Chronopin: upcoming release dates, events and other important dates

Antico Caffè Greco opened in 1760 a few steps from the Spanish Steps and became the room where the Grand Tour sat down - Keats, Byron, Goethe, Stendhal and Casanova among the names attached to it. It is the oldest cafe in Rome, but it lost a long court fight with its landlord over the rent: after the Court of Cassation upheld the lease termination, police sealed the premises it had occupied for more than two and a half centuries on 8 October 2025.

Demel was established in 1786 a few steps from the Hofburg and became confectioner to the imperial court, a title it still puts on its boxes. Its window on the Kohlmarkt and its Anna Torte made it one of the fixtures by which Vienna measures its café culture, and it sits at the centre of a long argument with Hotel Sacher over who may call a cake a Sachertorte.

An enduring family-run dining room for traditional Catalan cooking in the Gothic Quarter.

At the Round Foundry in Holbeck, Leeds, engineering firm Fenton, Murray and Wood built the Salamanca, the world's first commercially successful steam locomotive, which first ran publicly on 24 June 1812. Designed by Matthew Murray for John Blenkinsop's rack-and-pinion Middleton Railway, it hauled coal using a toothed rail system.

The most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded history threw 37-45 cubic kilometres of rock into the atmosphere from Sumbawa. Its veil of ash cooled the planet enough to give 1816 the name the Year Without a Summer.

The bar opened in 1817 under the name La Piña de Plata, took the name Floridita later, and became the daiquiri's home address - frozen, without sugar, double rum, the way Hemingway drank them at the corner of the bar where his statue now leans.

In 1821, landowner Marco Borrini and French businessman Jean-Baptiste Alexandre Henraux founded the Henraux marble company in Tuscany’s Apuan Alps. It still works the Monte Altissimo quarries first opened by Michelangelo in the 1500s and shown in Stone Men.

The oldest restaurant still operating in the United States opened on 7 October 1826 as the Atwood & Bacon Oyster House, in a Union Street building already old at the time. Its semicircular oyster bar is the original, and Daniel Webster is said to have worked through brandy and oysters at it daily.

Jonathan Dodgson Carr founds a small bakery and biscuit factory in Carlisle, pioneering mass biscuit production. The site is still operating today as a McVitie's factory, the world's oldest continually-running biscuit works.

Café Kranzler opened on Unter den Linden in 1834 and became the Berlin coffeehouse. Destroyed in the war, it was rebuilt on the Kurfürstendamm, where its red-and-white striped rotunda survives as a listed landmark of West Berlin's reconstruction.

Antoine Alciatore opened his restaurant on 3 April 1840 in the French Quarter, and it has been run by his descendants ever since - the oldest family-run restaurant in the United States. Oysters Rockefeller were invented in its kitchen, and the recipe has never been published.

The Bewley family began dealing tea in Dublin in 1840, having broken the East India Company's grip on the trade by shipping direct from China, and the cafés followed. The Grafton Street room, with its Harry Clarke windows and open fires, became the city's front parlour.

On April 16, 1853, the Great Indian Peninsula Railway ran the first passenger train in India and Asia, carrying about 400 guests roughly 34km from Bombay's Bori Bunder to Thane.

With more than 500 dead in ten days around Golden Square, John Snow persuaded the parish to remove the handle from the Broad Street water pump. He had mapped the deaths house by house and found them clustered on one well - the argument that cholera travelled in water, not air.

Washington's oldest saloon dates itself to 1856 and has moved premises more than once, ending up a block from the White House. Its oyster bar and dark wood booths have fed enough administrations that the taxidermy over the bar is said to have been shot by Theodore Roosevelt.

Café Tortoni first opened in 1858, started by a French immigrant who named it after a Paris cafe, and became the room where Buenos Aires argued about itself - Borges, Gardel and Rubinstein among the regulars whose likenesses now sit at its tables. It still trades on Avenida de Mayo with its original marble, mirrors and tango cellar.

The coffeehouse on Vörösmarty tér opened in 1858 and grew into one of the largest and grandest in Europe, its rooms panelled and chandeliered on a scale that belongs to the Habsburg city. It gave its name to the Gerbeaud slice and remains the fixture by which Budapest's café tradition is measured.

On 25 April 1859 the Suez Canal Company broke ground at what is now Port Said, starting a ten-year dig across the Isthmus of Suez. The Suez Canal Authority says about 20,000 Egyptians took part in the groundbreaking despite objections from Britain and the Ottoman Empire.

John Murray issues the first edition of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection from 50 Albemarle Street in London. The print run of 1,250 copies is taken up by the trade on the day of publication.

Tai Ping Koon was established in 1860 serving Western food to Chinese diners, and in doing so more or less invented the genre Hong Kong calls soy-sauce Western - Swiss chicken wings in a sweet soy braise, baked pork chop rice, souffle to finish. It began in Canton and became a Hong Kong business alone when the Canton branch was confiscated and closed in 1956.

The Metropolitan Railway opened between Paddington and Farringdon on January 10, 1863, the world's first underground railway and the ancestor of every metro system shown in Moving Millions Every Day.

Quanjude opened in 1864 and made its name on a method: hanging the ducks in an open oven over fruitwood rather than closing them in, which crisps the skin differently. The dish it standardised is the one the world now calls Peking duck, and the carving at the table is part of it.

During the 1867 Exposition Universelle, Paris opened Baron Haussmann's newly rebuilt sewer network to public tours for the first time, turning Eugène Belgrand's engineering into a civic showcase.

Dmitri Mendeleev's paper The Dependence between the Properties of the Atomic Weights of the Elements is read to the Russian Chemical Society in St Petersburg, arranging the known elements by atomic weight and valence and leaving gaps for elements not yet found.

The Suez Canal was inaugurated on 17 November 1869, linking the Mediterranean and the Red Sea after ten years of digging. A procession of ships headed by the French imperial yacht L'Aigle, carrying Empress Eugenie, entered the canal at Port Said.

Leopold Cafe was founded in Colaba in 1871 by Irani immigrants, part of the wave of Zoroastrian cafes that shaped how Bombay eats out, and has outlasted almost all of them. It became a fixture for travellers along the Causeway, and was one of the sites attacked in November 2008 - it reopened days afterwards and kept the bullet marks in its walls.

New York's Brooklyn Bridge opened to the public, completing a 13-year construction effort that Emily Warren Roebling steered to completion after her husband was incapacitated by decompression sickness.

The third explosion of 27 August 1883 destroyed over 70% of the island and remains the loudest sound in recorded history, audible in Perth and near Mauritius. The eruption and its tsunamis killed at least 36,417 people.

On 4 October 1883 the Express d'Orient, run by Wagons-Lits, began its through service from Paris to Constantinople, the start of the legendary Orient Express.

The Doyle family began selling fish on the sand at Watsons Bay in 1885, looking back across the harbour at the city, and the business has stayed in the family for five generations - one of the oldest restaurants in Australia still run by the people whose name is on it.