28th September 2016
The modern day violin was first designed in Italy by Andrea Amati, of the Amati family, in the 1500s. Future generations of the Amati family – sons Antonio and Girolami and grandson Nicolo Amati – perfected the art of making this musical instrument. Antonio Stradivari and Andrea Guarneri, Nicolo’s pupils, further improvised the design eventually bringing out their own distinct styles.
22nd June 2016
Gravitational waves are vibrations that occur when highly dense cosmological elements like dwarf stars, neutron stars or black holes come together and collide or merge. The vibrations produced are commonly known as ‘ripples’, for they travel in a manner similar to the ripples formed when a stone is pelted in a pond or lake. The colliding bodies disturb the stillness of ‘spacetime’ (the space in four dimensions including time) giving rise to gravitational waves. The energy emitted during the process is known as gravitational radiation.
18th May 2016
The number 17 can be written in Roman as XVII. When these numerals are rearranged, it reads VIXI, which means in Latin ‘I have lived’, meaning ‘my life is over’. The number 17 is therefore considered unlucky in Italy.
18th April 2016
In 1962 the satellite Telstar was developed by AT&T and it was placed in an orbit of 682 to 4,030 miles (i.e. 1,091 to 6,444 km) orbiting the earth in 2 hours 40 minutes. The first transatlantic television signals were transmitted through Telstar. With the launch of Telstar, wireless communications, such as voice, television, fax and data transfer were carried out between UK, Brazil, France, Italy and the US.
16th March 2016
The French are known to be expert wine-makers. But archaeologists have analysed a stone platform dated to 425 BC to 400 BC from a site in southern France. The traces of tartaric acid on it suggest that people used the platform for stomping on the fruit to make wine. They also analysed the pottery shipping containers used to import wine into France from an old civilization of Etruscan near Rome. These potteries are older than the stone, which suggests that the French used to depend on merchants from Italy to deliver the first batches of wine well before they started making their own. So, France learnt winemaking from Italy.
11th February 2016
In Italian, mala means ‘bad’ and aria means ‘air’. Thus the word malaria got coined basically to mean ‘bad air’.