The exhibition, Rome and the Barbarians: the Birth of a New World, in Venice, meditates on Europe's cultural genealogy. Europe, it argues, is a concoction of disparate traditions conceived and developed by the will of admiring immigrants to the Roman world from the east and north. It raises a range of issues left latent in the gallery. How can we create an appropriate narrative for the first millennium AD, particularly with archaeological finds? How, for that matter, can Europe's tradition be defined; and what prompts the issue?