The woman found the crying child with its umbilical cord still attached as she threw out her rubbish on Sunday evening, in the town of Santa Maria di Sala, near Venice, Rai News reported.

She initially mistook the child's cries for those of a cat and began searching around the bins to see if there was an animal in trouble. She eventually found the plastic bag containing the newbo behind the bins.

The woman immediately called the emergency services, who took the boy to Dolo hospital. In spite of his ordeal, the child is in perfect health and hospital staff have named him 'Attilio'.

Police suspect the child was abandoned by his mother and are investigating the incident. If nobody comes forward to claim the child within 10 days, the boy will automatically be put up for adoption.

“Throwing a newbo baby in the bin is a defeat for humanity,” Gian Luigi Gigli, president of the Italian pro-life group, Movement for Life, told Andkronos.

“We need to do more to offer alteatives to abandonment, such as informing people about the ability to give birth anonymously in Italian hospitals.”

In June 2015, a baby girl was found abandoned at a different set of rubbish bins in Santa Maria di Sala by a passing nun.

With Silvio Berlusconi still at the helm, for the next four years the party worked tirelessly, mostly using the inteet, to reflect the palpable change in mood among Italians - that they were fed up with the ruling class.

In February 2013, the party became the second biggest political force in Italy behind the centre-left Democratic Party (PD) after scooping 25 percent of the vote in the general election.

During the intervening years, most of that success was down to the protest nature of the group, with the burly Grillo – as much of a showman as Berlusconi - making a stand against everything from the euro and corruption to Italy’s sclerotic political and economic system.

Beppe Grillo, leader of Italy's Five Star Movement. Photo: Filippo Monteforte/AFP

The party has since seized control of small cities, including Parma, Livoo and Ragusa, in Sicily, and on Sunday clinched two of its biggest prizes yet: the capital of Rome, and the former capital, Turin.

So how did the so-called ‘Grillini’ get this far?

Possibly due to the party's leader taking a back seat. In January, the 67-year-old aounced his retu to the comedy circuit, not because he was distancing himself from the movement, he said, but simply “taking a step to the side”.

The move was preceded by a colourful few years, during which the party made headlines more for Grillo’s tirades than for anything else.

Most of those, including telling a prostitute to ply her trade online because it’s safer and making Nazi jibes at EU politicians, came in 2014 – the year he allied with Nigel Farage, the leader of Ukip, the British right-wing populist party.

Just a few weeks ago, Farage, who is campaigning for Britain to leave the EU ahead of a referendum on Thursday, told Corriere della Sera that the pair would “destroy the old EU” . “On June 19th, the Five Star Movement elects the mayor of the capital,” he said. “On June 23rd, Britain leaves the EU and changes Europe.”

Grillo also once said that he and Farage were “rebels with a cause”.

But 2014 was also the year Grillo, dubbed by the Italian media as ‘the clown’, was advised by the party’s co-founder and spin-doctor, the late Gianroberto Casaleggio, to tone down his aggression and “smile more”. The advice came during a post-mortem of the party’s performance in the European Elections, which left it trailing behind the PD.

Grillo had kept a relatively low profile since then, with Luigi Di Maio, widely tipped to succeed him, working to transform the party, clean up its image and broaden its appeal. Grillo has also removed his name from the party’s logo.

But he was back to his old tricks again in early May, sparking widespread condemnation after making a terrorist ‘joke’ about London’s new Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan, during a show in Padua.

At the time, some commentators wondered if the gaffe risked damaging the party’s chances in the impending mayoral elections. Not so.

So how come the tuaround?

Almost out of nowhere came Virginia Raggi, who was elected Rome’s first-ever female mayor on Sunday.

An intellectual property lawyer and mother-of-one, Raggi has no experience of ruing anything.

But her pledge to crackdown on fare dodgers, improve public transport and clean-up the capital’s streets struck a chord with the basic demands of an electorate that has long been weary of its political class.

With Rome’s administration wracked by an ongoing trial over the infiltration of organized crime, and former mayor Ignazio Mario being ousted over an expenses scandal, Raggi also vowed to rid city hall of corruption.

Meanwhile in Turin, one of Italy’s largest urban centres, the Five Star Movement’s Chiara Appendino, 31, claimed just over 54 percent of the vote to oust the PD’s long-serving Piero Fassino.

She became the city’s third female mayor – after Maria Magnani Noya, elected in 1987, and Giovaa Cattaneo Incisa, who became mayor in 1992 but died within a year, aged 69. Noya died just a few days before, aged 80.

In their victory speeches, both Raggi and Appendino touched on their wins as being about “change” rather than “protest”.

"For the first time Rome has a female mayor in an age where equality of opportunity remains a mirage," Raggi said. "I will be a mayor for all Romans. I will restore legality and transparency to the city's institutions after 20 years of poor goveance. With us a new era is opening."

Appendino, a multilingual businesswoman who helps run her family's laser equipment company, said: "We have made history. This was not a protest vote, it was about pride and change."

Has the party forged alliances with any others in order to win votes?

Since inception, one of the party’s golden rules has been not to form any alliances with its opponents. Locally-elected representatives are also bound by a code of conduct that means they have to ask permission from the top for every important position.

So why else is the party appealing right now?

That Italians MPs are among the highest paid in the world is well-known, and many voters have voiced their outrage by backing the Five Star Movement, whose representatives are forced to contribute part of their salaries towards reducing Italy’s public debt and funding small businesses.

Raggi has vowed to tackle corruption in Rome. But are there any lurking threats to the party’s image?

The party has been beating the drum about corruption since the begiing, but alas, its anti-graft baer has, in fact, been blackened by allegations it struck deals with local mobsters in Naples, while investigations have been launched into the Five Star’s mayor of Parma for abuse of office, while his counterpart in the Tuscan city of Livoo is being probed for fraud.

Only time will tell if the Five Star Movement can truly break from Italian political tradition.

"It's definitely a defeat for us. Losing Rome and Turin is a blow, it's painful," Matteo Orfini, president of the Democratic Party (PD), said in an interview with La Stampa daily.

The city elections have been a closely-watched barometer of Italian politics.

Renzi's political strength has weakened in recent months. Rome in particular is seen by some analysts as a springboard for general elections due in 2018.

Sunday's polls saw the populist Five Star Movement (M5S) sweep to power in the capital and in the northe industrial city of Turin.

Virginia Raggi, 37, was elected as Rome's first female mayor, trouncing the PD candidate, Roberto Giachetti, in a 67-to-33 percent share of the vote.

The anti-establishment M5S also claimed control of Turin, where another woman, Chiara Appendino, 31, took 54.56 percent, ousting the long-serving mayor, Piero Fassino, a PD heavyweight.

The PD had some satisfaction by wiing in Milan, Italy's principal economic hub, against a centre-right opponent.

Orfini said the results from the various cities bore out M5S's tactics, of forging local alliances with rightwing or far-right candidates to gain the votes of their supporters for the second round of voting.

The PD's leadership is to meet on Friday to analyse the outcome of the elections, Orfini said.

The picture, which shows a young woman, is thought by some to have been painted by Amedeo Modigliani and was salvaged from the rubbish tip by an avid 'skip diver', who now owns it, in the suburb of Rustica on the outskirts of Rome.

