Sister Anna Donelli, a respected nurse from northern Italy, was recently arrested under suspicion of having colluded with a powerful clan of the ‘Ndragheta mafia family.

The arrest of 57-year-old Anna Donelli, a respected nun and recent recipient of the Golden Panettone, an annual Milanese civic award, for her volunteer work in prisons and in the troubled outskirts of cities like Milan, Rome and Brescia, came as a shock for the whole of Italy. On Thursday, Sister Anna and 24 other people were arrested following an investigation into the activities of the ‘Ndragheta in Brescia, with authorities claiming they had strong reasons to believe the nun had been working with the mafia crime family for a long time. As part of her work in several prisons where ‘Ndragheta members were being held, the nun is suspected of facilitating communication between prisoners and the clan’s leaders and solving conflicts and disputes between inmates.

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An Italian man has been struggling to adjust to daily life following a hit-and-run accident that put him in a coma and ultimately erased 39 years worth of memories, including his own family.

Imagine living in the 1980s and then suddenly being transported to present day. Things like smartphones, self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, the internet or social media must seem like real-life science fiction, and everyone you used to know is now either gone or much older. It sounds like the plot of a Hollywood movie, but it’s the life story of Luciano d’Adamo, an Italian man who lost the last 39 years of memories following a hit-and-run accident in 2019. After waking up from a coma a few days later, he was convinced he was 24 years old and waiting to be married to his 19-year-old fiance; he didn’t recognize the old woman claiming to be his wife, the 30-something man calling him ‘dad’, or the old man staring back at him from the mirror.

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A 49-year-old German woman who had been posing as the empress of a non-existent kingdom and rubbing shoulders with Italy’s elite had been accidentally unmasked as a fraud.

Sandra Nicole Martinez, who had adorned herself with titles like ‘Her Royal Highness’ or ‘Her Imperial Highness”, had become a regular at exclusive parties and social events in Italy’s capital city after being introduced to them by legendary Italian socialite Guya Sospisio a few years ago. Apparently, no one questioned her claims of being the Empress of the Imperial House of Glodeni, a royal house with headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon, even though a simple Google search would have revealed that Glodeni is actually a town in the tiny Eastern European country of Moldova. Martinez was eventually unmasked as a fraudster completely by accident.

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A 40-year-old Italian man took a doctor and two medical clinics to court after paying for a penis enlargement procedure that he claims left him with “impotence and erectile dysfunction”.

The unnamed man from Tuscany, Italy, allegedly paid a cosmetic surgeon 5,000 euros ($5,400) for a penis enlargement procedure, but after about a month he ended up calling the doctor to complain about physical discomfort. This was only the beginning of a painful odyssey that saw the patient undergo a total of 12 procedures in an attempt to fix the initial botched surgery. According to court documents obtained by Italian news media, the man had two lipofilling operations, in which fat from various parts of his body was transferred to his penis in order to adjust its shape. Unfortunately, they did not have the desired effect, as the man’s genitals did not maintain the expected shape and volume.

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An Italian woman with no direct heirs left all her €5 million ($5.4 million) fortune to her Albanian caretaker, completely blindsiding the 10 nephews who were expecting the inheritance.

Maria Malfatti, a descendant of one of the most famous families in Rovereto, a town in Italy’s Trento province, died last November at the age of 80. A descendant of Valeriano Malfatti, a former mayor of Rovereto and vice-president of Vienna’s Parliament, the woman owned a number of valuable assets, including several apartments, a historic building in the town center, as well as significant sums of money kept in bank accounts. However, Maria Malfatti had never been married and had no children to leave the family fortune to, so her nephews stood to inherit everything. Only the woman apparently had other plans, as she decided to leave everything down to the last cent to the woman who had cared for her over the last few years, an Albanian national.

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Casa du Currivu, aka ‘House of Spite’, is a bizarre-looking house in the Sicilian village of Petralia Sottana that holds the unofficial title of ‘world’s narrowest house’.

Petralia Sottana, a small village of about 2,000 people in the heart of the Madonie mountains in the province of Palermo, is home to one of Italy’s most unusual tourist attractions – a two-storey house with a normal ground floor and an upper level that is only around 3-feet, or one meter thick. It is known as Casa du Currivu, or the House of Spite, mainly due to the local legend surrounding its purpose. Seeing as it isn’t wide enough for two people to pass by each other, let alone live inside it full time, the thin edifice was allegedly only designed to block a neighbor’s window view following an argument.

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A gang of six alleged armed robbers led by senior citizens in their 60s and 70s have been arrested in Italy after carrying out several armed burglaries at post offices in Rome.

70-year-old Italo De Witt, nicknamed “the German”, Sandro Baruzzo, 68, and 77-year-old Raniero Pula look more like harmless grandpas than hardened criminals, but appearances can be deceiving. Italian prosecutors claim that they were the leaders of a ruthless gang of armed robbers that specialized in Rome post offices. The gang had a very clear structure, with the three elderly gentlemen at the top, and three other experts, a key maker (66) to breach the various locks, and two bricklayers (51 and 56 years old) who handled “the hole” through which the gang entered the post offices. All members had criminal records, but the leaders had particularly impressive records that went back all the way back to the 1970s. Apparently, some people never change.

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The Santuario Della Beata Vergine Maria Delle Grazie, in Italy’s Lombardia region, is an old church famous for having a real taxidermied crocodile hanging from the ceiling.

