From a guitar by Matteo Sellas dating back to Germany before 1630 to one made in New York by John Monteleone in 2008, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Guitar Heroes exhibition is will go down as the longest guitar solo slot in history. Including one of the four surviving models by Stradivari, it monitors the guitar’s development in Italy and the instrument’s migration across the Atlantic. Angelo Mannello, born in Italy, made the mandolins seen here in America. It is clear from this gallery, which includes a bespoke instrument made for Paul Simon, that the skill exhibited by the great guitarists is no less an attribute of the craftsmen who design and build the instruments they play.

Back in the early 1960s, anyone with half a curious cultural brain in their heads would take themselves off to small fleapit cinemas like The Academy or the Classic in Oxford Street (now defunct). There you could catch the latest European art film. And at one of these I remember seeing Italian director Antonioni’s La Notte with Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni. Such was its impact that neither I nor the flat mates I was with were able to utter a word until we reached home.

Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia comes gift-wrapped in its own candy-striped box – packaging that sets the tone for the brittle, sugary entertainment within. Trading satire for slapstick, politics for aesthetics, and subversion for celebration, the production is generous in laughs but lingers scarcely longer in the mind than on the lips. With previous alumni including Mark Elder, Joyce DiDonato and Juan Diego Flórez, there are some long shadows looming over the show’s hot-pink horizon, adding a not unwelcome sense of edginess to this latest revival – an edginess entirely absent from the production itself.

There must be good reasons why the fine crime novels of Michael Dibdin have been absent from screens large and small. They're probably to do with Dibdin's deadpan satirical tone and the anti-heroic nature of his protagonist, the Venetian detective Aurelio Zen. Also, his shrewd observations of the hidden undercurrents of Italian society are almost bound to get lost in screen translation. "Books and movies are completely different media", Dibdin once commented, "and the more the Hollywood crowd learns to knit their own stuff, the better."

“There is a sense I very much get about this place. Italians know what life is for and they know it won’t last very long. And so they take advantage. I like that. Particularly at my age.” The last of several times I interviewed the British crime writer Michael Dibdin (1947-2007) was four years before his death. It was a freezing February morning in Bologna, where he was researching the 10th and (it turned out) penultimate book in the Aurelio Zen series. The interview was at 9am. In the fug of a crowded bar, Dibdin soaked up several espressi and a warming tot of grappa.

There is a climactic moment in Loose Cannons when one of the characters has rather more dolci than is good for her. For anyone without a sweet cinematic tooth, the two hours’ traffic of this soft-centred Italian melodrama may induce a similar kind of diabetic shutdown. For everyone else, it’s a dessert trolley to feast the palate. But there is one intriguing discrepancy between this and other entertainments blown up from the bottom of Europe on warming southerly thermals.

They have period names in the foreign country we call the past. In last night’s documentary about a brilliant wartime trick practised upon Hitler, we came across a coroner called Sir Bentley Purchase, a love interest called Peternel Hankins and a Welsh tramp with the stirringly patriotic if implausible name of Glyndwr Michael. Charles Cholmondeley, one of the authors of the deception, would even draw attention to the absurd discrepancy between the way his name looked and sounded. More or less the only person in this entire story who didn't sound like a character in a novel was Major Bill Martin, and yet he was entirely fictional. How on earth did the Nazis not smell a rat?

Not much snow left on the Barbican after last night's barnstormer from Riccardo Chailly and the Leipzig Gewandhaus. What hadn't melted in the flames of the Russian pyre that is Tchaikovsky's Francesca da Rimini would had been swept aside by the great quakes of Respighi's tub-thumping Pines of Rome. And the icy refuseniks clinging to Barbican pavements? Note-gobbling piano virtuoso Arcadi Volodos - doing a very good impression of a snow shovel in Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto - was dealing with that.

When Riccardo Chailly (b 1953) left the Royal Concertgebouw for the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Richard Morrison said it was as if Bill Gates had ditched Microsoft for Aeroflot. The Gewandhaus has since become one of the lustiest of orchestral beasts in the world. Chailly and his orchestra make a rare appearance at the Barbican next Thursday and like all his previous visits it's likely to be a pretty unmissable event.