The salvaged portrait, entitled 'Odette', bore a large humidity stain and a hole which experts think was chewed by a passing rodent, but has been lovingly restored by Italy's Amedeo Modigliani Institute.

It will be on display at the Fesival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, Umbria, from next Thursday.

“By putting the portrait on display we hope to encourage scholarly debate about its authenticity,” Franco Sensi, the institute's vice president, told The Local.

Until now, the portrait's authenticity has been fiercely contested with Modigliani experts in France - where the painter and sculptor lived and worked for much of his adult life - refusing to analyze the painting as they are convinced from photographs it is a forgery.

“Not one single element of the work corresponds to Modigliani's craftsmanship. Neither the theme, the chromatic structure nor the choice of structure,” experts from a French Modigliani group wrote in a letter to the painting's owner.

But Italian experts say there is reason to believe the painting is original.

“Studies carried out in Milan have dated the materials to 1917-1918," added Sensi.

"At that time Modigliani was practically unknown and his paintings worthless, so it's unlikely someone would have wasted the canvas and materials in producing a forgery, although it could have been produced by an admirer."

"The figure is painted in his trademark style and the picture is signed by him," Sensi added.

“We can't say it's definitely an original, but obviously the owner is very hopeful because Modigliani paintings are among the most valuable in the world.”

If scholars can agree on the painting's authenticity, it could net its owner millions.

Last November, a Modigliani portrait of a reclining nude sold for €154.6 million at auction – making it the most expensive work by an Italian artist in history and the seventh most expensive painting of all time.

Driven by jealousy, Vincenzo Paduano followed her home after a night out, ramming his car into the back of hers before dousing the vehicle with a flammable liquid and setting it alight.

Di Pietrantonio was able to escape from the car, but he chased after her. The student is said to have screamed for help from passing motorists, but nobody stopped.

The 27-year-old security guard then set her alight. Her still-smouldering body was found a few hours later by her mother.

Paduano soon confessed to the crime, telling investigators that he couldn't accept that she'd abandoned him.

He also reportedly admitted: “I am really a monster. I am obsessive, paranoid, jealous.”

Di Pietrantonio became the 55th "femicide" victim in Italy so far this year - three more were murdered by either a spouse, boyfriend or ex within a few weeks after.

Last year, 128 women were victims of femicide, the year before there were 136. Thousands more have suffered domestic excuse or are stalked by men.

These figures come from Telefono Rosa, a women's rights organization offering legal advice and counselling.

But they are just the tip of the iceberg: an estimated 90 percent of these crimes go unreported.

In some ways, the situation has improved. Italy's govement has taken steps to address violence against women, introducing an ‘anti-femicide’ law and appointing a govement advisor on the issue in 2013 - after being shamed into action by a damning UN report, which called domestic abuse “the most pervasive form of violence in Italy”.

But while legislation is an important step, changing the mentality and culture that lie behind the attacks will take much longer. Most femicides and rapes are carried out by partners or - most often - ex-partners, according to figures from Istat released in 2015, which also showed that while the overall number of incidents has declined slightly, acts of violence are becoming more serious, with more women fearing for their lives.

Divorced or separated women are most at risk, with over half suffering violence (compared to 31.5 percent on average), and attacks often occur after the victim has begun a new relationship, as was the case with Di Pietrantonio.

Disturbingly, a 2015 study by non-profit organization We World found that one in four young Italians believed violence against women could be justified by "love", or exasperation at the woman or her clothing.

So how can the country get to the root of the problem and tackle the perception of violence as a legitimate reaction to rejection?

Centres offering anger management courses and other treatment, aimed directly at men who consider themselves violent, are growing in number across the country.

The president of Ferrara’s Cam (Centre for violent men), Michele Poli, says there is no common factor among the men the centre has worked with.

“Violence against women happens across-the-board,” he told The Local. “It’s about a patriarchal culture which validates violence against women and prevents effective action against it," he said, adding that every member of society must actively work towards change.

Poli says the centre has been able to measure the success of its courses through interviews with the men’s partners - or sometimes ex-partners - carried out at the start, middle and end of the course.

Another centre includes the following testimony in its advertising material: "Now I know that nothing justifies my violent behaviour".

Men receive treatment at the centre either after being referred by a doctor or social services worker - which may mean the treatment comes too late - or by self-referral, which relies on men to recognize that they have a problem and take responsibility for dealing with it.

One centre appeals to those who “do not consider themselves to be a violent person" but may have hurt their partners “without meaning to” - but how are men going to seek out this kind of help if they are not properly educated on respect and domestic violence?

Laura Boldrini, an Italian politican and long-time advocate for women's rights, said: “the voice of men is missing” in the discourse and spoke of the need to “change the mentality of men”, arguing that schools in particular must do more to educate young boys. Many men seem unwilling to acknowledge the sexism underlying Italian society; Italian media coverage of attacks on women overwhelmingly focuses on cases where the perpetrator is foreign, despite the fact that in most cases, they are carried out by Italian men.

Monica Pepe and Luca Cardin, who run online magazine Zero Violenza, told The Local that more and more men, including high profile figures, are adding their voices to the discussion. Their organization is working on training teachers and parents on how to ensure that their children are equipped to deal with the opposite gender in a healthy maer.

"No man is bo violent, but becomes violent for a variety of reasons linked to their environment, family, society and education," they said. "At Zeroviolenza, we have created violence prevention training for parents and teachers together, because it is important that they are aware of the importance of their role in the formation of the younger generation.

"The goal of our courses is to deconstruct the most common stereotypes and look at the meaning of identity and belonging to a genre. Respect and recognition of the individual need to come before gender difference."

Pepe and Cardin also pointed out the lack of sex education and emotional education in the Italian school system, which shows that "bogeyman still represents healthy, responsible sexuality."

Some schools are introducing lessons on domestic violence into the curriculum, for example in Turin, where boys are educated on consent and girls taught how to spot the signs of abuse. The University of Bologna is the only one in Italy to offer a seminar dedicated to violence against women, which includes discussions with those who have suffered.

But on the whole, the issue is still "taboo", as three students at the university explained to The Local.

One of them, Irene, said her only experience of domestic violence being discussed in school was a PE lesson in self-defence. "The teacher spoke to us specifically about female self-defence - psychological as well as physical - and how to avoid a violent man. But this doesn’t tackle the problem at its roots," she says.

Another student, Chiara, 21, said: “Italian schools don’t pay attention to gender-based violence at all, and no one talks about domestic abuse. We don’t even study the story of feminism.” She added that some men disagree with the idea of courses on gender or relationships, because they feel it labels them all as violent.

The reluctance to address the topic means that women are often left to shoulder responsibility for their protection themselves. One mayor celebrated Inteational Women’s Day this year by handing out pepper spray to female residents, while a Milan-based women’s organization recently launched an app named ‘Stalking Buster’ launched, allowing women to keep a record of incidents and contact police immediately.

Sonia, a third student, said that while improvements to the education system were "essential", it is also crucial to focus on "major means of communication, like TV, advertising and film". In fact, in the UN report cited above, it commented on the unequal representation of women in Italian media, for example the fact that over half of women shown on TV did not speak, while the rest were overwhelmingly presented in relation to stereotypical topics such as sex and beauty.

