Kristina Kallas reveals the reasons behind her country’s success in the PISA rankings — and the secret to learning without stress

A new documentary revisits his turbulent career. Does he regret kung-fu kicking a fan? “I should have kicked him harder”

One of the rarest surviving monuments to a pre-Christian cult has been restored to its former glory in Rome. Its third-century fresco depicts the sacrifice of a bull, surrounded by symbols of the cosmos and the regeneration of the universe.

From Pieter the Elder to Abraham, from the Flemish countryside to Italian palaces: a Milan exhibition traces the story of a dynasty that shaped European art in the 16th and 17th centuries

“Writing for the cinema is a habit I can’t kick,” says composer Nicola Piovani. For now, though, he is turning Romanzo criminale into an opera, with a libretto by Giancarlo De Cataldo. “Opera plots are often confusing. Not this time.”

An exhibition in the Tuscan city brings together works by the American artist who captured urban nights, dawn over the ocean and the loneliness of the forgotten — and made his wife both his muse and his victim

The Korean-German thinker, whose admirers include Italian rock star Vasco Rossi, recalls how Pope Francis quoted him and invited him to the Vatican and his fascination with Rome’s churches. And why kindness lies at the heart of his philosophy

Starring Keri Russell, Rufus Sewell and Ali Ahn, the new season was filmed in Lucca, Florence and Prato

At the Rome Film Fest, the director of Perfect Strangers presents his new film, Il rumore delle cose nuove (The sound of new things)

The saint from Assisi, who died eight hundred years ago, led a revolution that redeems a society marked by violence against people, animals and nature. An extract from the Oscar-winning actor’s monologue

The beating heart of the festival remains the Auditorium Parco della Musica, but events will take place across the entire city

The author of Gomorrah remembers his friend, the playwright and Nobel Laureate in Literature, ten years after his death. And he confesses how much we miss his jester’s voice amid the relentless noise of social media

Unfinished, damaged, vandalised or censored: an exhibition at Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi explores the power of the fragment, with a provocative message — being whole is overrated

Nearly 150 years after Carlo Collodi brought him to life, the wooden puppet continues to fascinate us with his story, which Italo Calvino considered the only darkly fantastical novel in Italian literature

After fifteen years, Rome’s historic theatre reopens on 16 October. A writer’s account of a visit

A new map of the Roman Empire’s road network charts 300,000 kilometres of routes. Archaeologist Tom Brughmans: “Many of our stereotypes come from looking at the Appian Way. But not every road was straight, and many cities were better connected than the capital.”

From the ruins of the home of a hated tax collector to baths transformed into sacred spaces, a wave of excavations is rewriting the history of Agrigento’s archaeological site

Known for his eccentric personality, the Tuscan painter and his fellow Mannerists built on the legacy of the great Renaissance masters. But a new exhibition in Rome reveals just how modern his art could be

Here are the highlights of the season just around the corner. From Palermo to Verona, there are plenty of performances not to be missed. But the main event is La Scala’s season opener, Verdi’s Otello