What’s the last thing you expect to see when you look up in a church? Granted, there are plenty of interesting answers one can think of, but ‘a crocodile’ definitely ranks up there with the quirkiest of them. But if you travel to the small municipality of Curtatone, in Lombardia, Italy, you’ll find a church with a five-century-old crocodile hanging from the ceiling. It’s a peculiar sight, to say the least, but one that has been around for as long as anyone can remember. How the croc wound up at the Santuario Della Beata Vergine Maria Delle Grazie is, and will probably remain a mystery, but its purpose had been linked to religious symbolism.

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An Italian woman stands accused of faking no less than 17 pregnancies – 12 natural abortions and 5 false births – over the last 24 years, to receive 110,000 euros ($120,000) in maternity benefits.

50-year-old Barbara Ioele has had an unusual number of pregnancies over the last 24 years, which have resulted in years of maternity leave and a small fortune in state-paid benefits. According to documents filed by the woman, she went through 17 pregnancies, 12 of which unfortunately couldn’t be carried to term. The other five allegedly resulted in the birth of healthy babies named Benedetta, Angelica, Abramo, Letizia, and Ismaele, only there is no record of them ever being registered, and no one has ever actually seen them. Barbara allegedly birthed her youngest child in December of last year, but now authorities claim she had been under surveillance throughout her late pregnancy and they have proof that she was never pregnant. They are also accusing her of having faked all 17 declared pregnancies to receive over 110,000 euros in benefits and get time off from work.

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For the past eight months, a mysterious man dubbed ‘Flexman’ by his motorist fans has been disabling speed cameras in several Italian regions by cutting their supporting metal poles with an angle grinder.

The angle grinder was invented in 1954 by a German company called Flex, and even today, in many European countries, the angle grinder is popularly known as a ‘flex’. Little did the creators of this useful tool know that many decades later, the flex would inspire the nickname of a vigilante specializing in disabling speed traps on the roads of Italy by taking an angle grinder to the metal poles supporting them. Flexman first made news headlines in May of last year, when he took down his first speed trap on a road near Bosaro, in Italy’s Rovigo region. Since then, he managed to disable at least seven other cameras in Rovigo and Veneto using his signature angle grinder, and authorities still have no idea who he is or how to stop him.

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Italian police recently arrested a Genoa barber for drug dealing after noticing that many of the clients going into his shop were bald and beardless.

The Carabinieri (Italian police) had received reports of drug dealing activity in Genoa’s Foce area, but they didn’t really have any strong leads. An investigative unit was charged with gathering more information and, with the collaboration of the Forte San Giuliano station, setting up surveillance teams to spot any unusual activity. It was one of these teams that reported an unusually high number of bald, beardless men visiting a small barber shop operated by a 55-year-old man. The individuals were of different ages and appeared to be from varied walks of life, but they had one thing in common – they didn’t appear to need a haircut or a shave…

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The people of Vastogirardi, a town of 600 souls in the south of Italy, have finally solved the mystery of a series of flat tires over the last few months – a local dog with a bad case of gingivitis.

It all started in July of this year when the quiet town of Vastogirardi was faced with its first intentional tire puncture case in many years. The owner of a car left parked in Piazza Giusto Girardi found it with a punctured tire and called the carabinieri, but after an inspection of the surrounding area and a brief investigation, no suspects were identified. By the end of October, a handful of similar tire puncture complaints had been registered, all of which occurred in the town square. Rumors of rows between neighbors and even intimidation attempts by the Mafia started going around, but in the end, the true cause of the punctures proved even more surprising.

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An Italian man who was serving 30 years in prison for murdering his girlfriend was recently released from prison because judges ruled that prison food didn’t allow him to go on a diet behind bars.

In 2017, Dimitri Fricano was arrested for killing his girlfriend, Erika, during a heated argument, while they were vacationing in Sardinia. He originally told police that robbers had attacked and killed his partner, but as investigators found more and more holes in his story, he eventually admitted that he had been the one to stab her 57 times. Apparently, she had scolded him for leaving too many crumbs on the bed when eating, and he became so angry that he couldn’t control himself. Two years later, he was put on trial for murder, but he only got convicted to 30 years behind bars in 2022, due to pandemic-related delays, before being released this month for being dangerously obese and not being able to lose weight.

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An Italian woman recently won a court case to have her two sons, ages 40 and 42, evicted from her home after they refused to leave the nest or contribute to the household in any way.

They say a mother’s love is infinite, but there is only so much even a loving mother can take. Take the story of this Italian woman who had no choice but to go to court to have her two adult sons evicted. The 75-year-old woman from the city of Pavia, in northern Italy, had long tried to talk her two children to finally move out of the family home, especially since they both had jobs and could afford to rent their own places. But they never even entertained the idea, and since they wouldn’t even pitch in financially or do house chores, the elderly woman had no choice but to take them to court.

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An Italian professor who was recently fired for around 20 years of absence out of 24 years of service at schools near Venice has vowed to contest her recent firing by the Ministry of Education.

51-year-old Cinzia Paolina De Lio, a secondary school teacher who specializes in history and philosophy, became famous in her home country of Italy for managing to skip work for a total of 20 years out of the last 24 years of service at a number of schools around Venice. De Lio was originally sacked in 2017, after an inspection found her to be “unprepared” and “inattentive” in class, but she appealed the decision, and a judge reinstated her the following year. She continued to provide all sorts of excuses to miss work until Italy’s Supreme Court of Cassation decided that her original termination had been justified, especially since she had been absent from the classroom for most of her two-and-a-half decades as a school professor.

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