Sometimes courage, altruism and hope make all the difference — If a 21-years-old British boy had gone straight to bed after his shift ended, 109 years ago, today the world would be a different place. Young Harold Cottam was the wireless operator aboard RMS Carpathia in 1912, and there would likely be no Titanic survivors around if he had not…

Fast, sleek and opulent, the legendary liner inspired the name of a beer — “Hurray for the Rex! The greatest thing the regime ever built!” In Fellini’s Oscar-winning 1973 movie Amarcord, the SS Rex comes out of the darkness, glistening with lights like a giant Christmas tree. …

An act of spite turned two invaluable historical artifacts to ashes “I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle,” Donna Tartt wrote in her 2014 Pulitzer winning novel The Goldfinch. …

The Amerigo Vespucci is 90 years old and doesn’t look it — On September 1, 2022, the colossal USS George H.W. Bush met the tiny school ship Amerigo Vespucci in the sunny Mediterranean sea. The contrast between the Nimitz-class supercarrier — 1,092 (333 m) feet long and over 100,000 tons — and the 330 ft (101 m) long, slightly over 4,000 tons…

The Divine Marquise was the OG Lady Gaga — Tall and pencil-thin, as pale as a corpse, with a live boa constrictor draped around her neck like a scarf and two cheetahs on diamond-studded leashes, Luisa Casati Stampa was sure to turn heads wherever she went. The daughter of a textile magnate who had amassed a formidable amount of…

Sabir was the Esperanto of the sea — Learning to speak sabir — a mix of Italian, French, Spanish, and Arabic — was essential if you were a sailor or a merchant in the Middle Ages. It also came in handy if you were an Ottoman pirate. Maybe even a banker. Or a Christian renegade hiding in Algiers…

The things you do for love — A young prince in love with a beautiful maiden, an old king determined to keep them apart by all means: sounds like a fairytale straight out of a children’s book. But King Pedro I of Portugal and Dona Inês de Castro’s love story doesn’t have a happy ending: it’s a…

Captain Hook has nothing on him — If you were a Longobard man in Medieval Italy, there were many ways you could lose your right hand. An enemy chops it off with his sword, or you mangle it while working in your blacksmith shop. You fall from your horse and the fracture is so bad a doctor…

“I got myself a taste for murder,” he said — On the 17th of December, 2020, the most prolific serial murderer in Italian records died of Covid-19. He refused treatment because, according to him, he “didn’t want to be a burden anymore.” So ended a dark and sinister chapter in Italian criminal history — in a hospital bed, quietly and…