Italy’s Rai TV chael has a programme titled ‘Amore Criminale’, ruing since 2007. Created in collaboration with the Italian police, it does important work in reporting on cases of femicide, as well as speaking to psychologists, criminologists and occasionally formerly violent men who have undergone anger management therapy.

However, the title, which translates as 'Criminal Love', seems to support the idea that the culprits simply 'loved too much'. Accompanying its opening credits are the lyrics “Each man kills the thing he loves”, with the title (which translates as ‘Criminal Love’) encircled in a heart on screen.

And the way the Italian media reports these crimes too often paints them as tragic love stories, illustrating articles with smiling photos of the victim and her killer when they were a couple. One recent headline read ‘He killed his partner with a vase of flowers’ - only explaining later in the article that the relationship had ended over a year earlier.

Reports often refer to the victim as the ‘girlfriend’ or ‘partner’ of her killer, even when the relationship ended some time previously; the woman obviously did not want to be seen as the man’s partner, and the tragedy is not that the 'happy couple' has been to apart, but that a woman has been killed by a man who saw her as a possession. This kind of reporting unfortunately plays into the narrative of the perpetrators.

Lucia Aibali, the victim of an acid attack by an ex-partner, addressed this issue in her book, called: Here I am: My Story of Non-Love.

Its blurb sums up the problem, saying: "The outline is unfortunately ‘classic’: possession mistaken for love, anger which becomes ferocious, up to the ultimate cruelty."

Yet pecorino, which shares its name with one of Italy's best-known cheeses, might not even exist but for the vision of a trailblazing pioneer fondly remembered by his daughters as being "a little bit crazy".

The late Guido Cocci Griffoni is revered as a hero of Italian viticulture and his native region of Marche for having hauled the ancient grape back from
the brink of extinction.

In the early 1980s however, the self-taught winemaker was almost alone in identifying the potential of a varietal now enjoying critical acclaim and commercial success after a four-fold increase in plantings between 2000 and 2011.

"Pecorino is not just a great grape variety; it is also one of Italy's biggest wine success stories of the 21st century," says writer Ian d'Agata, the author of "Native Wine Grapes of Italy".

The grape's name is derived from the Italian word for sheep, "pecora", which are ubiquitous in the hills of central Italy, where both wild and cultivated pecorino vines abounded in the 19th century, providing a ready snack for shepherds.

Things began to change after World War II as rural depopulation emptied mountain villages in Marche and the neighbouring Abruzzo region.

Professional grape growers tued away from pecorino to the higher-yielding but less characterful varieties trebbiano and malvasia, grapes generally destined to be made into non-descript wines by cooperatives lacking Cocci Grifoni's vision.

"Pecorino is not generous in yield terms and, at that time, volume was everything; farmers needed money," explains Marilena Cocci Grifoni, who now runs the estate alongside her winemaker sister Paola.

Rebo in Marche

But their father had a hunch that pecorino could produce interesting results and in 1982 he began experimenting with a parcel of wild vines acquired from an 80-year-old farmer no longer able to tend his garden vineyard at Arquata del Tronto, 1,000 metres (3,300 feet) above sea level in the Marche mountains.

Experimental samples were made from vines planted on four different slopes before the decision was made to go with the coolest of them, a steep north-facing slope licked by salty breezes from the Adriatic Sea.

A peach orchard was ripped up to make way for what is now the "mother vineyard" and the first Cocci Grifoni Pecorino was made from the 1990 harvest.

That year's production had to be bottled as a humble table wine but recognition was to come quickly.

In 2001, Pecorino from the Offida area was granted DOC or controlled origin status. A decade later it completed an extraordinarily quick ascent to the top rank of Italian wine by obtaining the DOCG classification occupied by the likes of Barolo and Chianti Classico.

Export markets are the next horizon with the wine now starting to appear on the shelves of British supermarkets and restaurant wine lists in North America.

Baptized in Abruzzo

Winemaker Paolo says a good pecorino should smell of tropical fruits but also display balsamic, herbal and honey notes thanks to the grapes' combination of high sugar and high acidity.

"The sugar means it is always strong in alcohol and the acidity brings freshness," she says. "These two elements give the wine its potential to age and this evolution leads to a particularly complex range of tastes."

Marilena says their father would regard the pecorino success story as a miracle.

"He has given the possibility of work to the children of farmers who believed there was no future in their area. Now young people are deciding to stay, to invest and not to abandon the vines. This is what he'd be proudest of."

Despite Cocci Griffoni leading the way in Marche, more pecorino is now produced in Abruzzo, where Luigi Cataldi Madoa was the first producer to market a pure pecorino based on the varietal name.

"The Cocci Griffonis rediscovered pecorino but I was the one to baptise it," says the university philosophy lecturer.

Cataldi Madoa says acidity-based freshness should be the defining quality of a pecorino, and his lead has influenced the style of other producers in Abruzzo.

"If I need to meditate I read Saint Augustine, I don't drink a glass of wine," he told AFP, saying he has no time for those who seek to elevate fermented grape juice into something overly complex.

"I drink when I'm happy, with friends and having fun. That's what wine is for.

"The only noble drink is water!"

Diluted versions

Wine expert D'Agata meanwhile was that rapidly expanding production could make pecorino a victim of its own success.

"Right now it is Italy's hottest white. And there is no doubt it can give complex, age-worthy wines," he says.

"But it is being planted everywhere and from high yielding biotypes, whereas pecorino is a low yielder by definition. The result is that a lot of Pecorino doesn't resemble what I think the wine should smell and taste like."

His ambitious three kilometre-long (1.9 miles) walkway of 200,000 floating cubes covered in orange fabric floating atop Lake Iseo was evacuated Saturday evening after wind and rain made it unstable.

"Given the influx of people and potentially bad weather, it is advisable to rethink your trip," said a manager at the installation in a statement.

Local authorities have also cancelled train services to the lake to limit the numbers able to reach the project.

After being closed throughout Saturday night, the project only partly reopened Sunday moing with one of the two walkways still closed to the public.

Crowds of visitors hoping to visit Christo's "The Floating Piers" have been gathering around the lake since it opened on Saturday, with organizers hoping that 500,000 people will experience it by July 3rd when the pontoons close to the public.

But the walkways can only hold 11,000 people at any one time - and only if weather conditions allow.

More than 55,000 visitors attempted to cross the walkways on Saturday, forcing organizers who had anticipated just 40,000 to ask that they retu another day.

And by the early evening the bridges had been forced to close by heavy winds and driving rain.

Christo first conceived the project in 1970 for the River Plate delta in Argentina but was thwarted after failing to secure the necessary permits.

Despite the long delay in realizing his vision Christo said on Thursday that the project, his first since 2005, "stayed in our hearts".

Exit polls gave the anti-establishment Five Star Movement's candidate at least 60 percent of the vote in a run-off contest with Roberto Giachetti of Renzi's centre-left Democratic Party.

The 37-year-old lawyer and local councillor, a complete unknown only a few months ago, had been widely expected to claim the keys to City Hall.

But the margin of her victory exceeded expectations with the exit polls pointing to her taking between 62 and 68 percent of the vote.

Polls suggested the PD had not suffered such big reverses elsewhere but the centre-left was in danger of losing control of the major northe cities Milan and Turin while holding on to Bologna and Naples.

