Arcola, Liguria
Arcola is a comune in the Province of La Spezia in the Italian region Liguria, located about 80 kilometres southeast of Genoa and about 7 kilometres northeast of La Spezia. As of 31 December 2004, it had a population of 10,145 and an area of 16.4 square kilometres. The municipality of Arcola contains the frazioni Baccano, Fresonara, Romito Magra and Trebbiano. Arcola borders the following municipalities: La Spezia, Sarzana, Vezzano Ligure. Www.comune.arcola.sp.it/
Tellaro
Tellaro is a small fishing village, perched on a cliff on the east coast of the Gulf of La Spezia in Liguria, northern Italy. It is a frazione of the comune of Lerici, it has been rated as one of the most beautiful villages in ItalyTellaro has been the destination for many Italian and foreign artists. Mario Soldati made it his home in the last years of his life. Tellaro is one of the seaside villages that annually participate in the Palio del Golfo, an annual boat race held in the gulf of La Spezia. 1152: Tellora and Lerici are part of the Republic of Genoa. Among the festivals of particular interest is the underwater Christmas celebrating the birth of Jesus on Christmas night; every year the statue of the baby Jesus emerges from the water carried by a group of divers and placed in the manger, in a setting of over 8,000 candles and celebrated by fireworks over the sea. The patron saint of Tellaro is St. George, celebrated on the 23rd of April; the "Festival of the Octopus", which takes place every year on the second Sunday in August, organized by the Unione Sportiva active in the Ligurian village.
There are many legends about Tellaro. The most famous tells the story an attack by Saracen pirates in the Middle Ages; the village was saved by a giant octopus that warned the population by climbing up the church tower and ringing the bells
Italian Riviera
The Italian Riviera, or Ligurian Riviera is the narrow coastal strip which lies between the Ligurian Sea and the mountain chain formed by the Maritime Alps and the Apennines. Longitudinally it extends from the border with France and the French Riviera near Ventimiglia to Capo Corvo which marks the eastern end of the Gulf of La Spezia and is close to the border with Tuscany; the Italian Riviera thus includes nearly all of the coastline of Liguria. The Riviera's centre is Genoa, which divides it into two main sections: the Riviera di Ponente, extending westwards from Genoa to the French border, it is famous for its mild climate and relaxed way of life which, together with the charm of its old fishing ports and the beauty of its landscape, has made it a popular destination for travellers and tourists since the time of Byron and Shelley. Many villages and towns in the area are internationally known, such as Portofino, Bordighera and the Cinque Terre; the part of the Riviera di Ponente centred on Savona, is called the "Riviera delle Palme".
Places on or near the Italian Riviera include: Carnevalöa - Carnival of Loano Barcalorata in Sestri Levante Sanremo in Fiore - Corso Fiorito - Carnival of Sanremo Euroflora in Genoa Festival della Scienza in Genoa Festival del Vento in Spotorno Festival della Mente in Sarzana Genoa International Boat Show Premio Paganini in Genoa Sanremo Music Festival Rallye Sanremo, the event was part of the FIA World Rally Championship schedule from the 1973 season to the 2003 season Milan-Sanremo annual cycling race Millevele in the Gulf of Genoa Regatta of the Historical Marine Republics in Genoa StraGenova RistorExpo French Riviera Portuguese Riviera Gulf of Genoa Riviera, links to articles on other coastal areas known as "Rivieras"
Horsham
Horsham is a market town on the upper reaches of the River Arun on the fringe of the Weald in West Sussex, England. The town is 31 miles south south-west of London, 18.5 miles north-west of Brighton and 26 miles north-east of the county town of Chichester. Nearby towns include Crawley to the north-east and Haywards Heath and Burgess Hill to the south-east, it is the administrative centre of the Horsham district. The first historical record of Horsham is from AD 947; the name may mean either "horse home" or "Horsa's home". The town has been known for horse trading in early medieval times and brick making up until the 20th century, brewing more recently. Horsham is the largest town in the Horsham District Council area; the second, tier of local government is West Sussex County Council, based in Chichester. It was once part of the county of Surrey in 1758 until a change in boundaries through the parliament act in 1867. In addition there are various Parish Councils; the town is the centre of the parliamentary constituency of Horsham, recreated in 1983.
