you know as much as i could um

and

i guess i i i really felt i was there you know and i needed to just bring it out you know like mikranjo said that, you know,

and I don't want to compare myself to Michelangelo, first of all, but you know,

you know, he was saying, you know, that the statue was already in the marble.

So I needed to bring it out.

So, so now the and this was really important to me.

And in general, the

the concept of passing knowledge and it this, you know, and preserving something, you know,

has, you know,

for the future, even in a very changed world,

how we as a species try to pass on to the next one.

So like passing the baton and say, okay,

you do yours now.

This is as much as I can.

I will do as much as I can.

And you'll do, you, you go wherever you want to go, next generation.

It may be completely different from what I thought you should go, but I will pass you the pattern.

I will not drop it.

So that's another thing that I wanted

to bring in the story.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, as I mentioned in my introduction, I did cry when I read the ending.

So Marco is in my head somewhere.

He knows exactly how I'm going to react.

He made it happen.

And

it's funny.

I wonder if I would have cried before I had a baby.

I imagine I would have done, but

something about about having children makes all fiction suddenly hit you much harder.

It does.

So yeah,

again, I don't want to spoil anything.

So I'll just say I found it very moving.

You really brought the

human story out of what can be just

And now the Goths did this, and now the Franks did that and now Belisarius did this.

And isn't that a great story?

And we move on.

And

yeah,

as people know, I tend to be very critical of justinian so this is just another quiver in my bow of uh critiques of justinian and uh

the tragedies his war was unleashed yeah it's uh it's it's a really you know for it from the point of view of italy it's really terrible time

and you know there is out there a parallel i i don't know what would have happened to the gothic kingdom had not uh so we're now we're talking about the history with the big age uh had not justinian invaded italy which was let's remind us there was no geopolitical force leading into that

that was a deliberate choice it's rare actually in history that you have a ruler that makes a deliberate choice that not forced you know not forced by circumstances because it's not for it's not really forced

and that has such a profound impact on the history of everyone involved including the people back in constantinople of course but in italy is really really important as i alluded to by the fact that in a lifespan things are completely different and

of course it's not only justinian obviously um there are forces at play here that are you know that are strong however

um

you know the more we study

the early sixth century, the more it looks like a great time.

So it looks like stuff is is being built,

the economy is doing great.

You know, I discovered one thing, I will tell you a little bit of detail again about archaeology.

In the past, Italian archaeologists, they will find a nice monument from this time and they'll say, oh, it's the fifth century.

Because they assumed it couldn't be the sixth.

And then later archaeologists, you know, more recent, they come in and say, oh, this detail, this other detail, the coin and this other thing, really is Theodoric time.

And so there has been a huge reassessment of

Theodoric kingdom in Italy.

Again, also because Italians didn't feel a connection to Theodoric, a bit like Turks don't feel a connection to the Roman past, because of course Theodoric is a god, is a German, you know, from the point of view of nationalists of the 19th century.

Lots of history has been written in the 19th century.

So

now we know that actually was pretty good.

And then we have this terrible war.

Like, it's hard to stress how bad this is.

It's the 30 years' war of Italy.

I mean, if you do a detailed narrative, every single city is sacked at least once, if not multiple times.

And there is a real at certain points there's really almost like a trench warfare, you know, like

with

the war raging on a very narrow area back and forth and back and forth and at the same time they you know because both are exhausted the invasions from the franks which are terrible and also the famine we have horrific stories from procopius which again as much as we can are corroborated by archaeology because we see the population every sign of population dropping

but but significantly dropping at least fifty percent

You know, when the dust is settled, some say more than 50%.

And, you know, and this is the effect, of course, of war, famine, and the plague all combined.

But you see, as the plague, when the Constantinople at least hit a city which was at peace, but imagine now transport the plague into Italy that at the same time is having a horrific war.

So it and you know all the apparatus of the state has been disarticulated.

There isn't and it's not very easy to move food around.

So people are already starving.

So you know the bodies are weak.

So I assume that the death toll,

we don't have of course

detailed narrative like Procopius for Italy and the plague, but I'm

I'm certain that the effort was even worse in Italy than it was in Constantinople, even adjusted with the fact that Constantinople had a big density of population, obviously.

So,

all this is really an horrific tale

that it's important to tell.

But I also didn't want to make the Romans into the evil guys.

So,

I tried to

make sure that

both sides do terrible things or kind things at the same time.

So just to stress the fact that humans are humans, no matter where they come from.

So that's also very important to me.

Yeah, absolutely.

No, that was

one of the things I liked that it wasn't

a comic book based around violence and action.

It was quite different and unexpected in that way.

And

just remind me, the treasure hoard that yielded the coin, the coin, the ring, was actually discovered relatively recently, right?

