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Art and culture

296

The first blocks of flats were built in Rome

in the 1st century bce.

Eleven Christian churches were carved out

of solid rock at Labilela in Ethiopia in the

12 th century ce. They took 24 years to complete.

The first ever skyscraper

was the 10-storey-high

Home Insurance Building,

built in Chicago, USA, in 1885.

The Circus Maximus stadium in Ancient Rome

could hold 250,000 people – a quarter of the

population of the city.

In 1923, marathon dancing competitions

became popular in the USA after Alma Cummings

danced for 27 hours without stopping.

After a performance

of the opera Otello

in Vienna, Austria, in

1991, starring Spanish

tenor

Placido

Domingo, the

audience applauded

for 1 hour 20 minutes.

Irish-born James Devine is the world’s fastest

tap dancer. He made 38 taps per second

in a performance in Sydney, Australia, in 1998.

Ancient Greek

theatres were open-air.

The biggest could hold

10,000 spectators.

Agatha Christie’s whodunit play The Mousetrap

has been playing in London’s West End since 1952. There

have been more than 27,500 performances so far.

In the Mayan ballgame court at Chichen

Itza, the acoustics are so good that a

whisper at one end of the court can be

heard at the other end 150 m (500 ft) away.

The marble and precious

stones used to build the

Taj Mahal in Agra,

India, were carried

there by 1,000

elephants.

In 2005, China

had 39,425

cinema screens –

more than any

other country.

The first modern novel

was called The Tale of

Genji, written 1,000 years

ago by Japanese author Murasaki Shikibu.

Americans spend an average of five hours

a day watching television.

The most expensive film ever

made was the Pirates of the

Caribbean: On Stranger

Tides, with a budget

of $378.5 million.

The world’s biggest cinema

screen is the IMAX in

Sydney, Australia. It is as

high as an eight-storey

building.

On average, it

takes eight weeks

to shoot a Hollywood

feature film. Editing

and adding special effects

takes many months more.

French author Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of

Lost Time contains just under 1.5 million words.

Playing

cards date

from 12

th

-century

Persia and India,

when a pack

contained 48

cards.

The

”Whirling Dervishes”

of the Sufi order of Islam perform their

spinning dance

as an aid to religious

meditation

.

The deputy electrician on

a film set is called the “best

boy”, even when she’s a girl.

The film Gandhi had 294,560 extras.

The epic ancient Indian poem

The Mahabharata is four times

longer than the Bible.

The Harry Potter novels by JK

Rowling have been translated

into 80 different languages.

The biggest library in the world is the

Library of Congress in Washington DC,

which has more than 32 million books.

The Asterix books, by

French duo René Goscinny and

Albert Uderzo, have sold over

370 million copies worldwide.

English playwright William Shakespeare

(1564–1616) is credited with inventing

1,700 new words.

The most prolific novelist in history was South

African writer Mary Faulkner, who wrote 904 books.

The Codex Leicester,

one of Leonardo da

Vinci’s notebooks, was

bought by US billionaire

Bill Gates in 1994 for

$29 million.

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