Tag Archives for Italy

Italy inaugurates first ever 24-hour, free-flowing wine fountain

Awesome! 🙂

A vineyard in Italy has opened a free wine fountain with local red flowing 24/7, in a bid to give tourists a warmer welcome and a literal taste of what the region has to offer.
[…]
While other wine fountains have previously been introduced in Italy, this one is being promoted as the first “proper” one to offers a 24/7 flow. However, it was highlighted that the fountain was not a place for “drunkards” or “louts.”

However, “winos” are okay, surely. 😉

Italy: Town square to become giant Risk board

Great! 🙂

Just remember, players: Never start a land war in Asia.

A small Italian town is transforming its main square into a giant Risk board for a two-day tournament, it’s reported.

The piazza in Sant’Eufemia a Maiella, located deep within Italy’s central Majella National Park, will be covered with a 650-sq-m (7,000-sq-ft) board as part of the event later this month, the local Il Centro website reports. It’s billed as the biggest game of Risk in the world by the event’s organisers. Artist Liberio Furlini spent 15 days painting the huge political map of the world used in the game. Super-sized playing pieces designed to fit with the gigantic board will be used by those taking part.

A Walk Along the Swiss Border

In a few weeks, Switzerland will vote on a proposal to dramatically restrict immigration. A group called Ecopop has gathered enough signatures to hold a referendum that proposes to limit immigration to 0.2 percent of the resident population. The new limit would be 75 percent lower than current levels, about 16,000 immigrants per year. Reuters photographer Denis Balibouse took the occasion to make a photo survey of the border regions Switzerland shares with France, Italy, Germany, and Austria.

[21 photos]

Architecture Du Jour: The Italian Trulli Stone Houses

Uncouth Reflections

Blowhard, Esq. writes:

Based on prehistoric building technique, dry-stone houses with conical roofs are found throughout the Mediterranean region and beyond. They follow similar construction principles, but each type has its own name and style. The trullo (pl. trulli) is the name for such building that are found scattered throughout the countryside of the Itria Valley of the Apulia region of southeast Italy. The trull guild in this region are either rectangular structures with truncated pyramid roofs or circular structures with ogival (pointed) roofs…The trulli here are distinctive rectangular-plan buildings, containing several square rooms with conical roofs, connected by semicircular arches.

These trulli are constructed out of roughly worked limestone boulders, collected from neighboring fields, and were built, without foundations, directly on the underlying natural rock, using the dry-stone technique (without mortar)…These walls are extremely thick, providing a cool environment in hot weather and insulating against the cold in…

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