The Italian Almanac for September 23: stories and curiosities

Impossible geography

Livigno, the Italian town where customs never enter

Petrol and sugar cost noticeably less in Livigno than anywhere else in Italy: this alpine town in Lombardy, sitting at 1,816 metres, is a duty-free zone. Its exemptions date back to 1538, granted by the county of Bormio, and an Italian law confirmed them in 1910. The privilege made up for genuine hardship: until the winter of 1952-53, when the Foscagno pass first stayed open through the cold season, the village spent every winter completely cut off from the world. Its nickname, Little Tibet, coined in 1967, was earned the hard way.

📍 Discover Livigno

Today's tidbits

Italian records

Where autumn touches Italy first

Italy's easternmost point is a cape in the deep south: Capo d'Otranto, also called Punta Palascìa, on the coast of Otranto in Puglia, the heel of the boot. Around the equinox, when day and night even out at every latitude, longitude decides who sees the sun first, and the first dawn of the new season lands here. The lighthouse on the cape also watches over an invisible border: by some nautical conventions, this is where the Adriatic ends and the Ionian Sea begins. Two seas and a new season, on the same kilometre of coast.

📍 Otranto →

Busted myths

Carbonara is younger than it looks

Ada Boni's classic 1930 handbook of Roman cooking has no carbonara in it, for the simple reason that the dish did not exist yet. The first known written mention dates from 1939; the first published recipe appeared as late as 1952, in a newspaper in northern France, signed by the actor Aldo Fabrizi; and the first version printed in Italy, in 1954, called for gruyère and garlic. One theory about its birth even involves the Allied rations of 1944, bacon and powdered eggs, in hungry, newly liberated Rome. The signature dish of the eternal Roman table is, in fact, a twentieth-century newcomer.

📍 Rome →

🎉 Celebrations today in… 4

4 towns with a guide celebrate their patron saint on September 23

Other saints of the day 4

Luranosan Lino Papa Martire · Lombardy Frattamaggioresan Sossio Levita e Martire · Campania Buddusòsanta Anastasia martire · Sardinia Estesanta Tecla · Veneto