Pope Pius IX, head of the Catholic Church, died in the Apostolic Palace in Rome on the 7th of February, 1878.
Born Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti in 1792, the Italian port town of Senigallia, Pius IX became the longest-running elected Pope in the history of the Catholic Church, with a papacy that lasted for over thirty-one years, from the 16th of June, 1846 until his death.
The Pope was beatified on the 3rd of September, 2000.
The region of Nervesa della Battaglia in northern Italy was retaken from the Austro-Hungarians in June of 1918.
This photograph was taken as Italian forces returned to the region to survey the destruction.
The recovered wreckage in 2007. X
On the 27th of June, 1980, Aerolinee Itavia Flight 870 disappeared from the sky during a flight from Bologna to Palermo, Italy.
The plane crashed into the Tyrrhenian Sea, killing all eighty-one people on board.
While it was concluded by British investigators that a bomb on the aircraft caused the disaster, to this day Italian officials insist a missile was fired at the plane.
The disaster occurred in the middle of a wave of terrorist acts to hit Italy (such as the Bologna Bombing), fuelled by far left and right-wing groups in the country’s north.
This photograph, dated the 24th of June, 1918, shows Italian troops at 10am, waiting for battle.
They are in the commune of Nervesa, in the northern Italian Veneto region, an area that was largely destroyed in battle in the days immediately before.
The soldiers retook the region from the Austro-Hungarians.
Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini stands on the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia in Rome to declare war on France and Great Britain on the 10th of June, 1940.
Meanwhile, in Turin in the north of the country, people gather in a piazza to listen to the declaration on the radio.
This photograph is from Easter in 1865, which fell on the 16th of April. Pope Pius IX conducts Easter Mass in St Peter’s Square in Rome.
Mount Vesuvius in Italy erupted in March, 1944, destroying a number of villages.
North American soldiers were in the area at the time, fighting in the Second World War.
The original caption of the picture reads:
Crew member cleaning the ashes and cinders off the wing of a North American B-25 of the 340th Bomb Group. This was caused by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius on 23 March 1944.