Jeremy Quin has served as Member of Parliament for Horsham since 2015, succeeding Francis Maude, who held the seat since 1997 but retired at the 2015 general election. Horsham holds the UK record for the heaviest hailstone to fall. On 5 September 1958, a hailstone weighing 140g landed in the town, it was similar in size to a tennis ball and impact speeds have been calculated to be 100 m/s. Horsham is 50 metres above sea level, it is in the centre of the Weald in the Low Weald, at the western edge of the High Weald, with the Surrey Hills of the North Downs to the north and the Sussex Downs of the South Downs to the south. The River Arun rising from ghylls in the St Leonard's Forest area, to the east of Horsham, cuts through the south of the town makes its way through Broadbridge Heath; the Arun is joined by a number of streams flowing down from the north. Horsham has grown up around the Carfax. To the south of the Carfax is the Causeway; this street consists of houses erected in the 17th, 18th and early 19th century and is lined with ancient London Plane trees.
The Horsham Museum is at the north end opposite to the developed former headquarters of the R. S. P. C. A.. At the south end of the Causeway is the Church of England parish church of St. Mary: Norman in origin, rebuilt in the 13th century and restored in 1864–65 by the Gothic revival architect S. S. Teulon; the area to the south of the parish church is known as Normandy. It was an area of artisans cottages and an ancient well. Fifty metres south is the River Arun. On the northern bank is Prewett's Mill and on the south side is the town's cricket field. A short walk along the banks of the Arun in a south easterly direction is Chesworth Farm, an area of open public access. To the north of the Carfax is a park, Horsham Park, the remnant of what was the Hurst Park Estate; the park has a wildlife pond and tennis courts. Leisure facilities, including a swimming complex and a gymnastic centre, have been built on land around the park. To the east along Brighton Road is Iron Bridge named after the railway bridge that carries the railway from London Victoria to Littlehampton.
The area consists of Victorian and Edwardian houses to the north of Brighton Road, whilst to the south there are areas of inter- and post-war housing. This area is known as the East Side. Horsham has developed beyond the original boundaries to incorporate some of the smaller hamlets which now form part of the outer districts. An area of Horsham named after a feeder stream of the River Arun, it consists of residential housing, the majority of, of late 20th century origin. The suburb is substantial enough for two council wards; the hamlet around Old Holbrook House is to the north of the A264 which abuts Holbrook. Holbrook House was the home of Sir William Vesey-Fitzgerald, Governor of Bombay and M. P. for Horsham. The Tithe Barn at Fivens Green is the most notable building in the district; this hamlet dates back to the late 18th century, when a small number of houses were in existence, with an inn opening in the early part of the 19th century. A station opened in the area in 1907 called Rusper Road Crossing halt, but renamed Littlehaven.
South-west of the town the Needles estate was laid out from c. 1955, with a mixture of owned and council-built houses and bungalows. Land around Hills Farm nearby was sold for development in 1972 and further development took place in the 1980s; the Needles are named after a local farmhouse, called so as it was built using timbers from ships wrecked on the Needles formation. In keeping with many other towns, new developments to the east of the town centre were rapid in the early Victorian era, that area of town became known, as it is today, as New Town; the area contains the Iron Bridge, a steel structure that carries the railway to the south of Horsham. Used as a label to describe the northern part of the parish of Horsham, this area was developed as a district in the latter part of the 20th century; this area was known as Grub Street, developed south of Depot Road in the 19th century. Roffey is north east of the centre of Horsham and as a hamlet dates back to at least the 13th century, with taxation records of 1296 showing 18 liable people in the area.
Kelley's Post Office Directory for 1867 describes'Roughey' as consisting'of a few farmhouses and cottages. Here is an iron church, capable of accommodating 80 persons'. Maps of the 1880s show Roffey Corner, but appear to label th
Lord Byron
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, known as Lord Byron, was a British poet, peer and leading figure in the Romantic movement. He is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains read and influential. Among his best-known works are the lengthy narrative poems Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, he travelled extensively across Europe in Italy, where he lived for seven years in the cities of Venice and Pisa. During his stay in Italy he visited his friend and fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. In life Byron joined the Greek War of Independence fighting the Ottoman Empire, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero, he died in 1824 at the age of 36 from a fever contracted in Missolonghi. Described as the most flamboyant and notorious of the major Romantics, Byron was both celebrated and castigated in his life for his aristocratic excesses, which included huge debts, numerous love affairs with both men and women, as well as rumours of a scandalous liaison with his half-sister.
