© IL MORUZ · CC BY-SA 3.0Request removal
🔔 The Italian Almanac

October 10

Stories and curiosities for October 10, from the Italy of a thousand bell towers.

It started here 📅 1813

Le Roncole took the surname of the innkeeper's son

On 10 October 1813 Giuseppe Verdi was born in the inn his family had rented since 1781 at Le Roncole, four kilometres from Busseto in the Po plain near Parma; his father kept the tavern. In 1963 a presidential decree renamed the hamlet Roncole Verdi: a village of 382 people (2010 figure) that carries the surname of the man born there. The birthplace is now a museum, and the church of San Michele Arcangelo still has the eighteenth-century organ the boy practised on. In 1868 Busseto opened its own theatre, 307 seats, with Rigoletto and Un ballo in maschera: Verdi paid 10,000 lire, was given a box and never once set foot inside.

📍 Discover Busseto

Today's tidbits

Italian records 1698

The Sancarlone of Arona: 35 metres and a ladder up into the head

On the Sacro Monte above Arona, on Lake Maggiore in Piedmont, Saint Charles Borromeo stands 23.40 metres tall on a pedestal of 11.70: 35.10 in all, a ten-storey building. Cardinal Federico Borromeo commissioned it, Giovanni Battista Crespi designed it and Siro Zanella and Bernardo Falconi built it out of hammered copper sheets, iron nails and tie rods, around a core of stone blocks from Angera. Begun in 1624, it was blessed on 19 May 1698. For almost two centuries it was the tallest statue in the world that could be climbed inside, until the Statue of Liberty, 46 metres, arrived in 1886. You can still go up: a spiral staircase, then steep rungs into the head.

📍 Arona →
Busted myths 1154

Spaghetti were already in Trabia a century before Marco Polo was born

In 1154 al-Idrisi, the Arab geographer at the court of Roger II of Sicily, described in the Book of Roger a village thirty kilometres from Palermo full of mills, where a pasta shaped like threads was made by hand and, once dried, shipped in large quantities across the whole Mediterranean, Muslim and Christian alike. The village is Trabia, today 10,821 inhabitants; he called the pasta itriyya, from the Greek itrion, dried pasta stretched into threads. Marco Polo was born exactly one hundred years later. The tale of the noodles he supposedly brought back from China in 1292 is an urban legend born in the United States in 1938, in the pages of the Macaroni Journal.

📍 Trabia →

🎉 Celebrations today in… 3

3 towns with a guide celebrate their patron saint on October 10

Other saints of the day 3

PescaraCetteo di Amiterno · Abruzzo Massa Marittimasan Cerbone · Tuscany Fondisant'Onorato di Fondi · Lazio
Patron saint festival 📍 Massa Marittima

Feast of Saint Cerbonius

📅 Every year, on 10 October

On 10 October Massa Marittima celebrates its patron Saint Cerbonius with a medieval costume procession; the town is also known for the Balestro del Girifalco, a crossbow contest dating back to the 14th century.

Patron saint festival 📍 Fondi

Feast of Saint Honoratus

📅 Every year, on 10 October

On 10 October Fondi celebrates its patron Saint Honoratus, a pre-Benedictine abbot who lived between the 5th century and 530; the town also preserves the Abbey of San Magno.

Patron saint festival 📍 Craco

Feast of Saint Nicholas

📅 Every year, on the second Saturday of October

On the second Saturday of October Craco celebrates Saint Nicholas. It is the feast of a town whose old centre has stood empty since the 1960s, emptied by a landslide and left a ghost town.

Patron saint festival 📍 Caulonia

Saint Hilarion the Abbot, patron of the Kaulonia Tarantella Festival

📅 Every year, on the second weekend of October and of May; also known for the Kaulonia Tarantella Festival

Caulonia celebrates Saint Hilarion the Abbot on the second weekend of October and that of May. Holy Week keeps rites typical of Southern Italy, including the Holy Saturday procession known as «Caracolo»; in summer, the Kaulonia Tarantella Festival is held, called Tarantella Power until 2007.

Festival 📍 Palermo

Le Vie dei Tesori

📅 Every year, on weekends between October and November

For six weekends between October and November, Palermo unlocks palaces, oratories, bell towers and gardens that stay closed the rest of the year. The 19th edition, in 2025, opened 85 sites with guided storytelling visits.