Victory in Rome is a major coup for the Five Star Movement (MS5) founded by comedian Beppe Grillo in 2009, which has since established itself as the major opposition force in Italian politics.

Raggi successfully tapped into widespread anger among voters over the state of the capital's public transport and other services, widely seen as having been undermined by years of cronyism and sleaze in the municipal administration.

Raggi, a 37-year-old lawyer and local councillor, has leapt from anonymity to become one of the best-known faces in Italian politics in the space of only a few months on the campaign trail.

The telegenic brunette is the rising star of the populist Five Star movement (M5S), the anti-establishment party founded by comedian Beppe Grillo.

It has emerged as the best-supported opposition to the centre left, Democratic Party (PD)-led coalition of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, and the stakes are extremely high for a movement that was only founded in 2009.

With the ebullient Renzi's star waning slightly, success in Rome could provide a platform for a tilt at national power in general elections due in 2018.

"We are witnessing a historic moment," Raggi said after the June 5 first round of voting, from which she emerged with 35 percent of the vote, well ahead of her run-off rival, Roberto Giachetti (24 percent).

It was a remarkable achievement for a party with a very limited organisational apparatus and also for a woman who only entered politics five years ago.

That was a move, she recently told AFP, triggered by the birth of her son Matteo and her determination that he should not grow up in a city beset by the intertwined problems of failing public services and endemic corruption.

Opposition to Italy's endemic cronyism and sleaze is the foundation of M5S's appeal to voters and the Roman electorate have had their fill of those in recent years.

Dozens of local businessmen, officials and politicians are currently on trial for their involvement in a criminal network that ripped off the city to the tune of tens -- if not hundreds -- of millions.

From stealing the funds allocated to get ethnic Roma children to school out of isolated camps, to paving the city's streets with wafer-thin surfaces, scams abounded for years, according to prosecutors, in what is known as the Mafia Capitale scandal.

The industrial action has been organized between 1pm and 5pm by the Italian Union of Flight Assistance and Control (Unica) and the League of Italian Air Traffic Controllers (Lica).

The workers are striking over issues surrounding pensions and contractual rights.

“We hope our requests are finally met,” Unica spokesperson Gianluca Labigi told La Repubblica.

“We ask all passengers to check their flights are leaving before coming to the airport to avoid discomfort,” he added.

In addition to causing hundreds of cancelled flights, the staff shortages caused by the action means many travellers can expect a long afteoon of crowded waiting rooms and heavy delays.

Many people have criticized the unions for not providing advanced waing ahead of the strike, while others have pointed to the fact it conveniently coincides with Italy's Euro 2016 fixture against Sweden, which starts at 3pm.

“Given the extremely short notice, we are doing our best to reduce problems for passengers,” said national airline carrier, Alitalia, in a statement.

“We will try and find alteative solutions to cancelled flights, where possible leaving today.”

The strike caps a difficult week for Italy, with rubbish piling up on the streets on Wednesday as refuse collectors held a national strike.

Meanwhile, workers with Rome's transport authority, Atac, were heavily criticized on Monday for calling a strike which coincided with Italy's opening Euro 2016 fixture against Belgium.

All that separated him and the vast body of water was 200,000 floating orange cubes that create a three kilometre-long (1.9 miles) runway that coects the village of Sulzano to the small island of Monte Isola on the lake.

"It's a very physical project, you need to go there (to understand it)," he said on Thursday of the project called "The Floating Piers" which will open to the public from June 18th to July 3rd.

"It's not a painting, it's not a sculpture. You need to walk on it... feel it with the sun, with the rain, with the wind. It's physical, not virtual."

First conceived in 1970 for the River Plate delta in Argentina, the Christ-like project that Christo, 81, devised with his late wife Jeae-Claude has finally been resurrected.

Despite the long delay in realizing his vision Christo said the project, his first since 2005, "stayed in our hearts".

Forced to abandon the aquatic walkways in Argentina, then again in Japan due to permit troubles, the piers exhibition got the go-ahead in just two years in Italy, thanks to the enthusiasm of local officials and nearby residents.

Photo: Facebook

Made of 200,000 recyclable polyethylene cubes linked by 200,000 giant screws, the piers are covered with a dahlia-yellow fabric made of tightly woven nylon designed to change tone as the sun sets and become an intense red when wet.

This is not Christo's first artistic outing in Italy.

Christo and Jeae-Claude, both bo June 13th, 1935, brought three projects to the country in the 1960s and 1970s, including an installation on Milan's Cathedral square in which they wrapped a monument to King Vittorio Emanuele.

The couple first rose to fame for their eye-catching packaging of famous landmarks like the Pont Neuf across the Seine in Paris in 1985 and Berlin's Reichstag in 1995 - a project which took almost a quarter of a century of bureaucratic wrangling to get off the ground.

'Artists do not retire, they die'

Describing his passion for reimagining objects with audacious wrapping and packaging, Christo said: "I don't like to talk on the telephone, I don't know how to drive cars... I'm interested (in the) real thing."

"The Floating Piers" cost €15 million ($16.7 million) to create but will be free to the public and is expected to attract 500,000 visitors by the time it closes.

It was funded as is typical for Christo's works by the sale of his blueprints and design models.

Local businesses are already hoping to cash-in on the cultural phenomenon described by The New York Times as one of the "musts" of the year.

Michele Pescali, a bakery owner based close to the lake, has created a line of "Christo biscuits" for the occasion made of pastry covered with jam and orange peel reminiscent of the artificial pontoons.

Some visitors like Almut and Walter Horstma from Germany arrived days early so as not to miss the final stage of installation.

"We wanted to see the construction work. We already saw the Reichstag, the wrapped trees in Basel, the wall of oil barrels, the Oberhausen gas holder in Germany," said Walter, 75.

He described Christo's latest feat as "fantastic, with this mix of water, countryside, colour and fabric".

And fans of the octogenarian genius need not fear that Christo is winding down.

He is now thought to be awaiting approval for two projects, one in the US and the other in Abu Dhabi.

Asked if he plans to hang up his welly boots and settle down, he said simply: "Artists do not retire, they die."

Speaking on the sidelines of the Inteational Economic Forum in St Petersburg, Renzi told the Russian news agency, Tass: “Of course it would be a problem, but it would be a small problem for Europe and a much larger one for Britain."

The premier has also expressed his dismay over the fatal stabbing and shooting of British Labour MP, Jo Cox, on Thursday. The 41-year-old was a prominent campaigner for the UK to stay in the EU.

“It’s a horrible act of hatred that casts a shadow over the hearts of all of us,” Renzi said. “This hatred will never prevail, in Britain or elsewhere.”

There were no reported casualties in the incident, with the boat's 117 passengers and six crew members all managing to disembark the craft safely, Ansa reported.

The incident happened at around 4pm when the vessel, named 'Massaccio', came in to moor at the island's main harbour.

Strong winds caused the docking manoeuver to go badly wrong and the boat slammed into a concrete pier.

The coastguard, police and port authorities intervened to safely evacuate the passengers and crew from the stricken vessel, but could do nothing to stop the Massaccio's prow from sinking into the shallow waters around the pier.

A video of the rescue operation can be seen below.

The Massaccio ran passenger services between Stromboli and the Aeolian islands of Lipari and Milazzo and will be salvaged from the water on Friday.