One of his lovers, Lady Caroline Lamb, summed him up in the famous phrase "mad and dangerous to know". His only legitimate child, Ada Lovelace, is regarded as the first computer programmer based on her notes for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. Byron's illegitimate children include Allegra Byron, who died in childhood, Elizabeth Medora Leigh. Ethel Colburn Mayne states that George Gordon Byron was born on 22 January 1788, in a house on 16 Holles Street in London, his birthplace is now occupied by a branch of the English department store John Lewis. However, Robert Charles Dallas in his Recollections states. Byron was the son of Captain John "Mad Jack" Byron and his second wife, the former Catherine Gordon, a descendant of Cardinal Beaton and heiress of the Gight estate in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Byron's father had seduced the married Marchioness of Carmarthen and, after she divorced her husband, he married her, his treatment of her was described as "brutal and vicious", she died after giving birth to two daughters, only one of whom survived, Byron's half-sister, Augusta.
To claim his second wife's estate in Scotland, Byron's father took the additional surname "Gordon", becoming "John Byron Gordon", he was styled "John Byron Gordon of Gight." Byron himself used this surname for a time and was registered at school in Aberdeen as "George Byron Gordon." At the age of 10 he inherited the English Barony of Byron of Rochdale, becoming "Lord Byron", dropped the double surname. Byron's paternal grandparents were Vice-Admiral the Hon. John "Foulweather Jack" Byron, Sophia Trevanion. Vice Admiral John Byron had circumnavigated the globe and was the younger brother of the 5th Baron Byron, known as "the Wicked Lord", he was christened at St Marylebone Parish Church as "George Gordon Byron", after his maternal grandfather George Gordon of Gight, a descendant of James I of Scotland, who had committed suicide in 1779. "Mad Jack" Byron married his second wife for the same reason that he married her fortune. Byron's mother had to sell her land and title to pay her new husband's debts, in the space of two years, the large estate, worth some £23,500, had been squandered, leaving the former heiress with an annual income in trust of only £150.
In a move to avoid his creditors, Catherine accompanied her profligate husband to France in 1786, but returned to England at the end of 1787 to give birth to her son on English soil. He was born on 22 January in lodgings at Holles Street in London. Catherine moved back to Aberdeenshire in 1790, his father soon joined them in their lodgings in Queen Street, but the couple separated. Catherine experienced mood swings and bouts of melancholy, which could be explained by her husband's continuingly borrowing money from her; as a result, she fell further into debt to support his demands. It was one of these importunate loans that allowed him to travel to Valenciennes, where he died in 1791; when Byron's great-uncle, the "wicked" Lord Byron, died on 21 May 1798, the 10-year-old boy became the sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale and inherited the ancestral home, Newstead Abbey, in Nottinghamshire. His mother proudly took him to England, but the Abbey was in an embarrassing state of disrepair and, rather than living there, she decided to lease it to Lord Grey de Ruthyn, among others, during Byron's adolescence.
Described as "a woman without judgment or self-command," Catherine either spoiled and indulged her son or vexed him with her capricious stubbornness. Her drinking disgusted him and he mocked her for being short and corpulent, which made it difficult for her to catch him to discipline him. Byron had been born with a deformed right foot. However, Byron's biographer, Doris Langley-Moore, in her 1974 book, Accounts Rendered, paints a more sympathetic view of Mrs Byron, showing how she was a staunch supporter of her son and sacrificed her own precarious finances to keep him in luxury at Harrow and Cambridge. Langley-Moore questions the Galt claim. Upon the death of Byron's mother-in-law Judith Noel, the Hon. Lady Milbanke, in 1822, her will required that he change his surname to "Noel" so as to inherit half of her estate, he obtained a Royal Warrant, allowing him to "take and use the surname of Noel only" and to "subscribe the said surname of Noel before all titles of honour". From that point he signed himself "Noel Byron" (the usual signature of a peer being the peerage, in this case "Byron
Beverino
Beverino is a comune of c. 2,000 inhabitants in the province of La Spezia in the Italian region Liguria, located about 70 kilometres southeast of Genoa and about 11 kilometres north of La Spezia. It is of the Regional natural Park of Montemarcello-Magra. Beverino borders the following municipalities: Borghetto di Vara, Calice al Cornoviglio, Pignone, Riccò del Golfo di Spezia, Rocchetta di Vara, Vernazza. Beverino was a possession of the Este family, who entrusted it as fief to the lord of the nearby Vezzano Ligure. In the 11th-13th century it was bitterly contended between the Malaspina family and the bishops of Luni. In 1247 it became a free commune and entered the Republic of Genoa in 1274, however maintaining its legislative autonomy; the frazione of Corvara was a dominion of the lords of Carpena and Ponzone, who, in 1211, ceded its fief to Genoa. Padivarma, a former possession of the bishopric of Luni, became part of the Genoese Republic in 1274 together with Beverino. Parish church of Santa Croce.
