It appears bad plumbing was the cause of wine flowing through taps in dozens of homes during an Italian grape festival, and not divine intervention. As part of the Marino Grape Festival, free wine flows from the main fountain in the town square. Due to a plumbing error, the pipes from the local vineyard which supply the marble fountain were switched to the domestic supply feeding homes. When local residents turned on their taps, out poured wine. I have a recurring dream that is very similar to this, but in this case the town was not subsequently attacked by a 50-foot Selma Hayek.

An Italian woman who worked as a part-time judge and lawyer had her identical twin pretend to be her in court when she had two simultaneous cases. The non-lawyer twin acted as a defense attorney and charged clients when her sister was called in to act as judge in another case. The twins are now being sued by former clients, and prosecutors have charged them with fraud. Since one of them is a lawyer, it should be easy to figure out which one is the evil twin.

An anonymous reader writes "Last month, The Pirate Bay was blocked in Italy. The Swedish tracker appealed the ruling, and have emerged victorious. When they will be back online in Italy is not known, as news of this development is rather fresh."

Rev. Antonio Rungi, an Italian priest, is organizing an online beauty pageant for nuns to give them more visibility within the Catholic Church and to fight the stereotype that they are all old and dour. Nuns will have a profile including information about their life, vocation and a photograph. It will be up to the nuns whether to pose with the traditional veil or with their heads uncovered. "We are not going to parade nuns in bathing suits, but being ugly is not a requirement for becoming a nun. External beauty is gift from God, and we mustn't hide it." Rungi said. This has to lead to longer lines at the confessional.

imhassan tips us to news that The Pirate Bay has been blocked in Italy. Other attempts to block the popular P2P site have been somewhat less than successful. From TorrentFreak: "Pirate Bay's IPs and the domain name are inaccessible, as they are blocked by ISPs all over the country. Whether these blocks will be very effective, however, is doubtful, since The Pirate Bay has already announced several countermeasures. An insider working at an Internet provider in Italy told TorrentFreak that all the relevant large access ISPs in Italy have complied with the request to block the popular BitTorrent tracker, which was sent out yesterday. Italy is taking a stand against BitTorrent sites, so it seems. Two weeks ago, the largest Italian torrent site, Columbo-BT, was shut down by the same prosecutor who is responsible for the Pirate Bay block."

Ubuntukitten writes "When some walls in Bocchignano near Roma started to erode, the perfect solution was found in Lego bricks (although some look suspiciously like Duplo bricks to me). FTA: 'At first I thought it would be a complicated procedure to fit the pieces, But as it turned out, the bigger plastic pieces were compatible with the smaller ones, and the Lego held itself in place without any glue whatsoever.' I like the effect. It's like the scene has been created on the holodeck but a few holoemitters are broken ..."

coderrr writes "New research could allow ISPs to selectively block or slow down your encrypted traffic even if they cannot snoop on your transmitted data. Italian researchers have found a way to categorize the type of traffic that is hidden inside an encrypted SSH session to around 90% accuracy. They are achieving this by analyzing packet sizes and inter-packet intervals instead of looking at the content itself. Challenges remain for ISPs to implement this technology, but it's clear that encrypting your traffic inside an SSH session or VPN connection is not a solution to protect net neutrality."

Keiko Wakabayshi, a 77-year-old Japanese grandmother and master of jujitsu, jojitso, kenjitso, judo, kendo and karate, has been hired by the Italian military to teach soldiers hand-to-hand combat and humility. Standing a mere 5ft tall she easily wipes the floor with the soldiers in the Folgore brigade, most of whom are over 6ft and a third her age. I hear her best move is forward, forward, heavy kick and you should watch out for her laser attack.

An anonymous reader writes "The italian economic journal 'Il sole 24 ore' published an article about a successful cold fusion experiment performed by Yoshiaki Arata in Japan. They seems to have pumped high pressure deutherium gas in a nanometric matrix of palladium and zyrcon oxide. The experiments generates a considerable amount of energy and they found the presence of Helium-4 in the matrix (as sign of the fusion). I was not able to find other articles about this but the journal is very authoritative in Italy. Google translations are also available."

David Harris, editor-in-chief at Symmetrymagazine.org (a joint publication of Fermilab and SLAC), sends us to his blog covering the American Physical Society meeting now going on in St. Louis. Among the breaking physics news relating to topics we have discussed in the past: results that explain about 1/3 of the Pioneer anomaly by differential heat flow in the spacecraft; an analysis of the Fermilab Tevatron's chances of spotting the Higgs "God particle"; and a hint that an Italian team has replicated their results from the year 2000 pointing to a detection of dark matter.