70 interesting facts about Italy, with dates, names and places

Here are 70 facts about Italy, each one carrying a date, a name or a building you can go and stand in front of. That is deliberate. Most fact lists about Italy recycle the same dozen claims with nothing attached to them, and half of those claims fall apart the moment you check. Every entry below names where it comes from or where you can see it for yourself, and anything that could not be checked was left out. This is part of a series that also covers facts about Belgium, facts about Germany and facts about Greece.

Rome and the Vatican: facts 1 to 10

Ten facts about Rome and the Vatican open the list, because the city holds more checkable claims per square kilometre than anywhere else in Italy.

1. Rome is called the Eternal City because of a line in Virgil. In Book 1 of the Aeneid, Jupiter promises his daughter Venus that her son’s descendants will have imperium sine fine, empire without end. The nickname has outlived the empire by about 1,550 years.
2. The Colosseum’s real name is the Flavian Amphitheatre. It was begun under Vespasian and opened in AD 80 under his son Titus, both of the Flavian dynasty, and the name Colosseum comes from a colossal bronze statue of Nero that once stood beside it. Read about my visit to the Colosseum here.
3. The Roman Forum was a swamp before it was the centre of an empire. The valley between the hills was marshy ground used for Iron Age burials, and it only became buildable once the Cloaca Maxima drained it. That sewer still runs under the Forum and still discharges into the Tiber.
4. The Pantheon still has the largest unreinforced concrete dome on earth. Nearly 1,900 years after it was finished, no one has built a bigger one without steel. The 9 m hole at the top, the oculus, has no glass in it, so rain falls into the building and drains through holes in the floor.
5. The Trevi Fountain is fed by an aqueduct completed in 19 BC. The Acqua Vergine, built under Agrippa, still delivers the water, which is why the fountain is where it is. Throwing a coin in over your left shoulder is supposed to guarantee your return to Rome, and the coins are swept up and collected by the city rather than left in the basin. There is also a hilltop town in Umbria called Trevi, which has nothing to do with the fountain and is worth a day: see these Umbrian towns.
6. SPQR is still stamped on Rome’s manhole covers. It stands for Senatus Populusque Romanus, the Senate and the People of Rome, and the modern city took the ancient republic’s initials as its municipal emblem. Look down at any drain cover or rubbish bin in the centre.
7. St Peter’s is not Rome’s cathedral. The cathedral of Rome is the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano, the seat of the Pope in his role as Bishop of Rome, and its facade calls it the mother and head of all the churches of the city and the world.
8. The St Peter’s you see is the second one on the site. Constantine built the first basilica in the 4th century over what was believed to be Peter’s grave; it was pulled down and rebuilt from 1506. Otto II, who died in 983, is the only Holy Roman Emperor buried there, and Queen Christina of Sweden lies in the grottoes below.
9. Michelangelo’s Pietà has been behind bulletproof glass since 1972. On 21 May that year a man named Laszlo Toth climbed the altar rail and struck the sculpture repeatedly with a hammer, breaking the Virgin’s left arm and damaging her face. The restored statue has never come back out from behind the screen.
10. Michelangelo did not want to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He was mid-way through Pope Julius II’s marble tomb when the commission came, and he thought of himself as a sculptor rather than a painter. He took it anyway and spent four years on it, working standing on a scaffold rather than lying on his back, which is the version that stuck.

Italian food, and four things that are not Italian: facts 11 to 20

The next ten facts cover what Italians eat and what they do not, including four dishes and chains that the rest of the world files under Italian on doubtful grounds.

