Italy to become first country to make studying climate change compulsory in schools
Under a new law, all state schools will dedicate around an hour a week to sustainability and climate change issues from the beginning of the next academic year.
Italy
This archive collects solutions-journalism stories and milestones from Italy — covering environmental policy, public health, civic innovation, and more. Each entry highlights measurable progress and the people driving it.
Enel plans to invest €10.6 billion in 11.6 GW of renewable energy
Italian energy giant Enel has announced its Strategic Plan for the next three years, which includes plans to invest €10.6 billion in new renewable energy capacity with plans to create an additional 11.6 gigawatts (GW).
Bartolomeo Cristofori builds the first piano in Florence
Bartolomeo Cristofori built the first piano in Florence around 1700, when a Medici court inventory documented his strange new keyboard — a harpsichord, essentially, that could play soft and loud depending on the player’s touch. His hammer-and-escapement mechanism gave musicians something no keyboard had offered before: dynamics shaped by the fingers. It still underlies every acoustic piano made today.
Elena Cornaro Piscopia becomes the first woman to earn a Doctor of Philosophy degree
Elena Cornaro Piscopia became the first woman on record to earn a PhD on June 25, 1678, stepping into Padua Cathedral to lecture in Latin on Aristotle before senators, scholars, and students. The university barred women from graduating soon after, but the door had been opened — and the next woman would follow in 1732.
Galileo Galilei overturns ancient physics and reveals a heliocentric cosmos
Galileo Galilei, in early 17th-century Italy, pointed a homemade telescope at the sky and began dismantling a thousand years of cosmic certainty. He spotted four moons circling Jupiter, watched Venus move through phases, and rolled balls down ramps to uncover the laws of motion. His habit of measuring rather than assuming became the backbone of modern science.
Raphael completes The School of Athens, his Renaissance masterpiece
The School of Athens was completed in 1511, when Raphael, barely in his mid-twenties, finished a fresco for Pope Julius II’s private library in the Vatican. He gathered Plato, Aristotle, Hypatia, and Ibn Rushd of Córdoba into one imagined hall, painting thinkers across centuries into a single conversation about why the world works the way it does.
Marco Polo and Rustichello da Pisa dictate the book that opens Asia to European readers
Marco Polo’s Travels was dictated in 1298 to a fellow prisoner, the romance writer Rustichello da Pisa, while both sat in a Genoese jail. Their collaboration described Kublai Khan’s court and a named, navigable Asia for readers who assumed it was fiction. Nearly two centuries later, an annotated copy sailed west with Columbus.
Roman Emperor Galerius issues Edict of Serdica, ending persercution of Christians in the Roman Empire
The Edict implicitly granted Christianity the status of religio licita, a worship that was recognized and accepted by the Roman Empire.
Lucius Sextius Lateranus becomes Rome’s first plebeian consul
Plebeian consul Rome: in 366 B.C.E., Lucius Sextius Lateranus became the first commoner to hold the republic’s highest office, ending centuries of patrician monopoly. His election followed a decade of stubborn tribune activism, including five years of blocked elections. It marked an early crack in Rome’s rigid class order, opening a slow path toward shared political power.
Earliest evidence of ancient tattoos found on the Iceman and Egyptian mummies
Ancient tattoos found on Ötzi the Iceman, the frozen body unearthed near the Italian-Austrian border in 1991, push the known history of body art back to around 3200 B.C.E. His 61 dots and crosses cluster over arthritic joints, hinting at therapy rather than decoration. It’s a quiet reminder that humans have long marked skin to heal, not just adorn.