His father, Achille La Guardia, was a lapsed-Catholic from Cerignola, and his mother, Irene Coen, was a Jew from Trieste, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire ; his maternal grandmother Fiorina Luzzatto Coen was a Luzzatto, a member of the prestigious Italian Jewish family of scholars, kabbalists and poets and had among her ancestors the famous rabbi Samuel David Luzzatto better known as Shadal.

Andrea Andreani ( 1540 – 1623 ) was an Italian engraver on wood, who was among the first printmakers in Italy to use chiaroscuro, which required multiple colours.

* 1454 – The Treaty of Lodi is signed, establishing a balance of power among northern Italian city-states for almost 50 years.

Developed into its present form in Italy, ( where it is called bocce, the plural of the Italian word boccia which means " bowl "), it is played around Europe and also in overseas areas that have received Italian migrants, including Australia, North America, and South America ( where it is known as bochas ; bolas criollas in Venezuela, bocha ( the sport ) in Brazil ), initially among the migrants themselves but slowly becoming more popular with their descendants and the wider community.

There are several distinctly Chicago sandwiches, among them the Italian beef sandwich, which is thinly sliced beef slowly simmered au jus and served on an Italian roll with sweet peppers or spicy giardiniera.

It was at this time that the misunderstanding began among those who had not understood the Italian.

She also worked to bring the papacy of Gregory XI back to Rome from its displacement in France, and to establish peace among the Italian city-states.

In one opinion, this pattern is clearly present among the modern Romance tongues, with Italian and Spanish having a high degree of mutual comprehensibility, which neither language shares with French, despite some claiming that both languages are genetically closer to French than to each other: In fact, French-Italian and French-Spanish relative mutual incomprehensibility is due to French having undergone more rapid and more pervasive phonological change than have Spanish and Italian, not to real or imagined distance in genetic relationship.

The terms for the instrument among classical performers are contrabass ( which comes from the instrument's Italian name, contrabbasso ), string bass ( to distinguish it from a brass bass instrument in a concert band ), or simply bass.

Outside the Italian Renaissance, yet another major current of esotericism was initiated by Paracelsus, who combined alchemical and astrological themes ( among others ) into a complex body of doctrines.

Vittorio Gassman, Marcello Mastroianni, Ugo Tognazzi, Alberto Sordi, Claudia Cardinale, Monica Vitti and Nino Manfredi were among the stars of these movies, that described the years of the economical reprise and investigated Italian customs, a sort of self-ethnological research.

Many original freestyle artists, and DJs such as Jellybean, Tony Torres, Raul Soto and Roman Ricardo, were of Puerto Rican ancestry, which was one reason for the style's popularity among Latino Americans and Italian Americans, especially in the New York City area.

The Gospel also takes a strongly anti-Pauline tone at times, saying in the Italian version's beginning: " many, being deceived of Satan, under pretence of piety, are preaching most impious doctrine, calling Jesus son of God, repudiating the circumcision ordained of God for ever, and permitting every unclean meat: among whom also Paul has been deceived.

Giacomo Puccini ( full name: Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini ) (; Lucca 22 December 1858Brussels 29 November 1924 ) was an Italian composer whose operas are among the most frequently performed in the standard repertoire.

* Italian Lazzaro Spallanzani ( 1729 – 99 ) was among early physicians to disregard Galen's theories, and in 1780 he gave experimental proof on the action of gastric juice on foodstuffs.

It is among the best preserved of Rome's ancient buildings and was highly influential to many of the great architects of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque periods.

The downfall of the former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has, among other things, been attributed to his hubris by the international media.

About 68 % of Italian population is classified as urban, a relatively low figure among developed countries.

Italian rates of growth were second only, but very close, to the German rates, in Europe, and among the OEEC countries only Japan had been doing better.

However, the biggest chunk of Italian public debt is owned by national subjects, and relatively high levels of private savings and low levels of private indebtedness are seen as making it the safest among Europe's struggling economies.

