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Italy will spend billions of euros to rebuild more than 60 central Italian towns destroyed in the devastating August earthquake. The plans were approved by Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.

Italian Nobel-prize-winning playwright Dario Fo has died at the age of 90, ANSA sources said on Thursday. Fo, who turned 90 in March, died in Milan's Sacco hospital. He was admitted to hospital a few days ago due to lung problems, sources said.

Premier Matteo Renzi on Wednesday accused the European Union of doing next to nothing to tackle the big challenges it faces. "As (German philosopher) Jurgen Habermas said, the responses of the EU seem characterised by frenetic immobility," Renzi told the Lower House. "After the Berlin, Brussels and Ventotene summits, where we had imagined a significant programme of reforms for the Bratislava summit, we realised that the frenetic immobilism led to little more than nothing. "A banal (concluding) document, the sum of many summaries, a list of good promises". Renzi said that the March European summit in Rome will be a crux moment for the EU's future. "The 27 States will meet in the Eternal City and they will try to imagine the future," Renzi told the Lower House. "It's a dividing moment. It's extremely important, crucial, decisive".

Ninety masterpieces, nearly one for each year of his life, have been chosen to illustrate the genius of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso in a show opening October 15 at Verona's AMO museum in the Forti Palace.