The ruins of Pompeii have once again rewritten the historical record, casting new light on the military technology of the ancient world. A team of Italian researchers has identified impact marks on the city’s northern defensive walls that they believe were made by a polybolos. The Greek-engineered repeating artillery weapon (‘machine gun’) was capable of […]
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Francesco Laparelli was born on 5 April 1521 in Cortona, one of the ancient Etruscan cities of what is now Tuscany, into one of the city’s wealthiest and most distinguished families. It was a beginning that gave him access, education and connections, and the opportunity to create one of Europe’s most extraordinary capital cities – […]
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Born with every gift Florence could bestow, Cosimo I’s brilliant eldest daughter, Maria de’ Medici, was dead at seventeen. Her story casts a long shadow over one of history’s most powerful families.
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Gaetano Casanova, the Italian actor and ballet dancer best remembered as the father of Europe’s most celebrated seducer, was born on 2 April 1697 in Parma.
Continue Reading![Fragment of portrait of Joachim Murat, Prince d’Empire, Grand Duke of Clèves and of Berg, King of Naples under the name of Napoleon in 1808 (1767-1815), Marshal of France in 1804 By François Gérard - [1] See full portrait:[2], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=264241](https://italynews.online/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Murat2.jpg)
On 30 March 1815, a declaration was made in the Adriatic city of Rimini that would echo through Italian history for generations. “Italians! The hour has come to engage in your highest destiny… From the Alps to the straits of Sicily, there is but one cry — Italian independence.” The words were stirring, visionary, and […]
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Born 28 March 1472 in Savignano di Prato, Tuscany, Fra Bartolommeo, a Dominican friar and High Renaissance master, whose figures were said to move “with a seraphic grace that must have struck the young Raphael with the force of revelation.”
Continue Reading![Francesco I Grand Duke of Tuscany By Alessandro Allori - [2], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=99729525](https://italynews.online/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Francesco-I-Grand-Duke-of-Tuscany.jpg)
Born in Florence on 25 March 1541, the second Grand Duke of Tuscany, Francesco I, left behind a legacy of art, alchemy, political ambiguity, and a death that has puzzled historians for more than four centuries.
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Julius Caesar remains, more than two thousand years after his death, one of the most recognisable figures in all of human history. His name became a title — Kaiser in German, Tsar in Russian — and his life a byword for ambition, brilliance, and the perils of absolute power. But who was the man behind […]
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On 24 March 1926, one of the most provocative and prolific figures in twentieth-century theatre was born in the small Lombardy town of Leggiuno Sangiano, in the Province of Varese. Dario Fo would go on to write more than 80 plays, win the Nobel Prize in Literature, be banned from Italian television, and spend a […]
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From the founding of the Franciscan Order in medieval Umbria, Italy to how the modern-day order functions, Italy News Online looks at how St Francis changed many aspects of Chritiantity.
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