The Italian Almanac for September 24: stories and curiosities

It started here 📅 1906

From Oderzo to Mr. Peanut: the boy behind Planters

Amedeo Obici left Oderzo, a town near Treviso in northern Italy, in 1889, a child without a word of English. He spent the next six years learning it while he worked, and in 1906 his business became the Planters Nut and Chocolate Company, the firm that turned the American peanut into an empire. Even Mr. Peanut, the company's logo and mascot, speaks Italian: it was created in 1916 by Antonio Gentile, a thirteen-year-old son of Italian immigrants in Virginia, who won five dollars for his drawing. An empire founded by one Italian kid and drawn by another: five dollars well spent.

📍 Discover Oderzo

Today's tidbits

Place names

Ventimiglia has nothing to do with twenty miles

The name of Ventimiglia, the Italian border town facing France on the Ligurian coast, looks like a distance: venti miglia, twenty miles. It actually comes from Albium Intemelium, the capital of the ancient Ligurian tribe of the Intemelii, worn down over the centuries into Vintimilium and finally its modern form. The misunderstanding had an easy life, though: some road signs used to shorten the name to XXmiglia, and the twenty-mile legend spread on its own. Chance played along too, since the town really does lie about twenty nautical miles from Nice. Pure coincidence: the Intemelii were there centuries before the road signs, and the miles.

📍 Ventimiglia →

Words born here

Faenza, the Italian town that became a common noun

The English word faience and the French faïence both name, without most speakers knowing it, a town in Emilia-Romagna: Faenza, near Ravenna. The reputation of its glazed pottery grew so great that across much of Europe the town's name simply became the word for the ware itself. The golden age began under the Manfredi family, who ruled from 1313 and made Faenza's majolica famous across the continent. Seven centuries on, every time a glazed plate changes hands at a Paris flea market, somebody is pronouncing the name of this Italian town without suspecting it.

📍 Faenza →

🎉 Celebrations today in… 2

2 towns with a guide celebrate their patron saint on September 24

Other saints of the day 2

Pesarosan Terenzio di Pesaro · Marche Mirtosanta Tecla di Iconio · Sicily