Pins matching place:Italy

Mount Vesuvius threw a column of superheated ash and gas 33 km into the sky, then collapsed it into pyroclastic surges that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum. The remains of more than 1,500 people have been recovered from the two towns.

Genoese galleys carrying plague from the Black Sea put in at Messina in Sicily, and the disease went ashore with them. Over the next seven years it killed perhaps a third of Europe - up to 50 million people - and took two centuries to be made good.

Venice's Baroque votive basilica, its foundations built on more than a million driven wooden piles in the lagoon mud, is consecrated by Patriarch Alvise Sagredo. The city still marks the day every November 21st as the Festa della Salute.

Floriano Francesconi opened his coffee house under the arcades of Piazza San Marco in 1720, making it one of the oldest cafés in continuous business anywhere. It admitted women when other Venetian cafés did not, which is how Casanova came to be among its regulars, and its orchestra still plays to the square.

Port'Alba began in 1738 as a street stall selling pizza to passers-by and took premises as a sit-down pizzeria a century later, which is the claim behind its billing as the world's first pizzeria. It still bakes in a wood oven lined with Vesuvian stone, on the street of booksellers under the old city gate.

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, and has spent recent years fighting its landlord in court over the rent on the premises it has occupied for more than two and a half centuries.

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.

Pirelli introduced the P Zero on the Lancia Delta S4 Stradale, the tire that gave rise to the Ultra High Performance category; the first generation followed in 1987 to equip the Ferrari F40. It launched the company's 'Perfect Fit' strategy of bespoke tires for premium automakers.

Carnival Vista, a 133,500-ton ship carrying more than 4,600 passengers, was delivered by the Fincantieri shipyard in Monfalcone, Italy on 28 April 2016.

A three-year, Tod's-funded restoration of the Colosseum's facade - the first phase of a longer project - wrapped up with a ceremony attended by Italy's prime minister, revealing the monument's stone cleaned of two millennia of grime.

Lamborghini unveiled the Huracán Evo, a 640-horsepower V10 supercar built by hand at its Sant'Agata Bolognese factory in Italy.

The consortium building Venice's MOSE flood-defence system put the last of its 78 mobile barrier gates into place across the lagoon's three inlets, nearly sixteen years after groundbreaking, though the system as a whole was still years from completion. Heavy-lift specialist Fagioli spent years floating and positioning the multi-tonne steel gates; individual gates were first raised in October 2013, and the first full test of all 78 followed on 10 July 2020.

Less than two years after the Morandi Bridge collapse killed 43 people, Genoa reopened the crossing as the Renzo Piano-designed Genoa San Giorgio Bridge.

Italy's government gave final approval to build a suspension bridge across the Strait of Messina, reviving a project that had stalled for over 50 years.

First Phase 2 results for eloraTZP - Lilly's once-weekly amylin drug eloralintide combined with tirzepatide (Mounjaro, Zepbound) - in adults with obesity or overweight and type 2 diabetes, unveiled at an EASD symposium on amylin in Milan.

The 2027 International Architecture Exhibition runs 8 May to 21 November in Venice, curated by Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu under the theme 'Do Architecture'.

The Temple of Speed holds the highest average speeds in Formula 1, and the Tifosi fill the banking whatever Ferrari's season looks like.

A proposed 3.3 km single-span suspension bridge linking Sicily to the Italian mainland, which would be by far the longest span ever built. Estimated date.

TELT, the joint French-Italian agency building the Mont d'Ambin base tunnel under the Alps, is now aiming to finish the roughly 57km bore by the end of 2033.