Anyone mesmerized by the mosaics in seven of Ravenna’s eight Unesco world heritage sites may be surprised by the historical scope of Judith Herrin’s wide-roving history. From the gem-like “Mausoleum” of Galla Placidia (425-50) to the flowery meadows of S Apollinare in Classe’s apse, consecrated in 549, covers little over a century of the nearly five covered here – 160 pages out of 399.

This seems a perfect project for Matteo Garrone, a director who has found new ways to conjure old Italian dreams, and invests even his most grimly realistic films with fairy tale logic and wonder. Carlo Collodi’s 1883 story is here returned to its local time and place, as Pinocchio’s picaresque journey of experience unfolds in a deliberately traditional, lovingly crafted children’s film.

The tortuous drama of James M Cain’s 1940’s thriller The Postman Always Rings Twice has inspired many films: the slow-burning mix of erotic desire, temptation, murder and guilt was ideally suited to American film noir, so it’s in some ways surprising to find is as the source of inspiration for Michelangelo Antonioni’s first full-length film (Cronaca di un Amore – Story of a Love Affair) a kind of counterblast to the neo-realism that dominated Italian cinema in 1950, the year of the film’s release.

Ennio Morricone was a genius, or as close to that description as makes no odds. If we mean someone who created a unique body of work, one that changed culture, had a distincive style and was massively influential, then Morricone fitted the bill. theartsdesk's Joe Muggs was discussing today on Facebook and Mixmag his influence on dubstep and Jamaican music, for example.

The latest wave of musicians to make their voices heard comes from the freelancers who haven't been able to claim anything so far for their loss of income and of the ability to work together.

It’s too early for a definitive account of the Covid-19 pandemic, and this was very much a Sky News version of what we’ve been through so far. Although it seems the virus has peaked and we’re entering a tentative stage of partial de-lockdown, the message was relentlessly grim.

Nathalie Léger’s The White Dress brings personal and public tragedy together in a narrative as absorbingly melancholic as its subject is shocking. The story described by Léger’s narrator – a scarcely fictional version of herself – is of the performance artist Pippa Bacca who, in 2008, set out on a symbolic journey from Milan to Jerusalem clad in a white wedding dress, hitchhiking her way through cities and countryside. Bacca was never to reach her destination.

Vendetta, morte: what a lark to find those tools of 19th century Italian opera taken back to their mother tongue in a Milanese take on Jacobean so-called tragedy, where the overriding obsession is on mortalità. It would take a composer of savage wit like Gerald Barry to set Middleton's satirical bloody-mindedness to music today. With Declan Donnellan directing, though, La tragedia del vendicatore remains too prosaic and half-literal a play.

8 ½ is one of the classic films about the art of cinema. There is something about the make-believe of movies, and our buying into the dreams they foster, which suggests reflection and self-referencing, as if films offered a mirror to our inner lives and the stories we tell on the big screen. 

It’s not hard to see why The Sicilian Vespers has struggled since its surprisingly successful opening run at the Paris Opéra in 1855. Verdi had composed it reluctantly, despised the librettist, Eugène Scribe, who he regarded as a well-named cynical scribbler, and tried unsuccessfully to get a release from his contract. The result is undeniably patchy, narratively implausible to the point of silliness, and though tight by the standards of French grand opera, nevertheless at least one scene too long.