The Italian Almanac for September 1: stories and curiosities

Impossible geography 📅 1933

The Italian town completely surrounded by Switzerland

Campione d'Italia, a comune in the province of Como, is Italy's only exclave: the Swiss territory of Canton Ticino and Lake Lugano cut it off from the rest of Lombardy. Shops take euros and Swiss francs side by side, and the phones answer to the Swiss prefix +41 as well as Italy's +39. Until 2019 the town even followed the Swiss customs regime; it only joined the EU customs area on 1 January 2020. The 'd'Italia' in its name was added by royal decree in December 1933 — a reminder, written into the name itself, of which country the bell tower belongs to.

📍 Discover Campione d'Italia

Today's tidbits

Italian records 1959

Italy's tallest bell tower is reinforced concrete from the 1950s

The Almanac of Bell Towers could only open in Mortegliano, a town on the plain of Friuli, in Italy's north-east. Beside the duomo rises a tower of 113.20 metres, the tallest campanile in the country, about a metre higher than the famous Torrazzo of Cremona. No medieval stone here: it was built between 1957 and 1959 to a design by the Udine architect Pietro Zanini, entirely in reinforced concrete, and inaugurated on 20 September 1959 by the Patriarch of Venice, Giovanni Urbani. The national record does not live in a city of art, but among the fields of Friuli.

📍 Mortegliano →

On the table today

In Carmagnola, one pepper comes in five shapes

Between late August and early September, Carmagnola, on the plain south of Turin in Piedmont, throws a fair for its pepper — a national fair since 2017, and the stage, back in 2010 at the 61st edition, of a 1,190-kilo peperonata that entered the Guinness World Records. The star is a recognised traditional Italian food product, with an IGP production standard and mark approved in 2002. It grows in five shapes, each with a Piedmontese dialect name: the square braghèis, the ox-horn longh, the spinning-top trottola, the tomato-named tomaticòt and the elongated square. Worth learning them before you join the queue at the stall.

📍 Carmagnola →

🎉 Celebrations today in… 22

22 towns with a guide celebrate their patron saint on September 1

September 1

The Italian town completely surrounded by Switzerland

Today's tidbits

Italy's tallest bell tower is reinforced concrete from the 1950s

In Carmagnola, one pepper comes in five shapes

🎉 Celebrations today in… 22

Sant'Egidio 8

Sant'Egidio Abate 6

Other saints of the day 8