"But if..." - "You're the Top" I Quiz

Answer: Vespasian

The Colosseum, also called the Flavian Amphitheatre, is a large oval amphitheatre located in the centre of Rome. Used for various public events, including gladiatorial contests, executions and re-enactments, it has been estimated that the venue could hold as many as 80,000 people, with an average audience of around 65,000, making it the largest such venue ever built, and the largest still standing.

Construction began in the year 72AD under the reign of Vespasian, and was completed in 80AD during the reign of Titus. After the early medieval era, the Colosseum ceased to be used as a venue for entertainments, and was instead repurposed for other uses, including as housing, workshops, a Christian shrine and as a quarry. Despite its ruined state, it remains an iconic symbol of Imperial Rome, and has been listed as one of the New Seven Wonders of the World.

Answer: Francis I

The Louvre Palace is located on the right bank of the River Seine, and was originally the location of a major castle in the city. However, in the mid 1540s, King Francis I ordered the demolition of the existing castle at the Louvre and its rebuilding as a renaissance style palace, engaging architect Pierre Lescot to undertake the work. Additional sections were added to the palace, with the most notable being the Grande Galerie, built between 1595 and 1607, which connected the Louvre to the Tuileries Palace. Although building work continued until the 1670s, it was halted by Louis XIV, who directed money for construction towards his new palace at Versailles.

Although there were brief periods of residence after this, for much of its history after the 1680s, the Louvre was used to display various art collections, with the National Assembly in 1793 decreeing that it should be a museum. The collection held by the museum has since expanded significantly - many pieces were added during the reigns of King Louis XVIII, King Charles X and Emperor Napoleon III, as well as bequests since the advent of the Third Republic. Today the Louvre has more than 380,000 objects in its collection, and now takes up almost the whole of the palace building.

Answer: Don Juan

"Don Juan" is a tone poem that Richard Strauss wrote in 1888. The piece, written for a large orchestra, and generally lasting 18 minutes, is based on "Don Juans Ende", a play by Paul Heyse that itself was based on a version of the Don Juan legend by Austrian poet Nikolas Lenau. "Don Juan" was premiered on 11 November 1889 at the Weimar Opera, where Strauss served as Kapellmeister to the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. The work, which was a major international success, is regarded as establishing Strauss's reputation as an exponent of modernism in music.

Strauss often conducted "Don Juan" himself, with, in 1917, it being among the pieces that were included in the first recordings that the composer made of his own music. The last time that he conducted it was in 1947 during his last tour outside Germany. Owing to the technical difficulty of the work, excerpts from "Don Juan" are often used as audition pieces for professional orchestral auditions.

Answer: Greenwich Village

Henri Willis Bendel was born in Vermillionville, Louisiana in 1868, the son of immigrant parents from Austria and Prussia. While still in Louisiana, Bendel set up a millinery store in Morgan City, which was where he married his wife, Blanche, in 1894. However, not long after his marriage, a fire burned down his store, with the result that the couple packed up and moved to New York City. Not long after this, Bendel's wife died.

Following the death of his wife, Bendel re-established his millinery, which he opened on 9th Street in Greenwich Village, which was establishing itself as a place for bohemian culture, in 1895. Catering to the city's wealthy denizens, Bendel's soon expanded from exclusively dealing in hats, to producing custom-made dresses, while the Francophone Bendel enhanced his reputation by beginning to import fashions from Paris. By 1913, the same year that he became the first retailer in the United States to sell designs by Coco Chanel, he inaugurated his new women's department store, Henri Bendel, on West 57th Street, where it remained until 1985, when it moved to new premises on Fifth Avenue. Henri Bendel was finally closed in 2019.

Answer: Lord Chamberlain's Men

The Lord Chamberlain's Men was a company of actors established in 1594 under the patronage of Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon who, at the time, served as the Lord Chamberlain, a functionary of the Court responsible for entertainments. Upon the company's establishment, they performed initially at The Theatre, a venue in Shoreditch, before being forced to move to the nearby Curtain Theatre in 1597. In 1598, the company dismantled The Theatre and carried its beams to Southwark where they were incorporated a new playhouse, the Globe Theatre.

Although carrying the name of Henry Carey, and later his son George, who subsequently became Lord Chamberlain, the company was privately owned and managed, with up to eight of its members owning shares of the company. Among the so-called "sharers" in the company were William Shakespeare, who provided them with plays exclusively, Richard Burbage, who played a number of the lead roles in Shakespeare's plays, and Will Kempe, the company's clown who often played the comedic roles. In 1603, following the death of Queen Elizabeth I, the patronage of the company was taken over by her successor, King James I, with the result that it was renamed as the King's Men.

Answer: Plane Crazy

Mickey Mouse was conceived as a replacement for a character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, a character in a series of shorts produced by Walt Disney and Charles Mintz for Universal Pictures. Owing to a disagreement between Disney and Mintz, Disney decided to end his collaboration, and decided to come up with a new character that he would produce cartoons for other studios. After rejecting a number of ideas, Disney, alongside animator Ub Iwerks, devised a mouse character. Initially named Mortimer Mouse, Disney's wife eventually convinced him to call his new character Mickey.