The incident was caused by the violent sirocco winds – which blow over Sicily from the Sahara desert. The hot winds have also also fuelled the spread of wildfires on Wednesday night and Thursday.

Player haircuts

Italy

Italy are missing Mario Balotelli's magic up top this year. Photo Vincenzo Pito /AFP

As you might expect from the Italians, the squad is an impeccably well-groomed bunch, but this year's crop of talent (pun intended) is lacking some flair.

With Andrea Pirlo's lush locks and beard combination missing from the midfield and Mario Balotelli's postmode pattes of headshaving not leading the line up front, the squad is composed of almost exclusively of unimaginative short-back-and sides hairdos.

Score: 5/10

Sweden

Lush locks in a neat manbun: Zlatan Ibrahimovic. Photo: Anders Wiklund/TT

A glance at the Sweden line-up from their most recent game against the Republic of Ireland doesn’t exactly suggest a wealth of creativity in the grooming department. Whether it’s Andreas Isaksson’s short back and sides, the shaved heads of Marcus Berg and Victor Lindelöf, or the schoolboy side partings of Kim Källström and Oscar Lewicki, most of Erik Hamrén’s troop are about as run-of-the-mill looking as it gets.

Fortunately, as is so often the case for Sweden, Zlatan Ibrahimovic saves the day. The striker’s man bun with a beard combination may not be the most original in the world, but to his credit, he has been sporting it for five years or so now, beating plenty of hipsters to the punch. At least he stands out from the crowd, and saves a point for his country.

Score: 1/10

Food and Drink

Italy

Italian food is famous the world over, and rightly so. The country is full to the brim of of great pizza and pasta dishes, but that's just scratching the surface of Italian cuisine.

The food is based around simple, fresh ingredients and is incredibly varied, delicious and healthy.

On the drink front, Prosecco now outsells champagne and Chianti and Pino Grigio are among the most quaffed wines worldwide.

The only thing letting Italy down is its lack of decent beer, but it more than makes up for that with its coffee. While the Swedes are walking to work in the dark, knocking back huge vats of dirty dishwater coffee, the Italians are sitting down and sipping tiny thimbles of delicious, intense espresso in a suy piazza.

Score: 10/10

Sweden

Sweden’s food doesn’t carry the same prestige as Italy’s, but there’s plenty to love about the country’s cuisine. If you’re a seafood fan, the west coast in particular is a delight, with lobster, oysters and mussels plentiful, while the variety of pickled herring eaten at pretty much every major celebration can be surprisingly good.

If you’re feeling more adventurous, there’s also the two Michelin starred Fäviken Magasinet in Järpen, which was the subject of an episode of Netflix documentary Chef’s Table, and recently named among the top 50 best restaurants in the world.

As for the drinks, the Swedish beer of years gone by could be a touch on the gassy side, but with an abundance of microbreweries popping up in the country as of late, most needs should be more than catered for. IPA (Indian Pale Ale) in particular is plentiful and popular at the moment.

Wine isn’t Sweden’s strong point, but when it comes to the harder stuff, the northeers know a thing or two about drinking. Snaps, the powerful alcoholic drink consumed at festivities, comes in hundreds of different varieties and quite often comes accompanied with a song, and what’s not to love about that?

Score: 5/10

Ice Hotels:

Italy

Italy: not a good place for building an ice hotel. Photo: Tiziana Fabi/AFP

Due to average summer temperatures above 20 degrees ice hotels haven't really caught on, which is a shame.

Perhaps there are parts of the Italian Alps which get cold enough to build an ice hotel during the winter, but given the extremely low tolerance to cold most Italians seem to share it might be a hard sell.

In central Rome, there is a bar made from sculpted ice, which offers sweet refuge from the infeal temperatures reached in the city during the summer, but that's about it.

Score: 1/10

Sweden

The Jukkasjärvi ice hotel. Photo: Daniel Rosenbaum and Dylan Pillemer.

Sorry Italy, but unsurprisingly given that Sweden has a lot of, well, ice, it also has a pretty impressive Ice hotel – probably the most impressive of them all. First made in 1989, each year the structure is redesigned and rebuilt in Jukkasjärvi, 200km north of the Arctic Circle, and includes an ice church, ice bar, and ice sculpting studio. On top of that there are two heated restaurants for the faint hearted, as well as two wildeess camps for the more resilient guests.

As for Rome’s ice bar, Stockholm has one of those too, but that’s really small fry when you can stay in an entire building sculpted out of frozen water now isn’t it?

Score: 8/10

Fashion

Italy

Italy has been leading the way in fashion design since the 11th century and over the years 'Made in Italy' has become a byword for quality and style.

The country boasts some of the biggest names in the industry and Milan's two aual fashion weeks are among the most important dates on the aual fashion calendar.

That said, the Italian dominance of mainstream fashion trends tends to stop alteative styles like punk or grunge from emerging, which then tend to arrive five years too late.

Score 7/10

Sweden

Swedish fashion is sleek, refined, and carries none of the snobbery of its Italian counterparts. Whether it’s affordable, high street brands like H&M or designer marks like Acne and Filippa K, the country more than punches above its weight when it comes to clothing.

“Less is more” is the key for Swedes, and with their products generally discreet looking but also effortlessly cool, there’s something for everyone. Scandi style is in at the moment, and Sweden is a huge part of that.

Score: 6/10

Industry

Italy

Italy is probably not considered 'an industrial powerhouse' in the same way that many northe European countries routinely are, however it is the fourth largest economy in Europe in no small part thanks to its impressive industrial output.

Five percent of Italian industry is based around the production of cars and car parts.

From icons like the Fiat 500 to Ferrari and Vespa Italian cars might not be as safe or as reliable as a Volvo, but they are so much cooler.

There's more than just cars too, an Italian company Olivetti even designed the world's first personal computer: the P101.

Both countries are famous for their elaborate glassware, but the glassmaker's art spread from the Venetian island of Murano, which for centuries has produced some of the finest glass in the world.

8/10

Sweden

With a population around a sixth of the size of Italy’s, Sweden doesn’t command anything like the same scale of work force as the Mediterranean nation, but what it loses in size it more than makes up for in creativity.

Start-ups and technology are key, with household names like Spotify, Skype, and Candy Crush producers King all coming from Swedish roots. If you have a young child, meanwhile, the chances are he or she will have played Minecraft, the hit game from Swedish developer Mojang.

On a per capita basis, Stockholm is the second most prolific tech hub in the world, helping Sweden to become the most competitive economy in the EU in 2016. Sweden has its own car giant too in the form of Volvo, but why focus too much on the present when you can look to the future?

Score: 9/10

Nudists

Italy

The Italians are embracing nudity like never before. Photo: Joe Joe/Flickr

Italy is not really associated with public nudity and until 2006 nudist sites were officially illegal.

Although Italians tend to embarrass easily there is a growing number of socially liberal Italians who love getting naked together.

Statistics from one Italian nudist association suggest that more than 600,000 Italians frequent the country's now legal nudist sites – and who can blame them?

Italy's 7,600 km includes loads of nudist beaches, whose azure waters and yellow sands make them the perfect places to spend the day in the buff.

