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🔔 The Italian Almanac

September 26

Stories and curiosities for September 26, from the Italy of a thousand bell towers.

Busted myths 📅 1889

The queen, the pizza and a letter historians distrust

The legend is set in June 1889: Naples pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito bakes a tomato, mozzarella and basil pizza in the colours of the Italian flag for Queen Margherita, who sends a thank-you letter, and the Margherita is born. Historians pick the tale apart: as early as 1858 Francesco De Bourcard described Neapolitan pizzas topped with tomato, mozzarella and basil, and Harvard historian Zachary Nowak found the famous royal letter full of oddities, from the seal to the missing letterhead to the handwriting. In Naples the Margherita remains the pizza above all others; its birth certificate is another matter.

📍 Discover Naples

Today's tidbits

Place names

The town that bears the full name of today's saints

In southern Lazio, between Rome and Naples, sits a town whose name is a complete dedication: Santi Cosma e Damiano, in the province of Latina, named after the brother physician saints Cosmas and Damian. Tradition holds that the two, martyred under Diocletian, passed through these lands on their way to Rome and sheltered in a cave; a chapel was built beside it in their honour and grew over the centuries into today's parish church. Their feast falls on 26 September, the day the town quite literally celebrates its own name.

📍 Santi Cosma e Damiano →
Words born here

Quarantine, the word the world owes to Venice

When plague travelled by ship in the fourteenth century, ports learned to make suspect crews wait: Ragusa, today's Dubrovnik, imposed thirty days of isolation in 1377. Venice went further: in 1403 it opened history's first lazzaretto on a small island of its lagoon, and in 1448 the Venetian Senate stretched the waiting period to forty days. That measure, quaranta giorni, gave the world the word quarantine, which sailed out of the lagoon into dozens of languages, recent pandemics included.

📍 Venice →

🎉 Celebrations today in… 16

16 towns with a guide celebrate their patron saint on September 26

Santi Cosma e Damiano 10

Corte FrancaLombardy Santi Cosma e DamianoLazio AirunoLombardy Carbonara di NolaCampania StimiglianoLazio RiaceCalabria Cagnano AmiternoAbruzzo Acquanegra CremoneseLombardy MarmentinoLombardy VolpeglinoPiedmont

Other saints of the day 6

ValbremboOssanesga: Santi Vito, Modesto e Crescenzia · Lombardy Brossosan Michele · Piedmont Grottaferratasan Nilo · Lazio Iseosan Vigilio · Lombardy Mondolfosanta Giustina · Marche San Cipriano d'Aversasanti Cipriano e Giustina d'Antiochia · Campania