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What's the attraction?
In all likelihood, Shakespeare never set foot in Italy. Yet the country exerted a powerful hold on his imagination and of his 38 plays, 13 are either wholly or partially set on Italian soil: Romeo and Juliet act out their tragic passions in Verona, Shylock demands his pound of flesh in Venice, Julius Caesar conspires and falls in Rome.

Deep sea divers "unpacked a wall of people" from the hull of a smuggler's trawler on the sea floor near this Italian island on Monday, gingerly untangling the dead would-be migrants in the latest and most painstaking phase of a recovery operation following the ship's fiery capsizing.

 A ship carrying African migrants to Europe caught fire and capsized off the Italian island of Lampedusa on Thursday, killing at least 114 people as it spilled hundreds of passengers into the sea, many of whom drowned from not knowing how to swim, officials said. 

In his early days as a rising star chef, Mario Batali received a letter from Marcella Hazan after he had made risotto in a sauté pan on his television show, "Molto Mario."