In 1966, Italy was rocked by one woman’s courageous efforts to challenge the country’s treatment of rape victims — the lessons of which are sadly still relevant. Franca Viola became the first Italian woman to refuse a "rehabilitating marriage" ("matrimonio…
The fall of communism in Albania taking place in the early 1990s gave way to a major economic collapse (with severe food shortages) amid widespread political and social unrest in the country. This incited many Albanians to try to leave the previously seclu…
Between 1928 and 1932, two enormous wooden ships, which once belonged to the Emperor Caligula, and had lain on the bottom of the Lake Nemi for over nineteen hundred years, were salvaged in what was perhaps the greatest underwater archaeological recovery ev…
The building in the picture is Palazzo Braschi in Rome, the headquarters of the Fascist Party Federation (the local one, not the national Party headquarters). It was not always covered up like that; this set-up was displayed for the 1934 elections, in whic…
In the first decades of the 20th century the Italian Cavalry School at Tor di Quinto near Rome was - along with the French Cavalry School at Saumur - the leading institution for horsemanship in the world. Tor di Quinto was probably the foremost academy for a…
Mussolini was brought up with firm socialist ideals and, as a young man, became a leading figure in Italian socialist circles. In June 1902, in an attempt to avoid conscription, Mussolini moved to Switzerland where he worked as a bricklayer, dabbled in jou…
The Battle of Caporetto (also known as the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo or the Battle of Karfreit as it was known by the Central Powers) took place from 24 October to 19 November 1917, near the town of Kobarid (now in Slovenia), on the Austro-Italian front o…