Disney and Iwerks produced their first Mickey Mouse short, "Plane Crazy", which was shown to a test audience on 15 May 1928. The short, which was produced as a silent film, did not prove a success, with Disney unable to find a distributor. A second short, "The Gallopin' Caucho, was produced in August of the same year, and again failed to find a distributor. It was only with their third effort, "Steamboat Willie", which was the first to be produced as a sound film, that the character reached the general public when it was released on 18 November 1928. The success of "Steamboat Willie" led to Disney returning to his previous two efforts and adding sound to them, leading to their subsequent general release.

Answer: Ethiopia

The Blue Nile is a river of approximately 1450km in length that is the shorter of the two major tributaries of the River Nile. The river originates in Lake Tana in Ethiopia, and flows initially through a 400km canyon through the Ethiopian Highlands, having gone over the 42m Blue Nile Falls. The river runs in a loop, starting in a southerly direction, before turning west to cross the north-west of the country to the Sudanese border. Having crossed into Sudan, the Blue Nile then turns north-west towards the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, which is where it reaches a confluence with the White Nile to form the main body of the Nile itself, which then flows out through Egypt into the Mediterranean.

The first European recorded to have seen the Blue Nile was Pedro Páez, a Spanish missionary, who visited the source at Lake Tana on 21 April 1618. However, attempts to chart the full course of the Blue Nile are hampered by the near impassibility of the Blue Nile Canyon. The river's upper course was eventually mapped by Robert Cheeseman, a British military officer and explorer, between 1925 and 1933, which he did not by following the river itself, but by following it from the highlands above. As a result of the difficulty in charting the river's full course, the exact length of the Blue Nile is unknown; although it is officially 1450km, according to Ethiopia's Central Statistical Agency, it could be as long as 1600km in total.

Answer: Assumption of Mary

Pisa's cathedral consists of three major structures located in the Piazza dei Miracoli in the city. The cathedral church itself is the oldest of the three structures, originally begun in 1063, and completed in 1092, before it was consecrated in 1118. Originally built outside Pisa's city walls, the cathedral was constructed on the site of an unfinished church that was named as Santa Maria. Designed by the architect Buscheto, the church was initially named Santa Maria Maggiore, before it was officially dedicated to Santa Maria Assunta, or the Assumption of Mary.

Construction of the cathedral's separate campanile, or bell tower, began in 1173. By 1178, when the work had reached the second floor, the foundations began to sink as a result of weak subsoil. As a result, construction was abandoned for a century, which allowed time for the building to settle, but which also led to it beginning to lean. Work restarted in 1272, which saw the upper floors built with one side taller than the other, to compensate for the tilt. The bell chamber was finally added in 1372, almost two centuries after construction began. At its greatest extent, measured in 1990, the tower's lean measured 5.5 degrees from vertical. This saw urgent work begun to prevent its collapse, with steel cables to stop it leaning further, and soil removed from the raised side and counterweights used in an effort to move the tower back towards vertical. After ten years of this work, the tower had moved 45cm in the opposite direction, giving it a lean of just under 4 degrees, and stabilising it for at least 300 years.

Answer: Florence

Lisa del Giocondo was born in 1479 as the daughter of Antonmaria di Noldo Gherardini, a member of an old but minor family from Florence, and his third wife, Lucrezia del Caccia. In 1495, at the age of 15, Lisa was betrothed to Francesco del Giocondo, who was a cloth and silk merchant of some means in the city. The new couple benefitted from Francesco's relative wealth and the age of Lisa's family name to live a relatively middle-class life, with Lisa giving birth to six children, of whom five survived, between 1496 and 1502. During this period, Francesco was elected to the Dodici Buonomini, one of the city's advisory councils, in 1499, before subsequently becoming a member of the Signori, which was Florence's government, in 1512.

As a result of his means, Francesco del Giocondo was able to commission art and serve as patrons to artists. One of these commissions came in 1503, when he obtained the services of Leonardo da Vinci to produce a portrait of Lisa, believed to be in celebration of the birth of their daughter Andrea. Leonardo began the work the same year, but was forced to halt it as he was then commissioned, and paid, to produce "The Battle of Anghiari". The artist is believed to have returned to the work in 1506, but he never received payment for it, and thus never delivered it to the del Giocondo family. The name that the painting is universally known by in English, "Mona Lisa", dates from 1550. The painting is referred to in Italian as "La Gioconda", from the feminine form of the subject's family name.

Answer: Certified cheque

A certified cheque is a type of personal cheque, in that it is written to draw on the funds of an individual's (either a person or entity) own account. However, as a way of ensuring that the cheque actually clears when it is paid into the payee's own account, it is "certified" by the bank of the drawer (the person that has made out the cheque), and the necessary funds to fulfil the cheque are withdrawn from the drawer's account and placed into the bank's own account, thus protecting those funds, as they become part of the bank's own funds until the cheque is deposited (barring the bank itself going out of business).

In some jurisdictions, a certified cheque can be considered an equivalent to cash, given it is a guaranteed payment thanks to the bank's own certification. Conversely, in other areas it is illegal for retail banks to certify cheques so as to stop them being used as an alternative to cash - in Germany for example, only the Bundesbank, which is the German central bank, has the power to certify cheques.