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🔔 The Italian Almanac

October 29

Stories and curiosities for October 29, from the Italy of a thousand bell towers.

Vanished Italy 📅 1268

Conradin of Swabia, beheaded at sixteen in Napoli's Piazza del Mercato

On 29 October 1268, in the Campo Moricino of Napoli, today's Piazza del Mercato, the executioner of Charles of Anjou beheaded a sixteen-year-old born in Bavaria: Conradin, Corradino to Italians, the last reigning Hohenstaufen. Two months earlier, at Tagliacozzo, his army had scattered believing the battle won, and the Angevin reserve had crushed it. Fleeing towards Torre Astura, he was betrayed by Giovanni Frangipane and handed over; his cousin Frederick of Baden went to the scaffold with him. Swabian Sicily ended there, Angevin Sicily began. He lies in the nearby basilica of the Carmine, where Maximilian II of Bavaria had Thorvaldsen carve a statue of the boy.

📍 Discover Naples

Today's tidbits

Impossible geography 1354

Alghero, the Sardinian town where the street signs also speak Catalan

In Alghero the street signs are written twice, in Italian and in Catalan, and the reason goes back to the fourteenth century. In 1354, after a siege, the town on Sardinia's north-west coast passed to the Crown of Aragon: its Sardinian and Ligurian inhabitants were deported and replaced with Catalan settlers, lured by royal privileges. The language they brought never left. Algherese is a variety of eastern Catalan, recognised as a linguistic minority by Italian law 482 of 1999 and protected by the Sardinian region since 1997; a 2004 survey found it was the first language of 22.4% of residents. Catalans call the town l'Alguer, and in Sardinia Alghero goes by the nickname Barceloneta.

📍 Alghero →
It started here 1908

From Ivrea to the first personal computer: Olivetti was born on 29 October 1908

The founding deed is dated 29 October 1908, town of Ivrea, in Piedmont, with 350,000 lire of capital; on the façade Camillo Olivetti had written “Prima fabbrica nazionale macchine per scrivere”, Italy's first typewriter factory. From 1932 his son Adriano turned the workshop into a multinational: Nizzoli's Lettera 22 in 1950 and, in New York in 1965, Pier Giorgio Perotto's Programma 101, the desktop calculator many regard as the first personal computer, about 44,000 sold, some of them to NASA for planning the Apollo 11 landing. The factories and housing built in Ivrea between 1930 and 1960 have been UNESCO World Heritage since 2018; the brand lives on in the TIM group.

📍 Ivrea →

🎉 Celebrations today in… 4

4 towns with a guide celebrate their patron saint on October 29

Other saints of the day 4

Calusco d'Addasan Fedele · Lombardy Plesiosan Fedele martire · Lombardy Santa Severinasant'Anastasia · Calabria Caiazzosanto Stefano Minicillo · Campania
Patron saint festival In 3 days 📍 Santa Severina

Feast of Saint Anastasia

📅 Every year, on 29 October

On 29 October Santa Severina celebrates its patron Saint Anastasia; the town also preserves the Baptistery and the "Andrea Carafa" Castle.

Patron saint festival In 3 days 📍 Plesio

Feast of Saint Fidelis

📅 Every year, on 29 October

On 29 October Plesio celebrates its patron Saint Fidelis the Martyr; the town preserves the tradition of the "festa del Giünee", with a straw effigy burned on 31 January.