Category Archives: Italy

Stolen Roman frescoes returned to Pompeii after investigation

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Six fragments returned to archaeological park, some after being illegally trafficked in 1970s

Six fragments of wall frescoes stolen from the ruins of ancient Roman villas have been returned to Pompeii’s archaeological park, after an investigation by Italy’s cultural protection police squad.

Three of the relics, which date back to the first century AD, are believed to have been cut off the walls of two Roman villas in Stabiae, a historical site close to the main Pompeii excavations, in the 1970s before being exported illegally.

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Wild boar corner Italian woman and steal her food shopping – video

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A group of wild boar surrounded a woman who had just come out of a supermarket near Rome and stole her shopping, rekindling a debate about the animal's presence in Italian towns and cities. A video posted on social media shows the boar pursuing the woman in a supermarket car park in the village of Le Rughe before raiding the shopping bag she is forced to drop. Italian farmers have protested in recent years about wild boar wreaking havoc on their land and causing fatal road accidents

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EU states cooperating informally to deny refugees asylum rights – report

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Beatings, thefts and dog attacks are just some of the border police practices migrants say they face when pushed back from Europe’s frontiers

Informal cooperation between states has prevented thousands of women, men and children from seeking protection in Europe this year, according to a report released by nine human rights organisations.

The Protecting Rights at Borders (Prab) initiative has recorded 2,162 cases of “pushbacks” at different borders in Italy, Greece, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, North Macedonia and Hungary carried out on the basis of bilateral agreements between countries, which resulted in them circumventing their responsibilities and pushing unwanted groups back outside the EU.

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More than 2,000 migrants arrive on Italian island in 24 hours

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Hundreds of asylum seekers forced to sleep outside as Lampedusa reception centre reaches capacity

More than 2,000 people have arrived on Lampedusa in 24 hours as people smugglers took advantage of calm seas to launch at least 20 boats, pushing the reception centre on the tiny Italian island to its limit.

Hundreds of asylum seekers, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, Pakistan and Syria, were forced to sleep on the dock after the centre rapidly surpassed its capacity. Hundreds more were being transferred to an unused passenger ferry offshore for quarantine until they can be tested for Covid-19. Another commercial passenger ship was being dispatched to Lampedusa to take on more.

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Italian public broadcaster asked to stop promoting ‘intolerable’ content

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Activists claim Rai regulary breaks its own code of ethics when it should be setting example to rest of industry

Activists opposed to racism, homophobia, antisemitism and sexism in the Italian media have written to the public broadcaster, Rai, urging it to stop promoting “intolerable” content.

Rai apologised recently for the use of blackface in its shows, and advised editors to stop airing productions in which performers wear makeup to imitate black people, but stopped short of an outright ban.

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Italy’s birthrate is falling. Can the storks help?

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Last year, the population of Europe’s fourth biggest economy dropped by the equivalent of a city the size of Florence. Yet the northern hamlets of Val d’Ultimo have found ways to buck the trend

Read more: As the global family shrinks, migrants and the planet benefit

As if having a baby wasn’t expensive enough, fathers of newborns in the mountain hamlets that make up Italy’s Val d’Ultimo have an additional cost.

In a revival of an ancient myth that white storks deliver babies, carved wooden storks carrying a newborn child in a sling are a common feature outside homes in the valley.

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Remains of nine Neanderthals found in cave south of Rome

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Italian archaeologists believe most of Neanderthals were killed by hyenas then dragged back to den

Italian archaeologists have unearthed the bones of nine Neanderthals who were allegedly hunted and mauled by hyenas in their den about 100km south-east of Rome.

Scientists from the Archaeological Superintendency of Latina and the University of Tor Vergata in Rome said the remains belong to seven adult males and one female, while another are those of a young boy.

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Refugees and the Armenian genocide: human rights this fortnight in pictures

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A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Colombia to China

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Dough to go: Rome’s first pizza vending machine gets mixed reviews

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Mr Go Pizza booth offers 24/7 pizzas, kneaded by a machine and served with cutlery

Massimo Bucolo bravely dared to go where nobody else had gone before in order to take a slice of Italy’s competitive pizza market: a 24-hour vending machine that dishes out freshly baked pizza in three minutes.

Located in a booth on Via Catania, close to Piazza Bologna in Rome, Mr Go Pizza offers up four varieties, including the classic margherita invented in Naples in 1889, each costing between €4.50 and €6. Customers can watch through a small glass window as the vending machine kneads and tops the dough.

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Libyan coastguard boat that shot Italian fisher was provided by Rome

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Italian government supplied vessel to help Tripoli control flow of migrants in Mediterranean

An Italian fisher wounded when his trawler was machined-gunned by the Libyan coastguard was fired on from a boat supplied by Italy’s government to help Tripoli control the flow of migrants.

Libyan authorities, who say the coastguard vessel fired warning shots into the air, said three Italian fishing vessels had entered Libyan territorial waters without authorisation before the incident on Thursday, the latest episode in a territorial dispute involving crews from the Sicilian port of Mazara del Vallo who fish for red prawns off the Libyan coast.

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Italian fisher wounded after Libyan coastguard reportedly shot at boat

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Navy rescues man, who was injured in one arm, after coastguard fired on his boat off the coast of Misrata in Sicily

Italy’s navy has rescued an Italian fisher who was wounded after the Libyan coastguard reportedly fired on his boat.

Salvatore Quinci, mayor of the fishing port of Mazaro del Vallo in south-western Sicily, said members of the coastguard shot at the fisherman’s boat off the coast of Misrata, the Italian news agency Agi reported.

