Italy

A few miles from the Vatican, Najat Hadi kept house with her husband, his other wife and their assorted children, an unhappy home with a hateful woman 10 years her junior and a cruel spouse who left her with a jagged scar peeking from her collar. Finally, she says, her Egyptian-born husband, who worked in Rome making pizzas, beat her so badly that she left him. But he kept her children.

Francesco Ra is the Maytag repairman of Italian tourism. He is the guard and greeter at the least-visited museum in all of Italy: the National Royal Palace Museum of Pisa. Days, sometimes weeks, go by without seeing a single art lover or curious tourist. "I read a lot," Ra said. When a reporter wandered by, he practically snapped to attention, eagerly offering the guest sign-in book, with its many blank pages.

The hardened women of San Luca want you to know a thing or two about their notorious town. Not everyone belongs to the mob, they will tell you. And many who do are driven to it by poverty and neglect. It's a tough sell, no doubt. San Luca, a remote hilltop town in southern Italy, is the ancestral home and principal headquarters of a criminal organization that has emerged as the country's most powerful and dangerous mafia, the 'Ndrangheta.

Months before the global financial meltdown this fall, the talk in the boisterous cafes of Rome and Madrid had turned from sports and politics to economic woes. Despite increasingly bleak outlooks, however, the international financial panic did not hit Italy and Spain as hard as other European nations. Unlike France, Britain or Germany, there have been no major bank failures or rushed bank rescues south of the Alps or the Pyrenees. Why?

One afternoon in the middle of September, I stepped off a train onto the rain-slicked streets of this sleepy, well-kept town 25 miles northwest of Venice.

Some homeless people in Italy will be savoring beluga caviar this Christmas, thanks to officials who seized 88 pounds of the contraband delicacy from smugglers. The caviar has been given to charities to be served alongside the traditional foods they offer the poor on Christmas -- lentils, pasta and cake -- officials said Saturday.

Robert Carsen, director of the Paris production of Leonard Bernstein's "Candide" that was dropped by Milan's La Scala opera house last week, said the production was back on the slate after he agreed to adjust it for the Milanese audience. In a long telephone conversation with La Scala General Manager Stephane Lissner, "I urged him to reconsider, and that's what he's done," Carsen said. They agreed to talk about specifics later.

Francesco de Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and his wife, Bianca Cappello, died in 1587 of arsenic poisoning and not malaria, as was claimed at the time, according to a new study by Italian researchers. Known as Francesco I, he ruled for 13 years before he died at age 46 at his villa at Poggio a Caiano, 11 days after falling ill. His second wife, Bianca, died the next day.

On an early autumn day more than four years ago, the CIA station chief in Rome allegedly presented Italy's top spymaster with a list of people he described as prime targets in the Bush administration's war on terrorism. The CIA wanted the targets "taken away," in the words of one Italian official. At the top of the list of about 10 names was a radical Egyptian cleric widely known as Abu Omar. Within months, Abu Omar was abducted, allegedly by CIA operatives, as he walked along a Milan sidewalk.

An Italian couple have confessed to killing four neighbors, including a toddler, after a feud over noise, a prosecutor said. Raffaella Castagna, 30, her 2-year-old son, her mother and a neighbor were found with their throats slit Dec. 11 in Castagna's apartment in the wealthy northern town of Erba. The home had been set on fire. This week police arrested Olindo Romano and Rosa Bazzi, a middle-aged couple with no criminal record who live in the same building.