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🔔 The Italian Almanac

October 27

Stories and curiosities for October 27, from the Italy of a thousand bell towers.

Bell-tower rivalries

Alba has the oldest fair, Acqualagna Italy's second truffle market: the white truffle dispute

Say white truffle and people think of Alba, in Piedmont's Langhe hills, home of the oldest fair. Yet in the Marche region a village of 4,159 people holds second place and defends it: Acqualagna, in the province of Pesaro e Urbino, has the most important truffle market in Italy after Alba's, where hunters from Upper Umbria and the Pesaro hills bring their finds. Three fairs a year: black truffle in February, summer black in August and, between October and November, the white, the largest in central Italy. October 27 also marks a date here: in 1962 Enrico Mattei, founder of Eni and born in Acqualagna in 1906, died at Bascapè.

📍 Discover Acqualagna

Today's tidbits

Impossible geography

Monte Busca in Tredozio: Italy's smallest ‘volcano’ is a methane flame among the stones

In the Romagna Apennines, at 740 metres in the municipality of Tredozio, a heap of stones has been burning for centuries. No crater, no lava: methane seeps from the ground and burns in small flames, documented since before the 1500s. People call it a volcano, which it is not, and the nickname of Italy's smallest volcano has stuck. In the mid-1500s the friar Leandro Alberti already noted a place where a flame of fire came out of the earth. In 1939 a company built a pipeline and a building to exploit the gas, inaugurated by Mussolini; surveys after the war and in 1975 found no deposit worth the effort. The flame is still there.

📍 Tredozio →
Words born here 2009

Prosecco is not a grape: it is a village of 1,349 people on the Karst above Trieste that gave the wine its name

On the Karst plateau above Trieste, in Italy's far north-east, sits a village of 1,349 people called Prosecco, Prosek in Slovene, a strip of forest cut by a narrow passage. By the 1500s Trieste saw in the castle of Prosecco the home of the Pucinum wine praised by Pliny, and in 1593 the English traveller Fynes Moryson noted that Pucinum was now called Prosecho. On 17 July 2009 a decree renamed the grape Glera and created the Prosecco DOC, reaching the province of Trieste: since then only wines from those territories may carry the name. In 2024 that meant over 660 million bottles, 82% of them exported. The village still has its church of 1637.

📍 Trieste →