A quarry working since 1387, a forest owned collectively since 1111, a mountain road cut by hand in nine months
On 24 October 1387 Gian Galeazzo Visconti gave the marble quarry at Candoglia to the Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo di Milano, along with free transport of the stone to Milan by water. The Fabbrica still exists, and the quarry is still the source of the pink marble used to maintain and replace the spires. Same organisation, same quarry, same building, for over six hundred years.
Source: Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo di Milano
The Magnifica Comunita di Fiemme grows out of agreements made in 1111 with the bishop of Trento. It is not a municipality and not a cooperative: it is a collective property entity that owns and administers the forests of the Val di Fiemme on behalf of the descendants of the original families. It has run without interruption through a prince-bishopric, Napoleon, the Habsburgs and Italian unification.
Source: Magnifica Comunita di Fiemme
Between February and November 1917 the 33rd Miners Company of the Italian engineers cut a military mule road 6,555 metres long across Monte Pasubio, 2,335 metres of it in tunnel, to supply the front out of Austrian fire. It climbs 700 metres through fifty-two numbered tunnels. The nineteenth, 320 metres long, spirals inside the mountain through four hairpins. You can still walk all of it.
Source: Comune di Valli del Pasubio
Every first of May at Cocullo, in Abruzzo, the statue of San Domenico is covered in live, non-venomous snakes, caught two or three weeks beforehand by the serpari and released afterwards where they were found; the species are protected and the festival runs under a ministerial derogation. The tradition is documented from at least 1392 and has roots in the cult of the Marsian goddess Angizia.
Source: Regione Abruzzo
The Battle of the Oranges at Ivrea moves roughly 700 tonnes of fruit, over 4.2 million oranges, with nine teams on foot, around seven thousand throwers and 54 horse-drawn carts.
Source: Fondazione Storico Carnevale di Ivrea
In 2018 researchers published in the journal Ecology the dating of a Bosnian pine in the Pollino National Park: 1,230 years. It is the oldest scientifically dated tree in Europe. Its exact location is not published, to protect it.
Source: ANSA, 18 May 2018
The Gran Sasso National Laboratories run three experimental halls of roughly 100 by 20 by 18 metres, some 180,000 cubic metres in total, under 1,400 metres of rock that cuts the cosmic ray flux by a factor of a million. Around 1,300 scientists from thirty countries work there. You reach it through a branch off the A24 motorway tunnel.
Source: INFN
The common thread is institutional rather than sentimental. These things survive because somebody wrote them down and nobody repealed them.
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