11. Real mozzarella is made from water buffalo milk, and it is protected by law. Mozzarella di Bufala Campana has held DOP status since 1996, which fixes both the animal and the area it can come from. Buffalo milk has more fat than cow’s milk, which is why it tastes sweeter, and refrigerating it ruins the texture.
12. The first written evidence of Italian dried pasta is from 1154. The geographer al-Idrisi, writing for King Roger II of Sicily, described a place called Trabia near Palermo turning out itriyya, string-shaped pasta, in quantities large enough to export by ship. You can still make your own on a food tour in Bologna.
13. Spaghetti and meatballs is not an Italian dish. Italian meals separate the pasta from the meat: primo piatto is pasta or risotto, secondo piatto is meat or fish, and vegetables come alongside as a contorno. Putting the two on one plate is an Italian-American invention.
14. Fettuccine Alfredo is Italian, but not the version you have eaten. Alfredo di Lelio made it in his Rome restaurant with nothing but butter and Parmigiano, whipped into the pasta water. American film stars carried the name home in the 1920s and the cream turned up somewhere over the Atlantic.
15. A McDonald’s opening in Rome in 1986 is where Slow Food started. The branch opened near the Spanish Steps, the designer Valentino sued over “significant and constant noise and an unbearable smell of fried food”, and a Save Rome committee handed bowls of pasta to the crowd outside. That protest is generally credited as the beginning of the Slow Food movement. You can read the contemporary report of the McDonald’s protest on the NY Times.
16. Pizza is younger than most people think. Tomatoes reached Europe from the Americas in the 16th century and were treated as ornamental or poisonous for a long time afterwards, and the first written accounts of tomato-topped flatbreads sold to the poor of Naples come from the late 18th century.
17. The Margherita story is a story, and Naples tells it well. Pizzeria Brandi says its pizzaiolo made a pizza in the colours of the new Italian flag for Queen Margherita of Savoy in 1889 and named it after her. The document behind the claim has been questioned for decades, which has not dented the pizza.
18. Neapolitan pizza-making is on a UNESCO list. The art of the pizzaiuolo napoletano was inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in December 2017. The listing protects the craft, not the recipe.
19. Perugia has been making chocolate since 1907. Perugina was founded there that year, and in 1922 it launched Baci, hazelnut chocolates wrapped around a slip of paper carrying a love note. The notes are still in them.
20. Starbucks only reached Italy in 2018. The chain’s founder has always credited a trip to Milan with giving him the idea, and it took him more than thirty years to come back: the Milan Reserve Roastery opened in September 2018 in a former post office on Piazza Cordusio.

The country itself: facts 21 to 30

Ten facts about Italy as a country follow, including a UNESCO count that changed in July 2026 and a mountain whose height is officially re-measured.

21. Italy has 62 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, more than any other country. The 62nd arrived at the Committee’s 48th session in Busan in July 2026, when the system of 18th and 19th century Italian-style condominium theatres in central Italy was inscribed: 18 theatres across Marche, Emilia-Romagna and Umbria, built by small towns whose residents taxed themselves and became co-owners of the building.
22. Sardinia’s fairy houses joined the list the year before. The domus de janas, tombs cut into rock between the 5th and 3rd millennia BC, were inscribed in 2025. There are thousands of them across the island.
23. Vatican City is a country of about 0.44 km² (0.17 sq mi). It became one on 11 February 1929, when the Lateran Treaty settled a dispute that had run since Italian troops took Rome in 1870, and it has its own flag, stamps, post office, pharmacy and army in the Swiss Guard. It is roughly an eighth the size of Central Park.
24. Monte Bianco is the highest mountain in the Alps and its summit belongs to nobody in particular. It stands about 4,805 m (15,774 ft), surveyors re-measure the ice cap every two years so the official figure moves, and France and Italy have never agreed where the border runs across the top.
25. Vesuvius is the only active volcano on the European mainland. Etna and Stromboli are on islands. Vesuvius buried Pompeii and Herculaneum in AD 79, and its most recent eruption was in March 1944, filmed by Allied airmen stationed nearby.
26. Venice is not built on the Grand Canal, it is built on a lagoon. The city occupies more than a hundred small islands linked by bridges, with the Grand Canal running through the middle as its main street. At the Doge’s Palace you can book the Secret Itineraries tour, which takes you through the administrative rooms, the torture chamber and the prisons, and across the Bridge of Sighs from the inside.
27. Gorizia was cut in half by a treaty and rejoined by a job title. The 1947 Paris Peace Treaty put the new border through the town, Yugoslavia built Nova Gorica on its side from 1948, and in 2025 the two became the first cross-border European Capital of Culture, holding the title jointly.
28. Friuli makes a ham with two ingredients. Prosciutto di San Daniele DOP is legally allowed to contain only Italian pork and sea salt, with no preservatives at all, and it can only be cured in the town of San Daniele del Friuli, where the air off the Alps meets the air off the Adriatic.
29. The lira had a hard deadline. Euro notes and coins entered circulation on 1 January 2002, and the lira stopped being legal tender on 28 February 2002, giving Italians eight weeks to change a currency they had used since 1861.
30. Italy’s sports car museums are all within an hour of each other. The Enzo Ferrari Museum in Modena sits beside the house Enzo Ferrari was born in, the Lamborghini Museum is at the factory in Sant’Agata Bolognese, and the Alfa Romeo museum is at Arese outside Milan.

