The Italian capital has a logistical nightmare: juggling ambitious restoration projects at the Colosseum and the Porta Maggiore basilica with trying to run and update the city – and all without a mayor. Can it cope?

“Please, sir, please! This is very serious. My engine is off and I have children and pregnant women.”. The desperate plea comes from a rubber dinghy packed with 112 people who set off from the Libyan coast in the hope of reaching Europe.

In his personal life, Gioacchino Campolo was renowned for extortion and usury but in private he was an avid art collector.

In the last country in western Europe not to offer rights to gay couples, thousands gather to condemn - or support - a change in the law.

Almost all the migrants who visit the Caritas center have avoided being identified by Italian authorities; European Union laws would make them unable to cross borders if they were identified.

In the first of our interviews with people at the centre of the year’s biggest stories, we meet Stephanie and her daughter Francesca.

Metal bars have been installed in the doors of an old newspaper office where scores of squatters - asylum seekers, refugees and a few Italians - fear a confrontation with Rome's riot police.

Humanitarian organisations and volunteers advocate for the use of drones technology to locate refugees at sea.

With its serious pollution problem and notorious driving styles, Milan is hardly renowned as a cycle-friendly city – but a radical new scheme aims to change that.

Forensic experts in Italy are working to identify the bodies of refugees drowned in the sea as they attempted to cross.

Italy is having a cultural revolution – and art historian Eike Schmidt, the first non-Italian to become director of the Uffizi in Florence, wants to transform the running of the nation’s heritage

An EU initiative to screen and fingerprint all migrants and refugees arriving in Italy and Greece is creating chaos.

Sierra Leonean footballer escaped Ebola, kidnappers, and the Mediterranean capsize that killed 800 people in April.

Around 100 migrants have been put up in tents at new camp in shadow of Tiburtina railway station after news that France has increased security at the Italian border.

A former international climate negotiator-turned-environmentalist is walking from Rome to Paris, hoping for a “miracle” that will push world leaders to strike a new deal on global warming.

A leafy street in Rome is transformed into a hive of activity every lunchtime as Eritrean migrants queue up to collect a plate of food outside the Baobab cultural centre run by the local diaspora community.