The Italian Almanac for September 4: stories and curiosities

It started here

Bank of America began with a family from Favale di Malvaro

Amadeo Peter Giannini's parents had left Favale di Malvaro, a small village in the hills behind Chiavari, in Liguria near Genoa. Born in California in 1870, Giannini opened the Bank of Italy in a former San Francisco saloon in 1904, lending to Italian artisans and small traders no other bank would take. After the 1906 earthquake he set up a table amid the crowd of survivors, hung out a sign saying the bank was open, and started issuing loans for the reconstruction. In 1927 his bank took a new name: Bank of America.

📍 Discover Favale di Malvaro

Today's tidbits

Vanished Italy 476

The Western Roman Empire ended in Ravenna, with a pension

On 4 September 476, in Ravenna, then the imperial capital on Italy's Adriatic coast, the general Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustus, the boy emperor remembered by the mocking diminutive Augustulus. The date conventionally marks the end of the Western Roman Empire. Barely in his teens, the last emperor was spared precisely because of his age: no execution, but exile to the Castellum Lucullanum in Naples, where Castel dell'Ovo stands today. One ancient source, the Anonymus Valesianus, even records an annual pension of six thousand solidi. The empire in the West did not end with a sword; it retired to the Bay of Naples.

📍 Ravenna →

Italian records

Italy's least populous municipality has 31 residents and an open-air museum

At the foot of the Resegone massif, at 1,070 metres in the province of Lecco, north of Milan in Lombardy, Morterone is Italy's least populous municipality: 31 residents at the latest count. It is a handful of houses among pastures and woods, yet it holds an unexpected cultural card: an open-air museum of contemporary art, with works placed among the meadows. In a country of nearly eight thousand municipalities, the one with fewer inhabitants than an apartment building still has its own mayor and its own art collection.

📍 Morterone →

🎉 Celebrations today in… 10

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

Santa Rosalia 6

RacalmutoSicily Campofelice di RoccellaSicily Santa Margherita di BeliceSicily BisacquinoSicily DeliaSicily BivonaSicily

Other saints of the day 4

Viterbobeata Rosa da Viterbo · Lazio Altinosan Gilberto · Abruzzo Ala di Sturasan Grato · Piedmont Villanova d'Astisant'Isidoro · Piedmont