Score: 6/10

Sweden

The Swedes love stripping off. Photo TT

Nudity isn’t a big deal for Swedes, who have some of the most liberal attitudes in the world to the subject. A 2014 survey by Expedia showed that more than a quarter of Swedish women have sunbathed topless, while there are a whole host of nudist beaches dotted across the country.

The Swedes love a sauna meanwhile, and if you’re thinking of indulging in a steam session, it’s worth keeping in mind that clothes off is the standard rule. It’s hard not to feel like these northeers are more forward-thinking than most of us when it comes to the human body, in fact, they probably have to drop a few points simply because they care so little.

Score:8/10

Verdict

Italy: 37/60 Sweden 37/60

A dead heat!

There's plenty to love about both Italy and Sweden, but it looks like bragging rights will be decided by the outcome of the match.

Raggi, a 37-year-old lawyer and local councillor, has leapt from anonymity to become one of the best-known faces in Italian politics in the space of only a few months on the campaign trail.

The telegenic brunette is the rising star of the populist Five Star movement (M5S), the anti-establishment party founded by comedian Beppe Grillo.

It has emerged as the best-supported opposition to the centre left, Democratic Party (PD)-led coalition of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, and the stakes are extremely high for a movement that was only founded in 2009.

With the ebullient Renzi's star waning slightly, success in Rome could provide a platform for a tilt at national power in general elections due in 2018.

"We are witnessing a historic moment," Raggi said after the June 5th first round of voting, from which she emerged with 35 percent of the vote, well ahead of her run-off rival, Roberto Giachetti (24 percent).

It was a remarkable achievement for a party with a very limited organizational apparatus and also for a woman who only entered politics five years ago.

That was a move, she recently told AFP, triggered by the birth of her son Matteo and her determination that he should not grow up in a city beset by the intertwined problems of failing public services and endemic corruption.

Years of sleaze

Opposition to Italy's endemic cronyism and sleaze is the foundation of M5S's appeal to voters and the Roman electorate have had their fill of those in recent years.

Dozens of local businessmen, officials and politicians are currently on trial for their involvement in a criminal network that ripped off the city to the tune of tens if not hundreds of millions.

From stealing the funds allocated to get ethnic Roma children to school from isolated camps, to paving the city's streets with wafer-thin surfaces, scams abounded for years, according to prosecutors in what is known as the Mafia Capitale scandal.

One of the defendants was caught on a police wiretap boasting how siphoning off funds meant to feed and house often-traumatised asylum-seekers was more lucrative than dealing drugs.

The former mayor, the PD's Ignazio Marino, helped expose the criminal activity that has contributed to these kind of abuses and the city having €12 billion of debts.

This has had crippling knock-on effects on public transport and other essential services, from refuse collection to road repairs.

But Marino also paid a price for the revelations emerging on his watch. Unpopular with many ordinary Romans and perceived by his own party hierarchy to be floundering, he was forced to quit last October after it emerged he had submitted several inaccurate expenses claims.

Exclusive club

Rome's bid to host the 2024 Olympics - against competition from Paris, Los Angeles and Budapest - has come up frequently during the campaign, but Raggi has made it clear she has other priorities.

"No Roman has asked me whether I back the Olympics," she said in a televised debate on Wednesday. "They talk to me about transport, they talk to me about schools. (The Olympics) are not a priority, they're really not a priority."

Where Marino, a liver surgeon from Genoa, was seen as an aloof outsider, Raggi has capitalized on her pure-bred Roman pedigree.

And as her momentum has grown, she has acquired the confidence and popular touch of a seasoned political operator.

Despite her lack of experience in ruing anything, the intellectual property expert is confident she has the local knowledge, character and inventiveness needed to restore Rome's flagging morale and reputation.

"I was a curious young girl, interested in many things, but very focused, as I am today," she told AFP. "Determination never failed me."

If she wins on Sunday, Raggi will join a select group of women who run major cities including Barcelona, Cape Town, Madrid, Paris and Santiago, Chile.

The vote in Rome is part of a nationwide election which will see a string of major cities choose new mayors.

The fires, which affected the provinces of Palermo, Agrigento, Trapani and Messina, broke out at the same time, suggesting a criminal motive, investigators told Ansa.

Sicily President Rosario Crocetta told La Repubblica that he believed organized crime was behind the fires.

“How do you explain a blazing fire in Cefalù last night (Wednesday), when the temperature was 24 degrees?”, he said.

“Of course, the heat and wind then play their part. I do not have proof, but I suspect criminals were responsible because they always affect the most valuable areas around Palermo."

More details to follow.

The girl was rescued from the home in Poggio Maria, near the coastal town of Cefalù, a popular tourist area where other homes and hotels are reported to have been damaged by the wildfires, brought on by a sirocco, a hot Mediterranean wind that originates from the Sahara and can reach hurricane speeds.

Fifty nursery school children were also hospitalized on Thursday moing, suffering from smoke inhalation, as the fires spread across the Palermo area. Their condition was not serious and they were later discharged.

The nursery, in Monreale, was evacuated, as were other buildings and hotels in the affected areas.

The town's mayor, Piero Capizzi, said the situation is now under control.

"But this moing there were moments of fear," he added.

Dozens of fires have spread across the island, affecting the provinces of Palermo, Agrigento, Trapani and Messina, according to the latest reports.

The A20 motorway between Palermo and Messina and a highway that runs from Lascari to Cefalù were also closed as the fires spread.

"We’re facing a dramatic situation," said Lapunzina Rosario, mayor of the coastal town of Cefalù, adding that the flames developed in the Lascari area.

The lower areas of the Madonie mountain range were among the worst affected, with homes and schools being evacuated.

“We are overwhelmed with calls,” a firefighter told La Repubblica.

The roof of a home in Cefalù can be seen on fire in the Tweet below.

Some Canadair water planes were launched but the operation had to be stopped because the winds, bringing temperatures of up to 40 degrees Celsius, were too strong, Giampiero Boscaino said.

The video below, of fires in Lascari, was posted on YouReporter.it.

The Italian Health Ministry has long approved the use of the chemical “to wash frozen and fresh mollusks and cephalopods,” meaning squid and certain shellfish are routinely rinsed in hydrogen peroxide solution, La Stampa reported.

Although hydrogen peroxide solutions are perfectly safe for human consumption, the chemical acts as a bleaching agent which makes certain fish seem whiter and more attractive to the customer.

The EU has told Italy to end the bleaching, which is in flagrant violation of EU law.

“Hydrogen peroxide is not a substance which the EU authorizes for use with certain foodstuffs,” read a note sent to the Italian Health Ministry.

“We therefore ask Italy to provide producers with clear information about which solutions can and can't be used to wash seafood.”

For the EU, the ban on hydrogen peroxide is to prevent producers from exploiting its bleaching action to make older seafood seem much fresher than it is - a trick it is almost impossible for consumers to detect.

The ban on the use of peroxide aims at combating the growing phenomenon of seafood fraud, which sees consumers duped into paying over the odds for falsely labelled fish.

A recent survey by inteational ocean advocacy group, Oceana, revealed that one in three fish dishes sold in the restaurants of the Belgian capital Brussels, which hosts the European Commision, were fraudulently labelled on the menu.

"We need to make sure these rules are implemented in Italy and across all EU-member states to stop H202 from reaching our fridges," Renata Briano, an MEP from Italy's Democratic Party, told the paper.

