flowers were significantly more diverse 100 million years ago than they are today. This decline in diversity highlights the impact of environmental changes, climate fluctuations, and human activity on plant life. Understanding this evolution not only enriches our knowledge of ecology but also emphasizes the importance of conservation efforts to preserve the remaining floral diversity we cherish today. Such insights can inspire action towards protecting vulnerable species and ecosystems that still hold the remnants of that ancient variety. https://thrillofitaly.com/ Family Tours in Italy

ChatGPT mainly talks in English and Italy is going to ban English. Meh! Clearly the Italian government has sorted all the economic problems and is looking around for important things to do.

Not that big of a deal, considering at one time The Vatican owned large chunks of the continent, it's still headquartered in Italy, most cardinals and such end up in Italy at some point. With a billion alleged members of the Church that breaks down to 1 property for every 200,000 members, it says that 14% of the property is rented at market rate and the rest at cut rate to Church employees, I'd view it very much in line with what other Churches like the United Methodist Church do, providing housing(Parsonage) for ministers. I mean the Church investment/real estate scandal is a big deal, but at the same time owning property across the planet when they have allegedly billions of people in their care, not out of the realm of probability, how many properties do other Governments own.... probably similar.

I love how you can just stumble into gold in Italy

I had gorgonzola ice cream in Italy once.

The fat content was 50%, which is much higher than the 10% in the average modern diet. "If you consider the altitude where the Iceman was hunting, you need this kind of energy supply," said Dr Frank Maixner of the Eurac Research Institute for Mummy Studies in Bolzano, Italy. "And the best way to do this is by eating fat; this gives you the necessary energy to survive in this harsh environment."

Yep,best way to do it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country

It's not huge, I agree, but it is growing, and faster in some countries than others.

It has grown quite a bit in the past several years though, US is now 1.4% and globally 1.8% . Worth noting, Japan @ 5%, Germany @ 6%. Italy @ 7.5%, UK @ 3.4%....and they don't have the great expanse of the badlands of the US. I would imagine that with proper incentive, the US could be much bigger with advancements to harvesting making it even more attractive.

Anyway, as far as taxing, companies won't get the bill, you will, and as long as you pay, you'll be getting your energy from fossil fuels,because you can't choose an option. Uncle Sam will get more revenue to fund it's Club Med.

True, but Italy also has quite a bit of seismic activity. Maybe we'll get a leaning skyscraper of San Francisco for a few hundred years.

I was in Italy this year, and we went to some countryside knife/cutlery shops in Parma. I noticed these beautiful but tiny little swords. They did not seem useful for cutting , so I just assumed they were decorative. The shopkeeper, who was also the craftsman said they were specially made for opening champagne bottles. It was a tradition in Napoleon's army...they would use their sabers to open the captured bottles, sabering.

Ok I don't know now if I should move to Iceland or Italy.

I have an uncle who was a POW. He was captured by the Germans in Italy not long after Rome fell. When my cousins and I were children, we asked him what it was like. He told us, "Ah! It was just like "Hogan's Heroes!" We'd laugh, of course, and thought that all the Germans were like Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz. He would have never been at this prison camp, as he was in the infantry.

"A Mafia chief in southern Italy has been arrested by detectives disguised as pizza boys who delivered food to his home as he was watching a football match, police said."

You know, if someone asked me to write the most Italian sentence I could come up with, I don't think I'd ever do better than the above.

Yes, the 3 of us got the bug for sure, and you are right, it is intoxicating! We've been on other trips together, especially Japan, stayed at a monastery for 3 days eating all vegetarian (we would sneak out at night and walk to the village to get some proper protein though) We walked the Philosopher's Path outside of Kyoto during fall, where the colors on the trees was amazing. I will post some pictures from that trip in the coming weeks if you guys are ok with that. They will be in color.

I do have color pics of the cowboy trip and will rustle them up.

I think the Little Big Horn was very moving, to actually ride on horseback the very trails that Custer's men road to their deaths was chilling. As far as scenic, Monument Valley was pretty dramatic, going to John Ford's point and realizing how many movies I saw with that view...and then walking for a day through the terrain was pretty cool.

I am going to Italy this summer, a semi-road trip, not the rough and tumble Cowboy style, going with another family, Start at Rome drive up through the Tuscany region, Florence, Siena, Pisa and end up in Venice. We booked a place right on a canal, yay for Airbnb! We try to go somewhere once a year together. Last year we went to France and drove all through Alsace and over to the Black Forrest, even went to Verdun. Amazingly German. Had no idea about the history of that region. We stayed at a working Dairy farm!