In

fact, it's old.

Okay.

That one is old.

In fact, actually, that is old.

And whomever wants to go see it is in Turin today.

So it's collected in a museum in Turin, nor western Italy.

Now, that one is pretty old, but a lot of the the archaeology that feeds into this story instead is fairly new because this period historically was not well studied.

Medieval archaeology in Italy is relatively young.

It only got started in the 80s really seriously, in the 80s.

Again, for the same reason, because the Middle Ages, you know, the Italian archaeologists, they love the Roman stuff and they tended to

dig out all

the barbaric

medieval

layers in order to get

to the nice stuff.

Of course, I'm talking about an attitude which though lasted longer in Italy than it did in other parts of Europe.

For I will say obvious reasons.

I don't like it, but I do

uh why uh that happened um but yes uh so a lot of medieval archaeology is actually very very recent um it lombard for example is either really old or really new because they they discovered um some really nice um you know cemeteries necropolis in you know early 20th century and of course at the time all they care was the shiny stuff so they will they got the gold.

And they even classified it.

They didn't care where they found it.

They just say, oh, let's gather all the fibulae and all the swords.

But nowadays, we care more about how it was found.

The body,

who was the person and what is rank.

And people, and arcologists actually care more about the,

you know, if there's traces of food,

if

uh there is gold so and the funny thing is that uh you know for almost 80 years nobody found anything about the lombards anymore nobody really looked too hard uh but then boom early 2000 the last 20 years it's it's it's uh you know uh they discover a gold mine of of new tombs and new even uh houses and you know like uh gruben house this is the typical lombard early Lombard house made of wood,

and all different kind of findings everywhere in Italy, and which,

and even the Goths, we found new things.

For example, there is a very recent

discovery near the place where this graphic novel happens, which shows a different layers where there's first a Gothic occupation.

It's called Coleno, whomever is interested.

They first found the Gothic

village, which then superimposed a Lombard village a few years later.

And there's a very interesting connection that you can do that.

And then there's archogenetics, which is doing also miracles now.

For example, we now know

many historians were saying, oh, probably the Lombards were already in Italy by the time of the official invasion that we have in the sources.

There's no invasion at all, and they probably didn't even come from where the sources tell us they came from, which is basically modern-day Hungary.

And then

archaeogenetic researchers looked in this cemetery in Coleno and another one in Hungary, and they found out that they were, you know, very close relatives.

So it's, I would say, it's without a doubt, almost without a doubt, is a very strong proof that, and all this is really exciting and really new.

Yeah, I mean, that's what's great about seeing that new work make its way into new history books, and then that inspires, you know, new fictions and new interpretations that become, you know, part of the popular culture.

Marco, thank you so much.

Where can people go to buy the book?

We have the website of the

of the publisher.

It's called Nubes.

Maybe I should spell it.

It's N U B E S

dot live.

So Nubes.live or Nubis.live, I guess in English pronunciation.

And it's

they have several comic books.

So, if you

are also interested in something else, there's one about Maxentius.

They are probably the only graphic novel publishing company that has two

graphic novels on late antiquity.

Maxentius, I really love the story of Maxentian in Constantine.

So, there's mine and Mianus,

and can be bought into English,

Italian, or indeed Latin if you want to

try your

knowledge in

Virgilius language.

So that's that's that's I think it's fantastic.

I really love the the Latin part.

That's brilliant.

That's

that's where you can buy it.

Right now it's mostly there.

I think eventually it will go also on Amazon and all the other websites, but for now it's it's the only place you can find it is there.

In digital and physical form.

Yes, in digital and physical form, and they do ship all over the world.

They used to ship, I think, because of Latin, the biggest market is the US actually.

So they're used to shipping.

Of course, shipping to the US costs a bit more.

The price of the graphic novel, I'll say it, is 18 euros, but then you need to add the shipping, and the shipping depends on, of course,

on the locality.

Cheapest in Italy, a bit more expensive from the us

marco thank you so much for coming on the podcast

ah an absolute pleasure uh as usual uh talking to you robin you i would like to say it you are really the inspiration of my podcast so it's like passing the baton so uh you got inspired by mike i got inspired by you you are you're really the you know the thing that i try to measure me against uh failing to reach,

but that's what I try to do as much as I possibly can.

Well, you've you have succeeded as far as I'm concerned, because uh, I don't think I've made anyone cry.

Uh,

not in a good way, anyway.

You'll be wrong.

You'll be wrong about that.

You know,

the Antioch, I'll say my first favorite episode is the siege of Antioch,

but all the Fourth Crusade

up there as well.

And that did make me cry.

Wow, well,

yeah, that's less me, more

the circumstances.

But anyway, Marco, thank you so much.

Thank you so much, Robin.