Interesting Facts

22nd June 1633 – The Holy Office in Rome forced Galileo Galilei to recant his view that the Sun, not the Earth, is the center of the Universe. 1907 – The London Underground's Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway opened. 1922 – 19 strikebreakers and 2 union miners were murdered in Herrin, Illinois . 1941 - Hitler's German troops invaded the Soviet Union. 1969 – The Cuyahoga River, in Northeast Ohio in the United States, caught fire, which triggered a crack-down on pollution in the river. Time magazine described the Cuyahoga as the river that "oozes rather than flows" and in which a person "does not drown but decays." 1969 – Judy Garland died. 1978 – Charon, a satellite of the dwarf planet Pluto, was discovered. 1981 - Mark Chapman changed his plea to guilty and admitted he murdered John Lennon in December 1980. 1984 – Virgin Atlantic Airways launched. Its first flight was from London Heathrow Airport. 1987 – Fred Astaire died. ...

St Valentine was buried somewhere along the Via Flaminia on February 14th. (Allegedly his relics are at Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church in Dublin, Ireland. They were donated to the church in the 19th century by Pope Gregory XVI from their previous location in the cemetery of St. Hippolytus in Rome. How romantic!)

Police in Rome, Italy, have seized €3m (£2.3m)  of marijuana in a drugs raid in the city. (Now 340kg (750lb) of marijuana is in itself interesting, but what makes this story unique is the plants were being grown  in an old underground Metro tunnel that was built beneath Rome during the fascist era of Benito Mussolini. The tunnel, which is 1 km (0.6 miles) long was officially being used as a mushroom farm.) Source

Emperor Nero had a rotating dining room built. (Archaeologists on a dig on Palatine Hill in Rome, Italy (where Roman emperors traditionally built their most lavish palaces) believe they have found the remains of the legendary rotating dining room which the Emperor Nero built to entertain his guests. According to the Roman historian Suetonius, who described the unique revolving room in his Lives of the Caesars, written about 60 years after Nero's death: "The chief banqueting room was circular and revolved perpetually, night and day, in imitation of the motion of the celestial bodies. Just imagine having a huge dinner and then sitting there - rotating day and night - ugh!)

Many ancient buildings in Rome bear the symbol SPQR. (It stands for "Senatus Populusque Romanus" - "the senate and people of Rome." It even appears on manhole covers.)