"Buon Giorno!"Fresh from Sunday mass, Joe Vitale shouts this greeting to the sky His towering fig trees await. At this house, he has eight that form a green canopy over his postage stamp of a front yard. Below them, sheltering in their shade, are a half dozen cuttings he's rooting. In the back, he has four fine trees.

 Early in Christopher Castellani’s new novel, “All This Talk of Love,” Frankie Grasso wonders whether he and his family are “at the end of something.” Frankie is a 30-ish graduate student in English literature, still a long way from the end of (for one thing) his dissertation. An answer begins to take shape when his sister, an affluent stay-at-home mom who has never strayed far from their childhood home in Delaware, organizes a family trip to Santa Cecilia, the village in Italy where their parents grew up.

 Part of Rome's Piazza San Giovanni will take the name of the late pope John Paul II when Pope Francis takes formal possession of the basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano (St John Lateran) on Sunday.

 Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, buoyed by new opinion polls showing a lead for his center-right coalition, said on Friday Italy must return to the polls quickly unless the center left agrees to govern with him.

 The Moroccan woman at the center of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's  sex-for-hire trial accused investigators on Thursday of waging psychological warfare against her and manipulating her testimony during interrogations.

 Italy's president has pardoned a U.S. Air Force colonel convicted in absentia by Italian courts for the CIA-conducted abduction of an Egyptian terror suspect from a Milan street.

Centre-left Democratic Party (PD) leader Pier Luigi Bersani and outgoing Premier Mario Monti on Thursday agreed "prompt solutions" were needed to forge broad agreement around a possible new government and the election of Italy's next president

One of Italy's most picturesque and unusual medieval villages is to start charging visitors an entrance fee in a bid to raise money to shore up its crumbling foundations

Florence mayor Matteo Renzi launched a clear challenge to Italian center-left leader Pier Luigi Bersani on Thursday, saying he must either agree a coalition with former premier Silvio Berlusconi or demand a new election

With strong revenues and continued expansion - despite the economic crisis shaking much of the globe - fashion house Versace isn't worried