Church of San Michele Arcangelo, in the frazione of Corvara. Villa Costa, a national monument. Beverino is crossed by through the Provincial Road 18; the nearest railway station is that of La Spezia on the Genoa-Rome mainline
Italy
Italy the Italian Republic, is a country in Southern Europe. Located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, Italy shares open land borders with France, Austria and the enclaved microstates San Marino and Vatican City. Italy covers an area of 301,340 km2 and has a temperate seasonal and Mediterranean climate. With around 61 million inhabitants, it is the fourth-most populous EU member state and the most populous country in Southern Europe. Due to its central geographic location in Southern Europe and the Mediterranean, Italy has been home to a myriad of peoples and cultures. In addition to the various ancient peoples dispersed throughout modern-day Italy, the most famous of which being the Indo-European Italics who gave the peninsula its name, beginning from the classical era and Carthaginians founded colonies in insular Italy and Genoa, Greeks established settlements in the so-called Magna Graecia, while Etruscans and Celts inhabited central and northern Italy respectively; the Italic tribe known as the Latins formed the Roman Kingdom in the 8th century BC, which became a republic with a government of the Senate and the People.
The Roman Republic conquered and assimilated its neighbours on the peninsula, in some cases through the establishment of federations, the Republic expanded and conquered parts of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. By the first century BC, the Roman Empire emerged as the dominant power in the Mediterranean Basin and became the leading cultural and religious centre of Western civilisation, inaugurating the Pax Romana, a period of more than 200 years during which Italy's technology, economy and literature flourished. Italy remained the metropole of the Roman Empire; the legacy of the Roman Empire endured its fall and can be observed in the global distribution of culture, governments and the Latin script. During the Early Middle Ages, Italy endured sociopolitical collapse and barbarian invasions, but by the 11th century, numerous rival city-states and maritime republics in the northern and central regions of Italy, rose to great prosperity through shipping and banking, laying the groundwork for modern capitalism.
These independent statelets served as Europe's main trading hubs with Asia and the Near East enjoying a greater degree of democracy than the larger feudal monarchies that were consolidating throughout Europe. The Renaissance began in Italy and spread to the rest of Europe, bringing a renewed interest in humanism, science and art. Italian culture flourished, producing famous scholars and polymaths such as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Machiavelli. During the Middle Ages, Italian explorers such as Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, John Cabot and Giovanni da Verrazzano discovered new routes to the Far East and the New World, helping to usher in the European Age of Discovery. Italy's commercial and political power waned with the opening of trade routes that bypassed the Mediterranean. Centuries of infighting between the Italian city-states, such as the Italian Wars of the 15th and 16th centuries, left the region fragmented, it was subsequently conquered and further divided by European powers such as France and Austria.
By the mid-19th century, rising Italian nationalism and calls for independence from foreign control led to a period of revolutionary political upheaval. After centuries of foreign domination and political division, Italy was entirely unified in 1871, establishing the Kingdom of Italy as a great power. From the late 19th century to the early 20th century, Italy industrialised, namely in the north, acquired a colonial empire, while the south remained impoverished and excluded from industrialisation, fuelling a large and influential diaspora. Despite being one of the main victors in World War I, Italy entered a period of economic crisis and social turmoil, leading to the rise of a fascist dictatorship in 1922. Participation in World War II on the Axis side ended in military defeat, economic destruction and the Italian Civil War. Following the liberation of Italy and the rise of the resistance, the country abolished the monarchy, reinstated democracy, enjoyed a prolonged economic boom and, despite periods of sociopolitical turmoil became a developed country.
Today, Italy is considered to be one of the world's most culturally and economically advanced countries, with the sixth-largest worldwide national wealth. Its advanced economy ranks eighth-largest in the world and third in the Eurozone by nominal GDP. Italy owns the third-largest central bank gold reserve, it has a high level of human development, it stands among the top countries for life expectancy. The country plays a prominent role in regional and global economic, military and diplomatic affairs. Italy is a founding and leading member of the European Union and a member of numerous international institutions, including the UN, NATO, the OECD, the OSCE, the WTO, the G7, the G20, the Union for the Mediterranean, the Council of Europe, Uniting for Consensus, the Schengen Area and many more; as a reflection
Mougins, France, since 26 October 2008
