ROME - Alain Economides, the Italian Ambassador in London, has awarded Italian writer Gaia Servadio the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic for the honour her career has brought Italy.

ROME - An Austrian tourist spent an entire night desperately clinging to a buoy after being swept out to sea on the coast of Siniscola, Sardinia, during a windsurfing trip.

ROME - In a controversial move, Italian Justice Minister Paola Severino is to give prisoners being held in the Emilia-Romagna region the chance to assist in the earthquake rebuilding effort.

ROME-- A 5.1 quake struck Modena last night, followed by at least three smaller tremors this morning. Residents escaped injury, but historic buildings suffered damage.

ROME -- International law firm Hogan Lovells has recruited two new corporate partners in Milan.

ROME -- The European Investment Bank (EIB) has provided BNL Gruppo BNP Paribas with three separate lines of credit totalling 325 million euros for financing Italian SM

ROME– The Italian marines accused of killing two Indian fishermen have been released on bail but with strict conditions.

ROME-- Italy's highest court has upheld a ruling from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and annulled a previous judgment that Germany must compensate Italian victims of Nazi war crimes.

 ROME-- The governor of the Bank of Italy spoke today of the need for “deep-seated change” to help the young generation bring Italy out of its financial crisis.

ROME -- The government has announced several measures to help deal with the emergency in the centre-north of Italy following two devastating earthquakes that killed 24 and left 15,000 homeless.

ROME– Rome International School hopes to raise more than 30,000 euros for recovering Haiti in this year’s gala dinner.

ROME– Italy, along with other major Western nations, has expelled the Syrian embassy.

ROME – Days after the discovery of the body of a pregnant Indian woman in the river Po, the victim’s husband has admitted to strangling her for “wearing Western clothes.”

ROME -- Another earthquake, magnitude 5.8, has hit the centre-north of Italy, killing 17 people, more deadly than the 5.9 earthquake which claimed seven lives in the region nine d

 ROME--  Lazio captain Stefano Mauri was amongst 19 people arrested in the latest police action against corruption and match fixing in Italian football.

ROME -- International Italian car company Fiat supports the international efforts for a diplomatic solution of the issues relating to the relations with Iran.

ROME-- Investigators are questioning nine people regarding the deaths of four workers killed in building collapses in the earthquake that hit North Italy at the weekend.

A 36-year old Parma woman who stabbed herself to death on the beach at Ostia said in a note that she wanted to see Rome before she died.

ROME-- At a ceremony to commemorate 160 years of the national police force, the President of the Republic thanked officers and spoke of the importance of staying on “high alert.”

ROME -- 1992 was a traumatic year for Italy. This year has seen a wave of commemorations of those events.

ROME-- The new head of employers’ union Confindustria, Giorgio Squinzi, has called the “tax burden” in Italy “intolerable” and questioned the current programme of reforms.

ROME – One of Italy’s top criminal lawyers, Enzo Fragala, was brutally beaten to death by the Mafia as a warning to MPs who fail to carry out Cosa Nostra orders, a senior magistrate has disclosed.

ROME-- Two people, one of them a 15-year-old boy, have been shot and killed and another wounded in a bloody night of violence in the southern city of Naples, police say.

 ROME-- The Brindisi school which was the scene of the bombing which killed one girl and wounded more reopened as police hunt the killer using video footage of the attack.