Italians who invented things: facts 31 to 42

Twelve facts cover Italian inventors, and several of them are about credit going somewhere else.

31. The battery was announced in a letter dated 20 March 1800. Alessandro Volta described his pile of copper and zinc discs separated by brine-soaked card to the Royal Society in London, and the volt is named after him.
32. The US Congress formally recognised Antonio Meucci in 2002. The Florence-born inventor filed a caveat for a talking telegraph in 1871 and could not afford the ten dollars to renew it in 1874. On 11 June 2002 the House of Representatives passed Resolution 269 acknowledging his work on the telephone.
33. A working telephone model existed in Aosta in 1865. Innocenzo Manzetti demonstrated a speaking telegraph there and never patented it, which is why almost nobody outside the Aosta Valley has heard of him.
34. The barometer was Galileo’s student’s idea. Evangelista Torricelli filled a glass tube with mercury in 1643, inverted it and found the column fell to a fixed height, which proved that air has weight. The unit of pressure called the torr is named after him.
35. Guglielmo Marconi sent a signal across the Atlantic in 1901. The Bologna-born engineer transmitted from Poldhu in Cornwall to Signal Hill in Newfoundland in December that year, and shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics for the work.
36. Spectacles were invented in Italy in the 1280s, and we know because of a sermon. Preaching in Florence in February 1306, the friar Giordano da Pisa told his congregation that the art of making eyeglasses was “not twenty years” old and that he had met the man who made the first pair.
37. The piano was invented in Florence and named after what it does. Bartolomeo Cristofori, born in Padua and employed by the Medici, built an instrument he called a gravicembalo col piano e forte, a harpsichord that plays soft and loud, because unlike a harpsichord it responded to how hard you hit the key. Three of his instruments survive.
38. The first controlled nuclear chain reaction happened under a squash court. Enrico Fermi, who had won the Nobel Prize in 1938 and left Italy the same year, ran Chicago Pile-1 to criticality on 2 December 1942 beneath the stands of the University of Chicago’s disused stadium.
39. The espresso machine started as a patent for making coffee quickly and cheaply. Angelo Moriondo of Turin registered it in 1884 and won a medal at that year’s Turin exposition, and Luigi Bezzera and Desiderio Pavoni turned his steam apparatus into the bar machine that spread across Italy.
40. Modern liposuction was developed by a father and son in Rome. The gynaecologists Arpad and Giorgio Fischer introduced blunt tunnelling with a cannula in 1974, which is the technique the procedure still rests on.
41. The jacuzzi began as a pump for a sick child. The Jacuzzi brothers emigrated from Friuli to California and made aircraft propellers and water pumps. Candido Jacuzzi adapted one into a portable hydrotherapy pump for his young son, who had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, and Roy Jacuzzi built the whirlpool bath itself two decades later.
42. MP3 and MPEG came out of a committee an Italian founded. Leonardo Chiariglione set up the Moving Picture Experts Group in 1988 and chaired it for more than thirty years, and the standards it wrote are why video and audio files play on everything.

Explorers, and one perfume: facts 43 to 47

Five facts cover the Italians who left, in some cases permanently attaching their names to places they barely saw.

