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🔔 The Italian Almanac

September 6

Stories and curiosities for September 6, from the Italy of a thousand bell towers.

Busted myths

Spaghetti bolognese does not exist in Bologna

The world's best-known 'Italian' dish rests on a misunderstanding: in Bologna, in northern Italy, ragù is served with fresh egg tagliatelle, never with spaghetti. 'Spag bol' thrives in the United States, Britain, Germany and Australia, while in Italy it appears almost only on tourist menus. As for its origin, theories abound: a Turin hotel in 1898, Italian emigrants in America, US servicemen in the Second World War, and finally Heinz, which put it in cans in the 1960s. The mayor of Bologna has publicly objected to both the name and the very existence of the dish.

📍 Discover Bologna

Today's tidbits

Words born here

Tarantula and tarantella: two words born from the name of Taranto

The spider half the world calls a tarantula, Lycosa tarantula, takes its name from Taranto, the port city in Puglia, southern Italy; the tarantella dance springs from the same root. Between spider and dance lies tarantism, a culture-bound syndrome recorded from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century around Taranto, in the Salento and near Matera: those who believed a taranta had bitten them were cured by dancing to exhaustion, to the rhythm of the pizzica, a genuine musical exorcism. One detail undoes the legend: the bite of that spider is practically harmless. The illness lay elsewhere; the words that left Taranto stayed in every language.

📍 Taranto →
Italian records

Atrani, Italy's smallest municipality: 0.12 square kilometres

Wedged between rock and sea on the Amalfi Coast, in the province of Salerno in southern Italy, Atrani measures 0.1206 square kilometres, making it the smallest municipality in the country by area, home to just over 700 people. Yet this handkerchief of houses was the ceremonial heart of the Duchy of Amalfi: in the palatine chapel of San Salvatore de' Birecto, the dukes, not 'doges' as historians point out, were invested with the birecto, the cap that symbolised their power. Since 1997 Atrani has shared with the whole Amalfi Coast the status of UNESCO World Heritage Site.

📍 Atrani →

🎉 Celebrations today in… 1

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

Other saints of the day 1

Saluggiasan Grato di Aosta · Piedmont