On 7 September 1303, Guillaume de Nogaret and Sciarra Colonna marched armed men into Anagni, a hilltop town south of Rome, to seize Pope Boniface VIII. The famous slap of Anagni was almost certainly a moral outrage rather than a physical blow, yet Dante fixed it forever in his Purgatorio. Freed by the townspeople two days later, the pope died about a month afterwards, and in Italian a solemn humiliation is still called a slap of Anagni.
At the far end of the Aurina valley, in the province of Bolzano in South Tyrol, Predoi is the northernmost municipality in Italy: its territory includes the Vetta d'Italia, a 2,912-metre peak right on the Austrian border. Around five hundred people live here at 1,475 metres, above a long underground history: copper was mined in Predoi from prehistory until 1893, and two crossed pickaxes on the municipal coat of arms still remember it.
📍 Predoi →The Fichi di Cosenza, from the province of Cosenza in Calabria, at the southern tip of the Italian boot, carry an unusual European DOP label: it protects exclusively the dried fruits of the dottato fig variety, never the fresh ones. Summer fruit turned into winter stores, with old instructions attached: as early as 1625 the monk Vitale Magazzini wrote that dottato figs should be dried in the sun, not in an oven. Four centuries later, the sun rule became a protected designation.
📍 Cosenza →10 towns with a guide celebrate their patron saint on September 7
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📅 Every year, on 7 and 8 September
On 8 September Vicenza celebrates the Madonna di Monte Berico, its patron. In dialect it is the festa dei Oto, the feast of the eighth, and it opens the evening before with the procession of the Jewel of Vicenza.
