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Murder! In hotel room ten, with a rope and a knife. By a fellow guest. If this were Cluedo, we’d have given the game away. But it’s true crime, turned cultural history. And travelogue: Seán Williams follows in the footsteps of the most famous art historian of all time. The German Johann Winckelmann – killed in Italy, in June 1768.

In a series that takes us to Trieste, Venice, and Rome, Seán uncovers skeletons in the closet. One crime becomes a way of conceiving a certain sort of life, death, art. Winckelmann’s end has written the script for a classic gay tragedy that has been adapted over the centuries. It’s a dramatic story told by Goethe, Oscar Wilde, and Thomas Mann, to name but a few.

But what are the facts of this fiction? Ranging from supposedly tolerant and intellectual Enlightenment Europe to the nonchalant nineties, and to Italy today – where the government are ramping up anti-LGBT rhetoric – Seán asks what it means that a historic murder has become cultural myth. To us. To him. Because it was also Winckelmann the historian who taught us a haunting truth. We always read art of the past personally, in the present.

The programme was made with the help of the Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities, Università Ca' Foscari; Marzia Vidulli, Museo Winckelmann, Trieste; Grand Hotel Duchi D'Aosta, Trieste; Villa Albani-Torlonia, Rome; the University of Sheffiel and Marcello Cattaneo.

In Part One, we learn about the incognito couple involved in the murder.