Alessi's playful and wintry twist on the traditional Italian presepe places the scene in a porcelain igloo. Love that pink donkey.

Clever! New ads for the salumeria Negroni show a Tuscan landscape made entirely of sliced meats!

A bit of spooky installation art for Halloween! The bones of 4000 Capucin monks were used to decorate this crypt in Rome.

Left of Center. This great ad for Il Manifesto, the Italian Communist newspaper, leaves no doubt as where on the political spectrum this publication falls.

Great holiday gift idea for the one who has everything. Adopt a sheep in the Abruzzo region of Italy and you'll help preserve traditional agricultural methods and fill your pantry with organic cheeses & sausages!

Michelangelo's iconic teen hero becomes Fat David for the German Olympic Sport Committee's new ad campaign: "If you don't move, you get fat."

Perfect for the wine-lover at Christmas: The Nobili Terre organization in Italy offers you a chance to adopt a row of grapevines and become a virtual winemaker. The reward for your investment? 60 bottles!

In the recent style of Sony Bravia, Futurist vandals dyed Rome's Trevi Fountain red yesterday. They want to turn "grey bourgeois society into a triumph of color."

The Romans are invading! Playmobil has launched a line of toys inspired by ancient Rome. Even adults will lust after the huge Colosseum, not least because it comes with toy marble statues!

On 27 May, the all-important UEFA soccer championship will be held in Rome. Organizers want to put up soccer fields with the Colosseum & Arch of Constantine as backdrops. Archaeologists are less inclined.

Cool (and creepy) industrial goth ads that are meant to remind us that Buttero boots are 101% handcrafted.

A gorgeous ritual in which red rose petals are thrown through the oculus or eye at the top of the dome of Rome's Pantheon and flutter to the ground.

Wow! Vassar College has created a highly detailed virtual version of the Sistine Chapel on Second Life. Fly around and enjoy an up-close and personal experience with Michelangelo's frescoes!

A really cute game on the website of the National Museum of Scotland teaches kids how to dress a Roman soldier.

Someone is putting these cool stencils all over Rome. They show a map of the city and tell you how many steps you are from the Aurelian Wall, a defense wall built in the 3rd century AD

Dan Brown's Angels & Demons opens today on the big screen and it's going to make you want to go to Rome. Angela Nickerson has published an absolutely free guide to the Rome of Angels & Demons and you can download it & take it with you.

Wow! There's a Bulgari retrospective exhibit in Rome that traces the firm's history for the past 125 years. From 300 carat emeralds to Liz Taylor's private collection and much more - it's jaw-dropping.

Michelangelo was such a stud. This is a great ad designed to encourage young artists to enter a competition for the New Young Artist Award at the Cerveira Biennial in Portugal.

Hilarious modern "chariot races" were staged today in Rome's Circus Maximus in honor of the city's 2762nd birthday.

Amphicars were produced in Berlin between 1961 and 1968. This week Bernd Weise "drove" his 1961 model down the Grand Canal in Venice.

Pandamonium in Rome's Piazza del Popolo--thousands of paper-mache panda bears.

In anticipation of the G-8 meeting in Italy, Greenpeace sent homeless polar bears onto the streets of Rome to remind the world's leaders to act against global warming.

Archaeologists in Venice have uncovered the skeleton of a medieval plague victim. Buried with a brick impaled in her mouth, it seems there was fear that the woman was a vampire.

An artist named Tommaso has installed tape sculptures in Rome's Pigneto district. The effort seems to be an outgrowth of Mark Jenkin's famous Storker Project.

New ads for the Intrecci hair salon in Milan are meant to convince you that their stylists are artists. The tagline reads: "To Be Finished at Intrecci."

Surf's up in Venice! A Dutch guy wakeboards through Piazza San Marco thanks to the aqua alta or high water that swept through the city this week.

An international sand sculpture festival in Italy takes Dante's Inferno as its theme. Abandon hope all ye who enter here!

If you were wondering which delivery service the Greeks relied upon when they sent that gift horse to the city of Troy, a nice new DHL ad campaign has the answer.

While everyone else has been talking about Damien Hirst, Subodh Gupta's 1000 kilo sculpture, A Very Hungry God, has been floating in Venice's Grand Canal.

The Tobu World Square theme park in Japan has 1:25 models of more than 100 World Heritage Sites. It's a small world after all!

Great ad for a travel iron. It's not just Paris, though. Rome & Tokyo are being flattened too!

Nice ads for Localite Power Gel glue: strong enough to restore some of the world's most iconic antiquities to their former glory!

In Naples, Italy, there's a tradition of including everyone from bakers to pizza makers in nativity scenes. Current events play a role too: this year the Obama and McCain figurines are incredibly popular.

The Italian coffee company, Lavazza, asked Annie Leibovitz to shoot their 2009 calendar which artfully re-imagines iconic Italian images (and it's shot in a studio)

Only in Rome would a wall from the 4th century BC run smack-dab into a modernist train station

Someone has created a hilarious (fake) Facebook page for the ancient epic, the Aeneid. The Trojan War has never been so hip! Maybe this is the Cliff's Notes of the 21st century.

Sergio de Rosa's photos make spaghetti more than just something to eat.

Armando Testa's new ads for Cuki foil make us giggle. "Keep it safe" is the tagline.

Europe's largest Easter Egg was broken in Rome over the weekend. Pieces of this dark chocolate monster were sold to the public and proceeds will benefit victims of the recent earthquake in the Abruzzo.

Those nauseatingly sweet Raphael angels have been put to work by LILA, an Italian AIDS awareness organization

The Louis Vuitton store on Rome's Via Condotti recently got a face lift that included the installation of plasma screen stairs that play technicolor games.

Designer Julian Lwin pays homage to the Moka Express (the world's most famous espresso maker) with his Dr. Octagon Espresso Table and Chairs.

For some reason, Jason Wishnow makes movies in which the only actors are vegetables. Here's Oedipus as a potato-head in eight and 1/2 minutes.

Just can't get enough of these Nike Italy ads based on vintage Italian graphic design. The entire series is out of this world.

Konica Minolta lets us indulge our obsession with the Venus de Milo at their new Museum of Beauty - it's full of fantastic images of the sculpture made with a non-contact 3D digitizer.

Nice reverse-design move! These fabulous one-liter glass bottles by Seletti were inspired by plastic water bottles.