Learning English with Angels & Demons

There's the Angels & Demons Official Tour, which calls itself "The Path of Illumination", lasts for four hours and costs €56. And then there's A Self-Guided Angels & Demons Tour of Rome, which asks, "Want to see the sights from the Angels & Demons movie without paying for a guided tour?" If you don't have much time, there's also the "Rome Angels & Demons Half-Day Tour". And that's just three. There are lots, lots more.

Whether you go on a guided tour and then see the film or watch the film and then go to Rome, the most important thing to do this week is read the book. That's how this started, after all. If you think that you'd like to try it in English, have a look at this excerpt on Dan Brown's website. Talking of English, one of the controversial things Brown claims is that the villains of his story, the Illuminati, used the English language. They picked it because it was relatively obscure 400 yeas ago. Their enemy was the Catholic Church, which used Latin. By choosing a language not widely spoken, the Illuminati effectively ended up with a kind of secret code. English was a form of encryption, in other words.

In Dan Brown's novel, we learn that the great English poet John Milton visited Rome in 1638, met Galileo and was probably a member of the Illuminati. But what about Sir Isaac Newton, who's best known for his law of gravitation and invention of calculus? Was he also a member of the Illuminati? We don't know, but if you walk down the Via dell'Olmata in Rome, you'll come to his school. What does that tell us?