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🔔 The Italian Almanac

October 24

Stories and curiosities for October 24, from the Italy of a thousand bell towers.

Busted myths 📅 79

Pompei did not die on 24 August: the clues moving the eruption to 24 October 79

The textbook date, 24 August 79, comes from a letter by Pliny the Younger: nonum kal septembres. But the excavations at Pompei, near Napoli, tell of another season: charred dried fruit, braziers, sealed must still fermenting, heavy wool cloaks, and a coin celebrating the fifteenth acclamation of Titus, which took place after 8 September. In 2018 a charcoal inscription turned up in a house in Regio V bearing the date XVI K Nov, that is 17 October; charcoal fades fast, so it was recent. In August 2022 a study by Italy's INGV put together history, stratigraphy, sediments and climate and concluded that the most likely date is 24 October. Not everyone is convinced, but August is wobbling.

📍 Discover Pompei

Today's tidbits

Vanished Italy 1902

Roscigno Vecchia, the village a 1902 law ordered to be abandoned

Nobody destroyed Roscigno Vecchia: it was simply left. The village, in the Cilento, in southern Campania, inside a national park, was threatened by several landslides, and two special laws, no. 301 of 7 July 1902 and no. 445 of 9 July 1908, ordered it emptied and rebuilt a little further on, where Roscigno Nuova stands today. The houses stayed up around Piazza Giovanni Nicotera, with the fountain that became the symbol of the place and the church of San Nicola di Bari. Films have been shot there since 1989. Until January 2024 one person still lived there, Giuseppe Spagnuolo, who spent his days walking the empty streets. The comune of Roscigno now counts 574 inhabitants.

📍 Roscigno →
On the table today

The Castelfranco radicchio, an 18th-century flower you can eat

They call it orchid, carnation, rose, “the flower you eat”, because the leaves at the heart, instead of closing into a head like other radicchios, stay upright and open. The variegato di Castelfranco was born in the 18th century from a cross between lettuce-leaved escarole and the late red radicchio of Treviso: from the first it took its large pale leaves, from the second its colour, which comes only with the cold, in streaks from bright red to purplish red on a creamy white ground. It takes frost and handling badly, so it is harder to grow than the others. PGI since 1996 in 54 comuni of the provinces of Treviso, Padova and Venezia; the name, though, belongs to Castelfranco Veneto.

📍 Castelfranco Veneto →

🎉 Celebrations today in… 4

4 towns with a guide celebrate their patron saint on October 24

San Raffaele Arcangelo 2

CastroliberoCalabria StignanoCalabria

Other saints of the day 2

San Felice sul PanaroSan Felice di Thibiuca · Emilia-Romagna Villasimiussan Raffaele · Sardinia
Patron saint festival 📍 Villasimius

Feast of Saint Raphael

📅 Every year, on 24 October

On 24 October Villasimius celebrates its patron Saint Raphael; the town preserves the Fortezza Vecchia and hosts the Archaeological Museum of Villasimius.

Patron saint festival 📍 Stignano

Feast of Saint Raphael the Archangel

📅 Every year, on 24 October

On 24 October Stignano celebrates its patron Saint Raphael the Archangel; the town preserves the Casa di Tommaso Campanella and Villa Caristo, a Roman archaeological site.