In particular, among the Romance languages, Italian is the closest to Latin in terms of vocabulary.

This conquest propelled the unification of Italy some decades after, and pushed the Italian language into a lingua franca used not only among clerks, nobility and functionaries in the Italian courts but also in the bourgeoisie.

He may respect too much the Italian tradition of letting singers hold on to their notes, but to restrain them in a singers' opera may be quite difficult.

Many police officers or responsible authorities present in Genoa during the G8 summit, are currently under investigation by the Italian judges, and some of them resigned.

He rightly maintained that Italian life and manners were susceptible of artistic treatment such as had not been given them before.

These types of claims are increasing and Italian courts have recently allowed them against banks that continue to apply compound interest on retail clients ’ current account overdrafts.

In the Languedoc and northern Italy, the Cathars would enjoy their greatest popularity, surviving in the Languedoc, in much reduced form, up to around 1325 and in the Italian cities until the Inquisitions of the 1260s – 1300s finally rooted them out.

One of them was a tack-like shape, looking like the left half of an H. This system was first used in the southern Italian colonies of Heracleia and Tarentum.

Among them were editions of Chaucer, Plutarch, two books in Italian, and folio editions of Cicero and Plato.

Almost half of all the Italian forces in East Africa were concentrated and engaged the Ethiopians who defeated them decisively.

Puccini succeeded in mastering the orchestra as no other Italian had done before him, creating new forms by manipulating structures inherited from the great Italian tradition, loading them with bold harmonic progressions which had little or nothing to do with what was happening then in Italy, though they were in step with the work of French, Austrian and German colleagues.

Baldwin studied the work of the Italian inventor Enrico Forlanini and began testing models based on his designs, which led them to the development of hydrofoil watercraft.

As a counterweight, Zog kept British officers in the Gendarmerie despite strong Italian pressure to remove them.

After the betting scandal of the early 1980 ( the Calcio Scommesse scandal ) it was decided to clean up the image of Italian football by assigning referees randomly instead of picking them, in order to clear up all the suspicions and accusations always accompanying Italy's football life.

Edwige is a French version of the name ; Edvige is the Italian version ; Eduviges is the Portuguese, Spanish and Catalan version, all of them from the Latinized version ( Eduvigis is also common ), Hadewych is a Dutch version ; Hedvig is a Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish version.

Cases vary greatly in weight and sturdiness: Italian harpsichords are often of light construction ; heavier construction is found in the later Flemish instruments and those derived from them ( see History of the harpsichord ).

The main event in the First Republic in the sixties was the inclusion of the Socialist party in the government, after the reducing edge of the Christian Democracy ( DC ) had forced them to accept this alliance ; attempts to incorporate the Italian Social Movement ( MSI ) in the Tambroni government led to riots, and were short-lived.

Although Christians, both Western and Eastern, were by law prohibited from being sold into slavery, the native Christians were often indistinguishable from the Muslim population and the Italian merchants were sometimes accused of selling them along with Muslim slaves.

Moreover, the pact erased the legal distinction between war and peace since the signatories, having renounced the use of war began to wage wars without declaring them as evidenced by the U. S. intervention in Central America, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939, and the German and Soviet Union invasions of Poland.

The Italian language preserves a large number of Lombardic words, although it is not always easy to tell them apart from those stemming from other Germanic languages such as Gothic and Frankish.

Nonetheless, his tiny principality was tormented by domestic conflict partly as a result of Louis ' indecisiveness, and also because the majority of the population was of Italian descent ; many of them supported the fascist regime of Italy's Benito Mussolini.

Italian and French communist leaders were prevented by party rules from pointing out that it was actually Stalin who had directed them not to take opposition stances in 1944.

* 2003 – Iraq war: in Nasiriya, Iraq, at least 23 people, among them the first Italian casualties of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, are killed in a suicide bomb attack on an Italian police base.