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🔔 The Italian Almanac

September 15

Stories and curiosities for September 15, from the Italy of a thousand bell towers.

Vanished Italy 📅 1864

The day Turin stopped being Italy's capital

On 15 September 1864, at Fontainebleau, Italy signed the September Convention with Napoleon III's France: the capital was to leave Turin (Torino) within six months, bound for Florence. The city — capital of the young Kingdom of Italy, in the northwestern region of Piedmont — rose up in protest, and on 21 and 22 September the crackdown left around sixty dead between Piazza Castello and Piazza San Carlo. The Minghetti government fell; the move went ahead anyway, and the capital never came back.

📍 Discover Turin

Today's tidbits

Place names

A village called Bomba, no explosives involved

In the hills of Abruzzo, in central Italy, a village of fewer than seven hundred people answers to the name Bomba — 'bomb', in Italian. No explosives are involved: scholars trace the name back to an onomatopoeic Latin word for a rumbling sound, probably of water. Bomba overlooks an artificial lake created in 1957 by diverting the river Sangro, and it gave Italy the Spaventa brothers, Bertrando and Silvio, patriots and thinkers of the Risorgimento, the movement that unified the country.

📍 Bomba →
Words born here

Baloney has an Italian hometown

Every American lunchbox knows bologna, pronounced 'baloney' — and the name is no accident: the sausage derives from mortadella Bologna, the silky pork classic of Bologna, in northern Italy's Emilia region. Across the ocean it took on a life of its own, from the bologna sandwich to the slang 'baloney!' for talk that doesn't hold up — one and the same word covering both the cold cut and the nonsense. Either way, an Italian city's name has been sitting in everyday American English all along.

📍 Bologna →

🎉 Celebrations today in… 10

10 towns with a guide celebrate their patron saint on September 15

Beata Vergine Addolorata 6

BalestrateSicily Villanova MondovìPiedmont AngeraLombardy TorrenovaSicily LuisagoLombardy ParoldoPiedmont

Other saints of the day 4

SoveratoMadonna Addolorata · Calabria Villanova SolaroMadonna della Noce e San Giovanni Battista (Vernetto) · Piedmont MarcellinaMadonna delle Grazie · Lazio Terme Vigliatoresanta Maria delle Grazie · Sicily