Should the wishes of the person who leaves treasures to a museum or art gallery be sacrosanct? Sir William Burrell insisted that the collection he bequeathed should never be loaned abroad. The director of Glasgow Museums is arguing before a Parliamentary Commission that the city’s famous Burrell Collection should no longer be tied to its donor’s dying wishes. David Lister, Arts News Editor, says there will be a dramatic twist at the hearing tomorrow which carries enormous implications for many other top art collections. It was a fitting coda to a very warm Roman holiday.-James Rampton.

People had clearly come to party.The trouble between English fans and Italian police appeared to be forgotten by the second half when, using the perspex barriers, the English supporters drowned out their hosts with a 10-minute version of theme from The Dam Busters.Even as we were marched back into the city, the sound of “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” rang out. At the airport, he refused to accept any money because he liked the English.This is entirely consistent with a day which for me was much more about harmony than hoolies. My impression was that this Italian Job was for the vast majority of English fans nothing more sinister than good old- fashioned fun.Timothy Bell, a computer salesman from Camberley, bore this out. In a bar before the game, he revealed that “the Italians have been very chatty. We’ve felt no grievances or had any adverse comments”.Frank Skinner, over with David Baddiel to launch their new video, More Unseen Fantasy Football, reckoned that the feelgood factor partly stemmed from Euro 96, which “gave the feeling that maybe the door on football hooliganism had been closed. It was OK for normal nice people to go to football”.The good humour was carried over into the stadium where Delia Smith and Ernest Saunders rubbed shoulders with cut-outs of Ginger Spice. The nattily dressed Italian contingent in front of us turned round to applaud us.

They were not taking the mickey, but exhibiting a concept thought to have deserted football with the rattle: sportsmanship.Later on, two of our party were searching in vain for a cab as a private car pulled up. When they told the Italian driver they needed to get to the airport, 30 kilometres away, he simply said, “hop in, I’ll take you there”. The windows of one bar were smashed in.After the match, the main thoroughfares were patrolled by police cars with sirens blaring, and the search for signs of trouble did not let up even after the first eight charter flights had taken several hundred fans home. One English fan was stabbed overnight in a well-heeled residential quarter – but that, on this craziest of weekends, seemed like a minor incident after all the rest.- Andrew GumbelSo was I, and it wasn’tAt the end of this pulsating, emotionally draining match, something bizarre happened. On Via del Corso, Rome’s answer to Oxford Street, a group of English fans threw bottles and rocks at riot policemen.At this point, Italy’s own contingent of fascists and bootboys weighed in. At around 5 o’clock, full-blown street battles broke out, fought with bottles and cobblestones lifted from a nearby roadworks site. The word “Italians” was barely uttered without the epithet “fucking” chucked in before it.By Saturday afternoon, owners of the fancy boutiques of the area around Piazza del Popolo and the Spanish Steps were forced to closefor fear of an impending rampage.