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American students jailed for life for murder of police officer in Rome

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Jury convicts Finnegan Lee Elder, 21, and Gabriel Natale-Hjorth, 20, over knife killing committed in 2019

Two American students have been sentenced to life in prison by a Rome court for the murder of Italian police officer Mario Cerciello Rega.

After almost 13 hour of deliberation, a jury convicted Finnegan Lee Elder, 21, and Gabriel Natale-Hjorth, 20, of murdering Cerciello Rega, who had only just returned to duty after his honeymoon when he was stabbed to death, aged 35, on a street in central Rome in July 2019.

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The Guardian’s coverage of Europe in the first week of its founding, 5 May 1821

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On 5 May 1821, the paper reported on revolutions in Naples and Sardinia as well as events in Moldavia, Odessa and Portugal

The hopes which were entertained, at the period when our prospectus was issued, with respect to the revolutions at Naples, and in Piedmont, have since been fatally disappointed, and the termination of the contest almost with a struggle on the part of the Neapolitans, of the Piedmontese, has afforded to the enemies of popular rights, opportunity for a sneer. It was not to be supposed that the forces of Naples, or of Piedmont, separated, or even united could cope with the armies of Austria, particularly when supported, as in the case of their receiving even a momentary check they would have been, and as in point of fact they still appear likely to, by those of Russia.

Related: The Guardian’s first ever edition – annotated

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Revealed: 2,000 refugee deaths linked to illegal EU pushbacks

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A Guardian analysis finds EU countries used brutal tactics to stop nearly 40,000 asylum seekers crossing borders

EU member states have used illegal operations to push back at least 40,000 asylum seekers from Europe’s borders during the pandemic, methods being linked to the death of more than 2,000 people, the Guardian can reveal.

In one of the biggest mass expulsions in decades, European countries, supported by EU’s border agency Frontex, has systematically pushed back refugees, including children fleeing from wars, in their thousands, using illegal tactics ranging from assault to brutality during detention or transportation.

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Melting ice reveals first world war relics in Italian Alps

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Accelerating retreat of glaciers in Lombardy and Trentino Alto-Aldige reveals preserved history of ‘White War’

The soldiers dug the wooden barracks into a cave on the top of Mount Scorluzzo, a 3,095-metre (10,154ft) peak overlooking the Stelvio pass. For the next three-and-a-half years, the cramped, humid space was home to about 20 men from the Austro-Hungarian army as they fought against Italian troops in what became known as the White War, a battle waged across treacherous and bitterly cold Alpine terrain during the first world war.

Fought mainly in the Alps of the Lombardy region of Italy and the Dolomites in Trentino Alto-Adige, the White War was a period of history frozen in time until the 1990s, when global warming started to reveal an assortment of perfectly preserved relics – weapons, sledges, letters, diaries and, as the retreat of glaciers hastened, the bodies of soldiers.

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How continental Europe is emerging from Covid lockdown

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Countries across Europe are starting to relax coronavirus restrictions as case numbers fall

Counting on an accelerating vaccination campaign to keep new infections in check, much of continental Europe has announced plans for a gradual exit from lockdown over the coming weeks as case numbers begin to fall. Here is where things stand:

Belgium (at least one vaccine dose administered to 25% of whole population) aims to permit outside dining in restaurants and bars again on 8 May, with a mandatory 10pm closing time and tables limited to groups of four. Non-essential shops and hairdressers reopened on Monday.

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Italian judge is asked to put Egyptian officers on trial over Giulio Regeni death

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Case of student whose body was found in Cairo in 2016 finally reaches courtroom

Italian prosecutors have asked a judge to put four senior members of Egypt’s powerful security services on trial over their suspected role in the disappearance and murder of Giulio Regeni in Cairo in 2016, as the case finally reached a courtroom five years after his death.

The 28-year-old doctoral student went missing in Cairo on 25 January 2016 while researching Egypt’s unions. His body was discovered on an outlying Cairo highway nine days later, displaying signs of extreme torture and abuse.

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‘Covid is just an excuse’: the scandal of Rome’s saturated cemeteries

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Funeral directors say up to 2,000 bodies await burial or cremation in warehouses at Prima Porta cemetery

Steps away from a warehouse containing row upon row of coffins at Prima Porta cemetery in Rome, anger simmered among a group of about 12 funeral workers queueing up outside the administrative office.

Some were there to deliver bodies for burial or cremation, others to collect the ashes of the deceased cremated months ago. “It’s a tragic, shameful situation,” said Maurizio, a funeral company worker. “Just look around you – we’re all waiting. They blame it on coronavirus, but that’s just an excuse. This is how it is every day.”

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France arrests seven Italians convicted of far-left terrorism

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Rome had long urged Paris to detain 10 people found guilty of terrorist acts from late 1960s to early 80s

Seven Italian far-left guerrilla fighters, who hid in France for decades after escaping terrorism convictions that left “an open wound” in Italy, have been arrested.

French authorities are also searching for three other Italians convicted on terrorism charges linked to bombings and assassinations between the late 1960s and early 1980s.

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UK accused of stranding vulnerable refugees after Brexit

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Exclusive: Torture survivors and lone children stuck in Greece and Italy after Home Office ‘deliberately’ ends cooperation on family reunions

The Home Office has been accused of failing to reunite vulnerable refugees who have the right to join family in the UK under EU law, leaving lone children and torture survivors stranded.

The government faced widespread criticism when it announced that family reunion law would no longer apply after the UK left the EU, and it promised that cases under way on that date would be allowed to proceed.

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