43. Columbus was Genoese and he was looking for Asia. Cristoforo Colombo sailed under a Spanish commission from Ferdinand and Isabella with orders to reach the spice markets of the east by going west, and he died still believing he had. Here is where else that instinct has taken us.
44. Marco Polo’s book was dictated in a prison cell. The Venetian merchant spent about 24 years travelling with his father and uncle, then ended up a prisoner of Genoa around 1298 and dictated his account to a cellmate, the romance writer Rustichello da Pisa.
45. John Cabot was Giovanni Caboto from Italy. He sailed from Bristol in May 1497 under letters patent from Henry VII of England and made landfall in North America that June, the first documented European landing there since the Norse.
46. America is named after a Florentine. Amerigo Vespucci argued that the land across the Atlantic was a continent in its own right rather than the edge of Asia, and the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller put the name America on his world map in 1507.
47. Eau de Cologne was invented by an Italian, in Germany, in 1709. Giovanni Maria Farina made a fragrance he said reminded him of an Italian spring morning and named it after Cologne, the city he had moved to.

Art, music, film and books: facts 48 to 59

Twelve facts cover what Italy made, including two about a man whose finger is in a museum.

48. Leonardo da Vinci had almost no formal schooling. He learned reading, writing and arithmetic and nothing else, and his father placed him as an apprentice in the Florence workshop of the painter and sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio, where he learned the rest.
49. Galileo Galilei waited 359 years for an apology. He was tried in 1633 for supporting Copernicus, sentenced to imprisonment that was converted to house arrest, and died under it in 1642. In 1992 John Paul II accepted the findings of a commission that the church had been wrong.
50. Galileo’s middle finger is on display in Florence. When his body was moved to a proper tomb in 1737, an admirer removed three fingers, a tooth and a vertebra. The middle finger of his right hand stands upright in a glass egg at the Museo Galileo.
51. Opera was invented in Florence in the 1590s. A circle of musicians and scholars set out to recreate what they believed Greek drama had sounded like. Jacopo Peri’s Dafne of 1598 is the first opera anyone knows of, but the music is lost; his Euridice of 1600 is the earliest that survives complete.
52. Vivaldi was a priest who stopped saying Mass. Ordained in 1703 and nicknamed il Prete Rosso, the Red Priest, for his hair, he gave up celebrating Mass within a year. He spent decades teaching at the Ospedale della Pietà, a Venetian home for abandoned girls, and wrote much of his music for its orchestra of pupils.
53. One novel helped decide what modern written Italian looks like. Alessandro Manzoni published I Promessi Sposi in 1827 in a Lombard-flavoured Italian, then went to Florence, rewrote the whole book in Florentine Tuscan and republished it from 1840. That edition became the model for the written language of a country that did not yet exist.
54. Pinocchio’s author took his name from his mother’s village. The journalist Carlo Lorenzini signed himself Carlo Collodi after Collodi in Tuscany, where his mother was born. The Parco di Pinocchio opened there in 1956 and is still open.
55. Sophia Loren won an Oscar for a performance in Italian. Born in Rome and raised in Pozzuoli, she took the 1962 Academy Award for Best Actress for La Ciociara, released in English as Two Women, the first acting Oscar given for a performance in a language other than English.
56. Roberto Benigni climbed over the seats to collect his. La Vita è Bella won both Best Foreign Language Film and Best Actor at the 1999 Academy Awards, and he walked across the backs of the chairs in front of him to reach the stage.
57. The Leaning Tower of Pisa took almost two centuries to build, and that is why it stands. Work began in 1173, stopped twice for war and finished in 1372, and the long pauses let the soil settle; the builders also angled the upper storeys to compensate, which is why the tower is slightly banana-shaped. It holds seven bells, one for each note of the major scale, and engineers closed it from 1990 to 2001 to pull it back by removing soil from under the higher side.
58. Italian hand gestures were being catalogued in 1832. The archaeologist Andrea de Jorio published a study of Neapolitan gesture that year, arguing that the movements he saw in the streets of Naples matched the ones painted on ancient vases. It is generally counted as the first serious work on body language anywhere.
59. One of Europe’s largest universities was founded by a pope in 1303. Boniface VIII issued the bull that created the Studium Urbis in Rome, now Sapienza, which makes it the oldest university in the city and one of the biggest on the continent by enrolment.

Luck, money and the fashion houses: facts 60 to 70

The last eleven facts cover superstition, the world’s oldest bank and the people behind the labels.