For the Cowboys, we have been discussing a multiple overnight desert outing to get some awesome night shots. Camping out and eating Mormon stew!

It says at the end of the article that it has been translated from Italian. I can't find that original Italian text. It'd be nice to post it to the /t/Italian tribe (or post this one there instead of to /t/Italy).

Ha Italy! Money laundering! He's quite a character, drove around my town in a taxicab to get to his gig here.

Dave will more then likely go to Italy to play. Id be interested to see his reaction to this.

Isn't there findings that show a high majority of pirates end up buying something after pirating it? It was the same thing with The Martian. I did download it and started reading, when I realized it was a badass book I ended up buying it on Google Play books to read the rest. Besides, pirated books are super low quality compared to legitimately bought books with horrible formatting and weird random characters.

edit 1: I found some information on it.

People who pirate content are much more likely to buy digital content and spend more on it. So not only would these people probably not have bought your book anyways, but a sizable portion probably ended up buying it because they pirated it.

edit 2: Here's another interesting source on music downloads

Relevant quote -

The study's modelling suggested that, for every ten percent increase in the number of clicks on illegal download sites, there was a corresponding two percent rise in legal sales. That's right: "clicks on legal purchase websites would have been two percent lower in the absence of illegal downloading activities". Within individual nations, Spain and Italy saw no effect but the UK and France saw a four percent increase in legal digital music sales attributed to the effect of illegal downloading.

Intriguingly, a ten percent increase in listening time on legal streaming sites only gave a 0.7 percent increase in the number of corresponding legal digital sales, suggesting that illegal downloads are a better "taster" of music content than legal streaming sites if the intention is to generate proper sales.

The problem is not paying it back, is that is not possible to pay that level of debt. This is not a economic problem, is a political one, if Syriza is triumphant and gets the funds without pain then leftist movements will arise in Europe, and neither the right parties or the financial institutions wants that.

Greece will get funding sooner or later, the fmi and rest of creditors just want Greece ( or Syriza if you want) to suffer before give it to them, and Syriza knows that, so they are forcing his hand. If Greece leaves the Eurozone ( is not going to happen) then the rest of PIGS (Portugal, Spain, Italy) are going to fall with them, and the eurozone can´t afford that.

Sorry for any typos.

As an American, I never fail to be impressed by the craziness of different European countries' policies. Greece and Italy (mainly under Berlusconi) not crazy, wow. Switzerland banning minarets, and France banning the wearing of religious iconography in for people in schools is pretty wild too.

It makes you wonder, "Maybe I don't have to look across the Atlantic to see crazy people in government or running in the government."

Europe, or should I say, the European Union is facing several waves of migrants from all over the rest of the world, mainly northern Africa and the Middle East. The problem with these thousands of people is that the countries where they land cannot solely take care of them.

The European Union had a meeting whereupon they agreed that the migrants should be displaced to all countries of Europe - it would be unfair to leave everything in the hands of Greece and Italy, the main countries that were struck by a wave of migration earlier this month, or if France and England alone had to deal with it.

Now some other countries have taken more radical measures. Hungaria, a country in the Eastern Europe territory, decided to build a wall against its southern neighbor, Serbia, from where a lot of Middle East migrants are thought to sneak in.

This map is just weirdly inconsistent. Chinese being listed as a macrolanguage seems okay with a little explanation (though it still makes me cringe to see Cantonese, Wu, and Mandarin under one big bubble--) but then why is Arabic not also listed as a macrolanguage with its respective varieties listed and given populations? Because no PRC government? And if we're going to go the route of depicting macrolanguages, why not depict the Romance languages together? --France, Italy and Spain have similar sovereignty as members of the EU as Hong Kong does in the PRC, you could even argue that they politically have less sovereignty than Taiwan. On top of that, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician, and many others are as comparably mutually intelligible as the "dialects and languages" of a Chinese macrolanguage.

It's not their fault that the austerity crowd keeps insisting that Greece punish their citizens for their sins. There's no reason this crisis had to develop the way it did, except that Germany kept setting policy that has frankly devastated many EU nations like Spain, Italy and Greece. Ireland is supposed to be the poster child for the German economic way and they're barely staying above water. Compare them to Iceland who devalued their own currency, nationalized their banks and sold them back for a quick and painless recovery and you have to wonder why Greece hasn't existed the EU already.

Italy has an impossibly tough job ahead of them.

After following this for quite some time, my conclusion is: stay out of Italy

If the general culture doesn't change, brain drain will heavily affect Italy.