Danielle Mitzman

Meg is a singer from the city of Naples in the south of Italy. The city is famous for being the birthplace of pizza and traditional romantic serenades but also for crime and, most recently, for the rubbish on the streets.

Meg used to be in a Neapolitan electronic hip hop-rap band called 99 Posse, but she went solo a few years ago. Her second solo album, “Psychodelice,” is being released in Italy this week.

I went to downtown Naples to chat with the singer-songwriter about how she makes her music, where she gets her inspiration and how being Neapolitan has influenced her sound.

(first broadcast on Cool, Deutsche Welle Radio, 4th May 2008)

The Royal National Theatre is one of the UK’s most important publicly funded theatre companies. Situated on London’s south bank, each year “The National” welcomes over 800,000 visitors through its doors. The building is home to three theatres – the Olivier, Lyttelton and Cottesloe – and presents an eclectic mix of new plays and classics from the world repertoire, with seven or eight productions in repertory at any one time.

With so much going on under one roof, the production teams are vast and the glue-like figure who holds everything together is the stage manager. I went to the National Theatre to meet one of their stage managers, David Marsland; and began by asking him what first attracted him to the job.

(first broadcast on Arts on the Air, Deutsche Welle Radio, 10th March 2010)

The Pre-Raphaelite movement was founded in 1848 by a group of artists and intellectuals who rejected what they considered “the frivolous art of the day” and embraced a return to greater “truth to nature”.

Until now, they’ve often been overshadowed by their contemporaries, the Impressionists, but recently they’ve been making a comeback: with exhibitions dedicated to the movement and its members in Stuttgart, Stockholm and London in 2009.

Now a major exhibition, The Pre-Raphaelites and the Italian Dream, has opened at MAR, the Museum of Art in the north Italian city of Ravenna. It will run until June before moving to Oxford’s Ashmolean museum in September. Appropriately a joint Anglo-Italian venture, it looks at the connection between the British Pre-Raphaelite movement and the Italian artists – as their name suggests, before Raphael - who inspired them.

I went to the exhibition to talk to two of its curators and began by asking why the Pre-Raphaelites are enjoying this new lease of popularity.

(first broadcast on Arts on the Air, Deutsche Welle Radio, 24th March 2010)