The Italian Almanac for September 20: stories and curiosities

Vanished Italy 📅 1870

A thirty-metre breach to end eleven centuries

At dawn on 20 September 1870 Italian artillery opened fire on the walls of Rome; by about 9.35, next to Porta Pia, a breach some thirty metres wide had opened, and the 12th Bersaglieri battalion was the first unit through. Within hours the Papal States, in existence since 756, were finished: more than eleven centuries of the popes' temporal power, closed at the cost of 32 Italian and 15 papal soldiers killed. Pius IX declared himself a prisoner and withdrew behind the Vatican walls, refusing to recognise the new kingdom; a few months later, on 3 February 1871, Rome officially became the capital of Italy.

📍 Discover Rome

Today's tidbits

It started here

America's most perfectly developed man was born in Acri

Angelo Siciliano was born in Acri, a hill town in Calabria at the southern tip of Italy, on 30 October 1892, and emigrated to Brooklyn in 1903, where he started out working in a leather factory. In 1922, after a contest at Madison Square Garden, Physical Culture magazine crowned him America's Most Perfectly Developed Man, and that same year he legally became Charles Atlas. In the 1920s he perfected Dynamic Tension, a twelve-lesson mail-order fitness course, and its comic-strip advert — the skinny kid who gets sand kicked in his face by a beach bully, trains, and comes back to settle the score — became his trademark.

📍 Acri →

Place names

Italy has both a Purgatory and a Paradise on the map

Among the hamlets of Custonaci, in the province of Trapani in western Sicily, road signs point to Purgatorio — Purgatory — right next to Sperone, Scurati and the town's other villages. Paradise lies at the opposite end of the country: Paradiso is a hamlet of Pocenia, in Friuli in Italy's far north-east, some seventy souls gathered around two historic villas and a circular seventeenth-century church; in the Friulian language it is called Paravîs. The whole of Italy stretches between the two realms, and for once the journey from Purgatory to Paradise can be done by car.

📍 Custonaci →

🎉 Celebrations today in… 6

6 towns with a guide celebrate their patron saint on September 20

Sant'Eustachio 5

MordanoEmilia-Romagna Tocco da CasauriaAbruzzo PoliLazio Torella dei LombardiCampania ScannoAbruzzo

Other saints of the day 1

Moncucco Torinesesan Bernardino da Siena · Piedmont

Patron saint festival In 10 days 📍 Andria

Saint Richard and the Madonna dei Miracoli

📅 Every year, on the third Sunday of September; the April Fair in spring

Andria celebrates its patrons on the third Sunday of September. The second feast, the April Fair, recalls 1438: the year the body of Saint Richard, lost during a siege, was found again.