Moving the Moon

From one of Europe's most original and brilliant classicists, an inspiring and deeply personal reflection on loss, memory, and what we owe the past and others, inspired by a night spent in Athens' Acropolis Museum One day in late spring, Andrea Marcolongo walks into an outdoor store in Paris to buy a camp bed, a sleeping bag, and a flashlight. Her destination: not a remote forest or mountain peak, but the deserted halls of one of the most famous museums in the world, the Acropolis Museum in Athens, Greece, where she has been invited to spend a night completely alone. But it's hard to be truly alone when you're surrounded by the scarred beauty of the Parthenon, lit only by the moon and summoning echoes and ghosts from the past. One of the shadows visiting Marcolongo is that of Lord Elgin, the English diplomat who in the early 19th century orchestrated the controversial removal of the Parthenon marbles from Ottoman Greece to London, where they remain today....