A beaver was captured on camera in northeast Italy, marking the first sighting of the animal in that country since 1471.

Saltriovenator is the first Italian dinosaur of the Jurassic age and the only dinosaur found in the Lombardy region. Wednesday Italian paleontologists presented evidence that the world’s oldest large-predator dinosaur inhabited the European country some 200 million years ago. "Saltriovenator predates the massive meat-eating dinosaurs by over 25 million years and sheds light on the evolution of the three-fingered hand of birds," Dal Sasso of Milan's Natural History Museum said in a statement.

This meat-eating dinosaur was the first of its kind to be huge.

Italy's parliament has approved a revised budget for 2019, amid opposition complaints that it was dictated by the EU. The country's populist government had originally vowed to push through costly campaign promises including a universal basic income. But in October, the European Commission raised concerns about the impact of such spending on Italy's debt levels.

North Korea's acting ambassador to Italy has disappeared from the diplomatic compound in Rome, according to South Korea's spy agency. NPR's Seoul Correspondent Anthony Kuhn reports the South Korean National Intelligence Service briefed lawmakers in a closed-door hearing Thursday. Ambassador Jo Song Gil and his wife disappeared from the diplomatic compound in Rome in November, before his term was set to end later that month, Kuhn reports.

The residents of Sardinia go for casu marzu, a festering pile of rotten pecorino cheese teeming with squirming fly larvae.

A team in Cremona, Italy, wants to preserve every note from the world’s finest instruments before they become too fragile to play. But perfect recordings need silence. Lots of it.

Burano, the beautiful fishing village in Venice. It is said that the houses were painted in different colours so the sailors and fishermen could identify their houses as they came in from the sea.

The last Lamborghini Gallardo has left the company’s production line in Sant’ Agata, marking an end to the Italian manufacturer’s most successful ever model. In total 14,022 Gallardos were made in a 10-year production run, almost matching the total number of all other Lamborghini cars built since the company was founded in 1963.

Dan Brown’s new thriller, Inferno is set primarily in Florence, Italy, and Brown shows his readers hidden spots of wonder in that well-known city at every turn of the page. Brown’s famous character, symbolist Robert Langdon, picks up after the “Da Vinci Code” and “Angels and Demons” and is asked once again to save the world. Readers immediately turned Inferno into a best-seller and even those familiar with Florence found exciting new places to explore through Langdon’s adventures.

The woman who kissed a riot policeman during protests near the northern Italian city of Turin in November has been detained for "sexual violence" and "offence to a public official".

With its greenery and crumbling ruins, the small island of Poveglia in the Venetian Lagoon seems a pleasant enough place.

Supreme court overturns 60-year-old's conviction for sexual acts with minor, saying verdict did not take into account 'amorous relationship'

Italian police on Wednesday issued arrest warrants for 90 suspected members of a Naples mafia clan and seized assets worth millions of euros, including dozens of well-known pizza restaurants in Rome. One suspect, a 42-year-old Roman man charged with extortion, killed himself by jumping off his fourth-floor balcony when police arrived at his home to arrest him, police said.

Coca-Cola actually had a campaign in the summer of 2011 to encourage Italians to drink Coke with their meals. This might not seem radical to Americans, but this is the land where people drink water or wine at mealtime.

After nearly 12 hours of deliberations Thursday, the court reinstated the guilty verdict first handed down against Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito in 2009.

Well, this one’s horrifying. The New York Daily News ispointing people’s attention to a story from Italian newspaper Il Mattino. Apparently a 50-year-old man in the northern region of Lombardy in Italy was adopting cats from nearby shelters only so he could cook them and serve them as meals.

The Italian state arrived in the heartland of the Camorra mafia this month bearing a backhoe. Police officers in polished black boots posed for television cameras as the backhoe clawed into an overgrown field, searching for barrels of toxic waste or some other illegal industrial sarcophagi.

A diver died Saturday while working on the shipwrecked Costa Concordia, apparently gashing his leg on an underwater metal sheet while preparing the wreck for removal, officials and news reports said. Italy’s civil protection agency, which is overseeing the removal of the Concordia from Tuscany’s coast, said the diver hailed from Spain.

Milan is a famous city of Italy. It has both the historic as well as modern attractions.

Italy's navy has rescued 1,123 people from inflatable boats in the space of 24 hours, as clandestine migration from North Africa reaches record levels.

Manarola may be the oldest of the towns in the Cinque Terre, with the cornerstone of the church, San Lorenzo, dating from 1338. The local dialect is Manarolese, which is marginally different from the dialects in the nearby area. The name "Manarola" is probably dialectical evolution of the Latin, "magna rota". In the Manarolese dialect this was changed to "magna roea" which means "large wheel", in reference to the mill wheel in the town. Photo by Dominic Kamp.

Mafia killings don't typically shock Italians -- as disturbing as the occasional hit may be, the tragedy usually affects only friends and families of the victims. But a coldblooded, point-blank killing this month in southern Italy has a nation grieving - for a 3-year-old child.

Italy's constitutional court has overturned a law that tripled sentences for selling, cultivating and possessing cannabis, declaring it "illegitimate". Prison rights group Antigone say the law has caused prison overcrowding, with 40% of all inmates serving sentences for drug crimes. It could affect some 10,000 people who may be released from jail as a result.

It speaks to the strange state of Italian democracy that Silvio Berlusconi, the disgraced former prime minister, is now claiming the high moral ground in politics — and that his claim is not completely without merit as Italy prepares for its third consecutive unelected prime minister.

Italy's new prime minister, Matteo Renzi, and his cabinet have been sworn into office at a ceremony in Rome. The new government is the youngest in the recent Italian history.

The new subcompact SUV will be built in Italy and sold in 100 countries around the world.

Voting begins Sunday on a referendum on whether Venice and its surrounding region should secede from the rest of Italy, in an attempt to restore its 1,000-year history as a sovereign republic.

Coke-mentos propelled rocket!

Google was handed a 1 million euro ($1.4 million) fine yesterday by Italy and has already paid it, according to Reuters. This time, Google received a fine for complaints related to its Street View program— in 2010, people complained that the cars were not easily recognizable as Google Street View cars.

A 21-year old man has died after being crushed by a crucifix erected in honour of Pope John Paul II in northern Italy.

On March 21, Guinea’s government declared an outbreak of the Ebola virus. According to a report from the World Health Organization (WHO) the following day, more than 140 people had already died, with a total of 208 clinical cases of Ebola registered throughout the West African country. Keiji Fukuda, the WHO’s assistant director-general, described the situation as “one of the most challenging Ebola outbreaks that we have ever faced”.

AN Italian appeals court on Wednesday upheld a tax fraud conviction for Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, the founders of the world-famous fashion label Dolce & Gabbana, sentencing them to a suspended 18-month jail term. The designers stood accused of failing to pay tax on income of $277 million by creating fictitious companies in Luxembourg in order to dodge heftier corporate tax rates in their home country.

British jails may have banned books for inmates but in Italy, the more prisoners read the more time have knocked off their sentence. New legislation set to be passed means that for every book a prisoner gets through, three days will be knocked off their sentence - up to a maximum of 48 days in a year. Officials say that is the equivalent of 16 books and they all have to be above 400 pages and approved by prison staff - comic books and picture books are excluded.

Police in Italy have shut down a mozzarella factory and arrested 13 people after finding that prized local buffalo milk was being cut with cheaper imported cow milk.