The Local

New rules limiting tourist parties to a maximum of 25 people and baing the use of loudspeakers came into force in Venice on Thursday under plans to lessen the impact of crowds on the city's fragile infrastructure. ...

Italy and the United States are drawing up a plan to exchange a small number of refugees in a reported bid to deter illegal migration, an Italian govement source said on Friday. ...

The European Union has committed to resettling nearly 61,000 refugees in some of its member countries over the next two years. Around 20 percent of world's refugees have been welcomed by the bloc over the last three years. ...

Italian Interior Minister Marco Miiti. Photo: AFP Up to 10,000 people stranded in refugee camps and detention centres in Libya could be relocated to Europe in 2018, the Italian govement said on Sunday. The initiative would be part of an attempt by EU countries to address the deteriorating conditions in Libya, where thousands of people are held captive in inhumane conditions. "In 2018, up to 10,000 refugees will be able to come to Europe without risk, through humanitarian corridors," Italian Interior Minister Marco Miiti said in an interview with the newspaper La Repubblica. The aouncement comes after a group of 162 "vulnerable" people, from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Som...

Italy Interior Minister Marco Miiti. Photo: AFP A group of 162 "vulnerable" refugees were flown directly from Libya to Italy on Friday for the first time, a day hailed as "historic" by Interior Minister Marco Miiti. "For the first time a humanitarian corridor has been opened from Libya to Europe. It's a start," Miiti said, adding: "Today is a historic day." Those evacuated came from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia and Yemen. They comprised families, single mothers, unaccompanied children and handicapped people, who were flown on a military jet. Vincent Cochetel, the UNHCR's special envoy for the central Mediterranean, said: "For the first time, we have been able to ev...

Pope Francis arrived in Bangladesh from Myanmar on Thursday for the second stage of a visit that has been overshadowed by the plight of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees. PHOTO: MUNIR UZ ZAMA Pope Francis on Saturday said he wept hearing the plight first-hand of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, adding that this meeting was a condition set for his trip to Myanmar and Bangladesh. The Rohingya meeting was a highly symbolic gesture of solidarity with the Muslim minority fleeing violence in Myanmar, and the pontiff told joualists on his plane flying back to Rome that the refugees cried as well. "I knew that I was going to meet the Rohingyas but I did ...

Rohingya refugees near Bangladesh's border with Myanmar. Photo: Fred Dufour/AFP Pope Francis will meet Rohingya Muslim refugees from Myanmar in Dhaka when he visits the Bangladeshi capital next week, a Vatican spokesman said on Wednesday. ...

Junventus' chairman Andrea Agnelli pictured last year. Photo: Marco Bertorello/AFP Juventus president Andrea Agnelli has been baed for a year for his role in the sale of tickets to fan groups, the Italian Football Federation said on Monday. Agnelli was also fined 20,000 euros ($23,770) while champions Juventus copped a fine of 300,000 euros ($356,000).Agnelli was accused of helping sell...

John Keats, by William Hilton/National Portrait Gallery. In Rome, the Keats-Shelley house where the British Romantic poets once lived hosted an art workshop for refugees, artists, and volunteers, to discuss what it means to leave one country for another. They discovered surprising parallels between Keats' jouey and their own, writes Dr Amanda Frances Johnson. The great sensualist Roman...

Ai Weiwei, pictured here in 2016. Photo: Patrick Kovarik/AFPAn impatient toddler chides his mother for not being quick enough in getting him into his pair of newly-acquired boots. Finally they're on and he wriggles free to put the new footwear to good use: kicking his siblings and friends on the shins. He might be a refugee, detained in a transit camp with the rest of his family, waiting to hear w...

Italy is set to issue new guidelines on refugee evictions after the UN criticised the ousting of hundreds of people from a Rome building last week, local media reported Saturday. The unexpected eviction -- carried out when Rome is virtually deserted at the height of the holiday season -- was seen by commenters as a sign of hardening attitudes in Italy towards asylum seekers. On the moing of Augu...

Pope Francis. File photo: Alberto Pizzoli/AFPA Belgian Catholic charity said Thursday it has been waed by Pope Francis to stop offering euthanasia in its psychiatric hospitals by the end of the month or face expulsion. The board of directors of the Brothers of Charity group, which runs 15hospital...

Project Director Rebecca Benefiel uses an iPad to take a photograph of a drawing in Herculaneum. Photo: Ancient Graffiti ProjectNo site in the world has been continually excavated for so long as Pompeii, the city that lay buried after being destroyed when Mount Vesuvius erupted, until its accidental...

Smoke rises from the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. Photo: Eliano Imperato/AFPItalian mafia expert and writer Roberto Saviano on Wednesday evening blamed "criminal organizations" for the huge fire which has spread over the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, as the Italian army were deployed to tackle the blaze. S...

Accommodation rental site Airbnb on Wednesday launched a project in Milan allowing residents to offer their spare rooms or apartments to refugees. The Open Homes Refugees initiative, set up in collaboration withRefugees Welcome Italy and Catholic organization theCommunity of Sant'Egidio, allows Mi...

File photo of migrants being helped aboard a rescue vessel. Photo: AFP Photo/Yara Nardi/Italian Red CrossPrivately-run aid organizations rescuing migrants off Libya have slammed the idea of creating a "code of conduct" for them to follow, saying European ministers tackling the crisis are bungling th...

Memorial to early 1990s war in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Clay Gilliland, CC BY-SAWith peak season approaching for refugees making treacherous joueys to and through Europe, don’t be surprised if we are told again that this is unprecedented. In fact, Europe has coped with comparable situations – not leas...

File photo of a rescue vessel arriving to the port of Saleo. Photo: Carlo Herma/AFPNearly 2,000 people are believed to have drowned trying to cross the Mediterranean this year, the UN's refugee agency said Tuesday on World Refugee Day, as it reported fresh deaths. "This is among the world's most...

Pope Francis greets people as he arrives at the Basilica of St. Bartholomew. Photo: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP Pope Francis on Saturday described some of Europe's refugee centres as "concentration camps", as he paid tribute to an unknown Christian woman slain for her faith in front of her Muslim husban...

Katja Meier came to Italy for a career break in an olive grove - but found herself ruing a refugee home. Photo: Private “There’s a huge contrast between the love tourists and so-called ‘expats’ like me have for Tuscany, and the shock that asylum seekers have to absorb when they are told that t...