Emma Persico, who tus eight this August, was walking along the river near her home in Cremona, Piedmont, with her father and one of his friends when she spotted the bone sticking out of the muddy riverbank.

The bone is a 12,000-year-old fragment of fossilized femur which once belonged to a young woolly mammoth.

The girl's discovery stued her father Daniele, who teaches paleontology at the University of Parma.

“Me and my friend had walked right over it, but she spotted it and just started digging it out,” he told Corriere.

“We were stued.”

The area where the bone was found is a popular spot for fossil hunters and has tued up thousands of bones belonging to long-extinct beasts, but few mammoth bones.

“Mammoth fossils are extremely rare and usually difficult to find,” Emma's father added.

The bone is now on display at a museum in Emma's home town of San Daniele Po, where a plaque names her as the intrepid naturalist who discovered it.

Although paleontology seems to run in the Family, Emma has no intention of following in her father's footsteps.

“When I'm older I wan't to be a vet,” she said.

Woolly mammoths were once a common sight across the north of Italy but the furry pachyderms died out due to a combination of climate change at the end of the last ice age, coupled with an increase in human hunting.

Italian mammoths were extinct by 10,000 years ago but a few of the giant beasts survived in Siberia until as recently as 3,700 years ago.

Overall, the number of people applying for asylum in the EU for the first time fell to 287,1000 during the first three months of this year, down 33 percent on the 426,000 who applied in the same period of 2015, Eurostat said.

Germany led the way, with 175,000, registering for asylum during the quarter, followed by Italy (22,300), France (18,000), Austria (13,900) and the UK (10,100).

Compared with the population of each EU state, the highest rate of registered first-time applicants was recorded in Germany (2,155 first time applicants per million inhabitants) and Austria (1,619), ahead of Malta (904), Luxembourg (888), Sweden (790), Cyprus (749) and Hungary (693).

In contrast, the lowest rates were observed in Slovakia (three applicants per million inhabitants), Estonia (4), Romania (11), Lithuania (13), Portugal (14) and Latvia (16).

More than a third of first-time applicants came from Syria (36 percent), with more than 85 percent of the 102,400 Syrians who applied during the first quarter registering in Germany.

Iraq and Afghanistan were the second and third main countries of origin.

For Italy, the three main countries of origin among those who registered for asylum during the period were Pakistan (4,125), Nigeria (3,535) and Gambia (1,940).

During the first quarter 2016, there were in total 565 first-time asylum applicants per million inhabitants in the EU as a whole, Eurostat said.

So far this year more than 48,000 people have been brought to the Italian coast after being pulled from boats trying to cross from Libya, according to the UN refugee agency.

The law follows a series of stings which found people clocking-in to work before leaving to engage in more appealing pursuits.

“For those who get caught clocking-in and then leaving, the ride is over,” Renzi said.

“Those who do so are cheating the state and will be sent home.”

Employers who tu a blind eye to time-stamp swindlers also "risk being sent home too", Renzi said earlier this year as he aounced the crackdown.

The problem of time clock dodgers hit the front pages in October last year after 35 people were arrested in San Remo in northwest Italy and 195 people were placed under investigation for absenteeism.

Traffic cop Alberto Muraglia, 53, who lives in the same building he works in, was secretly filmed by financial police as he clocked in in his underwear before apparently going back to bed. His wife was also filmed clocking in some days on his behalf, in her nightie.

Others were caught on camera clocking in and then going canoeing, shopping or out with friends.

In January, nine staff at a museum in Rome were suspended after being caught swindling the time management system. In the same month, staff at a council in Sicily were exposed for clocking in, before spending the day pursuing more appealing activities such as "shopping and hunting".

The woman had parked her car on a road beside a public garden, and was walking towards the other side of the street when a huge poplar tree tumbled, killing her instantly, La Repubblica reported.

The mayor of Mantua, Mattia Palazzi, who immediately went to the site of the accident, insisted the tree was “healthy” but said “the mix of wind and water in the violent storm soaked the earth, causing this terrible tragedy.”

“The trees in the garden had been recently pruned, but now we will reduce the height of all of them,” he added.

In Brianza, a 47-year-old had to be airlifted to Milan’s Niguarda hospital after a tree fell on his car, trapping him inside. A 34-year-old fellow passenger, who was found by rescuers outside the car, was also taken to hospital in Lecco with injuries.

In late May, flash floods wreaked havoc in Milan after a violent storm caused 90 litres of water to fall per each square metre of ground within just three hours. No casualties were reported.

In February, five people were killed when storms battered most of the country.

The weather is forecast to be calmer from Thursday, with temperatures creeping up across the peninsula over the next few days.

With Virginia Raggi tipped to become Rome's first female mayor after a run-off vote this weekend, the spotlight has tued to M5S's performance in smaller cities where it already holds power.

Viriginia Raggi. Photo: Filippo Monteforte/AFP

It is a record that is mixed in Parma (population: 200,000) and Livoo (160,000), both of which have had mayors elected on an M5S slate since the last set of local polls in 2014.

"The impression is that the actions of these mayors have led to disappointment. They raised hopes so highly that they were impossible to be fulfill and inevitably a certain disillusionment set in afterwards," said
Lorenzo De Sio, a professor of political sociology at the Luiss university in Rome.

Founded by comedian Beppe Grillo, Five Star has established itself as the primary opposition force in Italian politics against a backdrop of deep divisions on the right between centrist allies of fading figurehead Silvio Berlusconi and a far right tendency led by the Northe League.

Grillo's movement insists it belongs to neither left nor right, basing its appeal instead on a call for voters to throw out an established political class it depicts as chronically corrupt and incapable of change.

Legal headaches

That is why the problems encountered by mayors, Federico Pizzarotti, in Parma, and Filippo Nogarin, in Livoo, have presented M5S with a knotty presentational problem and highlighted the scale of the challenge involved in trying to be a "party unlike the others".

"The movement has a major problem, it does not have a stock of experienced people and the two mayors had problems finding officials to appoint to different sections of their respective administrations," said De Sio.

M5S activists have split over the different treatment the two mayors have received from the party in reaction to relatively minor legal woes they have encountered.

Nogarin is seen as having been let off lightly after prosecutors began looking at the recruitment of new staff at the city's near-bankrupt refuse collection company.

Pizzarotti, who is more critical of the leadership, has been suspended from the party pending the outcome of a probe into his decision not to follow an advisory committee's recommendation over the appointment of a new director of the local opera.

In Parma, M5S displaced the centre-right, which had goveed the city for most of the previous 20 years, while in Livoo, a gritty port that was the birthplace of the Italian Communist Party, the left had been in control continuously since the end of World War II.

"We inherited a disastrous situation due to 20 years of awful administration of the town and we started by making a study of the extent of the damage," Nogarin said in an interview with AFP in Livoo's town hall.

High stakes in Rome

"So, for example, companies in which the town is the main or only shareholder had accumulated debts of more than €200 million."

Prime Minister Matteo Renzi's Democratic Party (PD) accepts some of the blame for the situation but insists M5S has made things worse.

"That the PD lost the town was partly its own fault - after so many years in power its appeal had waned," admitted Andrea Romano, a PD parliamentary deputy for the city.