60. Thirteen is the lucky number in Italy. The phrase fare tredici, to do thirteen, means to hit the jackpot, and it comes from Totocalcio, the football pools, where correctly predicting the results of all thirteen listed matches won the top prize.
61. Seventeen is the unlucky one instead. Written as the Roman numeral XVII, it can be rearranged into VIXI, Latin for “I have lived”, which on a Roman tomb means the occupant is finished. Italian buildings and aeroplanes have been known to skip the number.
62. The world’s oldest bank still trading was founded in 1472. Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena was set up by the city of Siena as a lending institution for people in need, and it has been operating from the same city ever since.
63. Bocce is won by getting closest to a small ball. Each team rolls its own larger balls towards the pallino, the little target ball thrown first, and the team with a ball nearest it takes the points. It is the reason for every gravel strip beside an Italian village bar.
64. Versace was shot on his own doorstep. Gianni Versace was murdered outside his Miami Beach house on 15 July 1997, at the height of a label he had built in under twenty years, and his sister Donatella took over as creative director.
65. Giorgio Armani started out dressing shop windows. He abandoned medical studies in Milan and took a job as a window dresser at the La Rinascente department store, moved into design with Nino Cerruti, and launched his own label in 1975.
66. Valentino red has a wedding attached to it. Valentino Garavani, born in Voghera in Lombardy, built a house on one particular shade of red, and Jacqueline Kennedy wore his short ivory dress to marry Aristotle Onassis in 1968.
67. Miuccia Prada has a degree in political science, not fashion. She took over her family’s leather goods firm in 1978 with no design training, and the thing that made the company was not leather at all: the black nylon backpack she introduced in 1984, cut from an industrial fabric her grandfather had used for luggage covers.
68. The head of Benetton spent two years in the Italian Senate. Luciano Benetton, who founded the group with his siblings, sat as a senator from 1992 to 1994.
69. Gucci began with a porter watching rich people’s luggage. Guccio Gucci worked at the Savoy hotel in London, noticed the quality of the cases the guests arrived with, went home and opened a leather goods shop in Florence in 1921.
70. Italy has won the football World Cup four times. The wins came in 1934, 1938, 1982 and 2006, which puts Italy second only to Brazil, and two of those titles were won back to back before the Second World War.

Planning a trip around any of these

Most of the 70 facts above are attached to a building, a museum or a town you can reach on public transport, and Italy makes that easy. The rail network links Rome, Florence, Milan, Naples, Venice and Bologna at high speed, and Omio shows the state operator and the private ones side by side so you can see which train is actually cheaper on your date.

A car only earns its place off that spine. Sardinia’s rock-cut tombs, the Friuli ham towns, the Umbrian hill towns and the small museums in Emilia-Romagna are all awkward without one, and comparing suppliers on DiscoverCars before you fly beats taking whatever is left at the airport desk.

WonderfulWanderings Pro Tips

Four of these facts change how you plan a visit rather than just how you sound at dinner.

1. Book the Doge’s Palace Secret Itineraries tour separately. The standard Palazzo Ducale ticket does not include the administrative rooms, the torture chamber, the prisons or the inside of the Bridge of Sighs. The Secret Itineraries tour is the only way into them and it runs on a limited number of slots.
2. Go to Sant’Apollinare in Classe and the domus de janas out of season. Both are UNESCO sites reachable on local transport, both are quiet, and neither appears on the coach circuit that fills Florence and Venice.
3. Check which Italian museum shuts on which day before you build an itinerary. Italy’s state museums generally close on Mondays and its diocesan monuments generally do not, so a Monday in Ravenna works and a Monday in Rome wastes a morning.
4. Time a July or August trip around the heat, not the sights. July and August are the hottest and driest months across the country, many family-run restaurants close for two or three weeks in August, and the shoulder months of May, June and September give you the same daylight without the queues.

About the author. This guide is written and maintained by the Wonderful Wanderings editorial team. Wonderful Wanderings was founded in 2012 by Sofie Couwenbergh, and the Italian trips behind this series took in Rome, Bologna, Modena, Ravenna, Friuli and the Umbrian hill towns. The team covers Italy for independent travellers, including the tours, rail tickets and hire cars worth booking around the places these facts point at, and checks this page against its sources when the numbers change.