Teenagers typically turn to fantasy as a means of escaping the rigors and disappointments of adolescence, and many authors specialize in creating universes entirely separate from our own. But in “The Girl With Borrowed Wings,” a frankly spellbinding love story, Rinsai Rossetti shows the power of fantasy when it coincides with, rather than opposes, what may be a grim reality.

Matthew Ianniello, the low-key reputed Genovese crime boss known as “Matty the Horse,” who was convicted of rigging construction bids, skimming union dues and wringing protection money from bar owners, pornography peddlers and topless dancers during a half-century career that, among other highlights, helped transform Times Square into the dingy world capital of peep shows in the 1960s and ’70s, died on Aug. 15 at his home in Old Westbury, on Long Island. He was 92.

An Italian-American organization says Columbia University has allowed its Italian studies program to promote stereotypes of Italian culture.      

The Italic Institute of America says in a lawsuit that La Casa Italiana's work is "elitist and detached'' and fails to encompass any serious scholarship in Italian-American history.''  

A Japanese artist is inviting the public to have an intimate view of Christopher Columbus high above a hectic intersection in midtown Manhattan.

Tatzu Nishi is constructing a contemporary living room on top of the Columbus Monument in Columbus Circle, where a 13-foot statue of Columbus is perched on a six-story column in the middle of a plaza where five busy streets intersect.

An Italian man has been arrested over the murder of a Nigerian prostitute after police searching her apartment found a short story he wrote with close similarities to the killing. Police in the northern Italian city of Turin discovered the nine-page story entitled "The Rose and the Lion" among the belongings of Anthonia Egbuna, whose body was fished out of the river Po in February, a Carabinieri spokesman told Reuters on Wednesday. She had been stabbed to death.