But he adds: "M5S represents a cocktail of administrative incompetence and populist propaganda. They took over a town that had been hit hard by the economic crisis and its debt but all they have done is make things worse and given us the highest taxes in Tuscany."

On the streets, opinions are mixed. "The new mayor has not made anything better for me," said 78-year-old pensioner Giancarlo. "Livoo is half-dead, there is nothing left here. It is worse than before."

But Luciano Marchioni, 57, says M5S has done okay. "In my opinion, the situation has clearly improved. The only thing I'd say is that I had expected something more radical, more investments in the town."

In Rome, all the signs are that voters are set to elect Raggi as their first female mayor. But the stakes will be much higher, the price of failure far greater.

The prints are thought to date back some 800,000 years and were unearthed in the desert of south easte Eritrea.

“Their age is yet to be confirmed with certainty, but footprints will reveal a lot about the evolution of man, because they provide vital information about our ancestors gait and locomotion,” Alfredo Coppa, the Italian archaeologist from Rome's Sapienza university who led the dig, told The Local.

Coppa and his Italian colleagues were working with researchers from Eritrea's National Museum when they unearthed the 26 m2 slab of stone containing the footprints.

Today, the area lies in the middle of an arid desert, but 800,000 years ago the environment was very different.

The fossilized footprints, which are almost indistinguishable to those of mode man, were left in sandy sediments on what archaeologists believe was once the shore of a large lake.

The shapes of the prints suggests they were filled with water after they formed before they eventually dried out and were buried.

“Fossilized footprints are extremely rare,” Coppa explained. “We need to carry out more digs in the area, which has so far tued up the fossilized remains of five or six different Homo Erectus specimens.”

Around the footprints, which move from north to south, the tracks of a gazelle-like animal – which were perhaps being stalked by the early man - can also be seen.

Homo Erectus lived between 1.9 and 70,000 years ago and spread from easte Africa to much of the Middle East and Asia. Mode man, Homo Sapiens, evolved from a group of African Homo Erectus around 200,000 years ago.

The footprints may be the oldest Homo Erectus prints ever discovered but they are by no means the oldest hominid prints.

In 1976 a team in Tanzania located the 3.8 million-year-old tracks of man's first upright ancestor, Australopithecus.

The project, co-organized by Italy’s foreign and interior ministries as well as the Sant’Egidio Catholic community, the Federation of Evangelical Churches and the Valdese Evangelical Church, got underway in February, with some 200 refugees since being flown to Italy on commercial flights from Beirut, Lebanon, as part of the ‘experimental’ stage.

Among the first to arrive was a seven-year-old Syrian girl suffering from eye cancer.

“It’s no longer an experiment but a concrete reality which enables people fleeing war or in vulnerable situations (victims of persecution, families with children, single women, the sick and disabled) to arrive safely and legally in Italy without risking their lives by crossing the Mediterranean,” the Sant’Egidio Catholic Community said in a statement.

“It’s a replicable model of reception and integration which is now being considered by other European countries.”

Two offices, in Beirut and Tangier in Morocco, were opened before Christmas to begin selecting candidates as part of the project which aims to bring 1,000 people, of various nationalities, to Italy over the next two years. There are also plans to open a third office in Ethiopia.

The costs - of hospitality, legal aid and Italian lessons, for example - are covered by the non-profit organizations behind the project, drawing mainly on religious donations, while families are housed initially with volunteers.

The 1600-year-old book, known as the The Codex Purpureus Rossanensis, tells the life of Jesus according to the gospels of Matthew and Mark.

The book features Greek text written in gold and silver ink on dyed parchment and contains a stuing series of biblical episodes illustrated in Byzantine style.

Following a lengthy three-year restoration project in Rome, the codex will now retu to its home city to be given a state-of-the-art display.

“The book is the only one of its kind in the world and is of extraordinary historical, artistic and religious significance,” said Aa Russo, a spokesperson for the diocese of Rossano.

"We are expecting many national and inteational visitors, making the book's exhibition important not just for our town but for the whole of Calabria."

An illustration shows Jesus arriving into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. Photo: Michele Abastante/Wikimedia

Inside the book's new high-tech display room, air temperature and humidity will be carefully controlled to stop its fragile pages from disintegrating.

Only 188 of the book's original pages still remain, with the rest having been lost or destroyed over time.

Multimedia installments will tell visitors more about the history of the codex and allow them to explore its detailed illustrations.

Recent studies of the book, which was discovered in Rossano's sacristy in 1876, reveal it was composed in Syria between 400 and 500 BC but little is known of its early history.

The display at the Diocesean Museum of Rossano will open to the public from July 2nd.

The 55-year-old, from Coa di Darfo parish near the Lombardy city of Brescia, allegedly abused the boy, of foreign origin, from when he was aged 12 until he reached 14.

The priest, who has been suspended from the parish, is alleged to have said to the child that if he told anyone about the abuse then he would go to hell.

The boy, who attended the parish in order to be baptized, eventually confided in a priest in Milan, who told him to tell police.

Some 850 priests have been defrocked for child abuse over the last decade, but according to research conducted earlier this year by L’Abuso, an Italian association for the victims of paedophilia by priests, many have not been brought to justice.

Read more: Hundreds of Italian paedophile priests outed in shocking map

In May, an Italian priest awaiting a criminal trial for sex abuse of minors, due to begin this month, agreed to pay €125,000 in compensation to the families of five of his alleged victims.

Mauro Inzoli, 66, was defrocked in 2012 after he was first accused of paedophilia but that decision was reversed in 2014, when Pope Francis ordered him to stay away from minors and retire to "a life of prayer and humble discretion."

An outcry over Inzoli's treatment led to criminal proceedings being initiated against him in the northe Italian town of Cremona but the Church has reportedly refused to hand over details of its own investigation.

Inzoli, dubbed "Don Mercedes" by the press for his penchant for luxury cars, will be tried for abusing minors aged between 10 and 16 years between 2004 and 2008. He faces up to 12 years in prison.

The perceived leniency of his treatment has angered critics who say the Church is still too reticent about handing paedophile priests over to the criminal authorities.

In March, the Vatican admitted there was "still much to be done" to combat clerical paedophilia in many countries.

The weather-wo sculptor is thought to be one of the earliest depictions of Augustus, who ruled Rome between 21 BC and AD 14.

It was stolen from the Civic Museum of Nepi, Lazio, in the early 1970s and had spent most of the intervening years on display at a museum in Belgium.

Although it was stolen almost five decades ago, museum staff in Nepi had no idea Nero's head was missing until they carried out a recent inventory check.

Once they realized, alarmed archaeologists immediately began searching for the stolen artefact, and soon found it on display at the Royal Museum of Art and History in Brussels.

The museum had purchased the head from a private dealer based in Zurich in 1975 and ever since it had been sitting in their portrait gallery.

Brussels curators had no idea the item was stolen, as it had never been reported missing by museum staff in Nepi.

As soon as the museum discovered the head's provenance, they quickly agreed to retu it to its rightful place and it was presented to the Mayor of Nepi in a ceremony at the Italian Foreign Ministry on Tuesday.

“This is a symbol of the close collaboration between our two countries,” Vice Foreign Minister Mario Giro told reporters.

“It's also a powerful symbol of an inclusive and multicultural Europe at a time when we are seeing cultural genocide and art destruction in countries like Iraq and Syria.”