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🔔 The Italian Almanac

October 12

Stories and curiosities for October 12, from the Italy of a thousand bell towers.

Bell-tower rivalries 📅 1492

Columbus makes landfall on 12 October 1492; on his birthplace Genoa has the papers, Cogoleto the house in via Rati, and the queue of claimants is long

At 2 a.m. on 12 October 1492 the lookout on the Pinta, Rodrigo de Triana, sighted the coast of Guanahani. Since then half the world has argued over where Columbus was born. Genoa has the documents: a birth between August and October 1451 and his words in the 1498 deed of primogeniture, “siendo yo nacido en Genova”. Cogoleto, in Liguria too, answers with the house in via Rati, decorated from 1650 by a priest of the Colombo family, and a 1638 atlas calling it “Christophori Columbi patria”. His son Ferdinand had already listed Nervi, Savona and Piacenza; then came Cuccaro in Monferrato, Calvi in Corsica, Catalans, Portuguese and Galicians. The dispute is not over.

📍 Discover Cogoleto

Today's tidbits

Words born here

Milliner means Milanese: the English word for a hat-maker began with merchants from Milan selling bonnets and gloves

Ask for a milliner and you are asking, without knowing it, for someone from Milan (Milano). In the early 16th century milliner, or Milener, meant exactly that: the Milanese merchants who sold fancy bonnets, gloves, jewellery and cutlery. Between the 16th and the 18th century the word slid from a foreign merchant to a dealer in small articles of dress, and from 1713 it gradually came to mean a woman who makes and sells bonnets and other accessories for women. In Britain, by the start of the Victorian period, milliners had specialised in hats. The city's name stayed stitched inside the trade.

📍 Milan →
Italian records 1606

142 steps clad in majolica: the staircase in Caltagirone that tells Sicily's story from the Arabs to today, one riser at a time

In Caltagirone, the ceramics town inland from Catania, in Sicily, the staircase of Santa Maria del Monte links the old town to the new: 142 steps over more than 130 metres, built in 1606 as separate flights and joined in 1844 to a design by Salvatore Marino. Since 1954 every riser has been faced with polychrome tiles, and the motifs follow, block by block, the island's history: Arab, Norman, Swabian, Angevin-Aragonese, Spanish, Renaissance, Baroque, down to today. On 24 and 25 July, for St James, the patron, the stairs are lit at 9.30 pm with four thousand lanterns called lumera. In spring, thousands of potted plants take their place.

📍 Caltagirone →

🎉 Celebrations today in… 1

1 towns with a guide celebrate their patron saint on October 12

Other saints of the day 1

Montegranarosan Serafino · Marche
Patron saint festival 📍 San Fili

Feast of Saint Francis of Paola

📅 Every year, on 12 October

On 12 October San Fili celebrates Saint Francis of Paola, one of its two patrons; the other patron is Our Lady of Mount Carmel (16 July), and in August the town hosts "Notti delle magare".

Patron saint festival 📍 Montegranaro

Feast of Saint Seraphin

📅 Every year, on 12 October

On 12 October Montegranaro celebrates its patron Saint Seraphin of Montegranaro, who was born there; one of the town's churches is dedicated to him.

Patron saint festival 📍 Teolo

Mary, patron of the ancient Bresseo Fair

📅 Every year, on the Monday after the second Sunday of October, with the ancient Bresseo Fair

Teolo celebrates its patron, Mary, on the Monday after the second Sunday of October, along the provincial road in the hamlet of Bresseo, with the ancient Bresseo Fair.