Greece has had its share of firework celebrations this year after the Euro 2004 success and the Olympics, but last night they had to endure pyrotechnics from their rivals' fans.

The Family is proving too stressful for Sicily's traumatised teenagers, writes Frances Kennedy

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ONCE AGAIN Giulio Andreotti has wriggled his way out of trouble. Italy's most prominent postwar statesmen, seven times premier and a senator- for-life, who has survived just about every tawdry, convoluted episode in Italy's tormented history since 1945, emerged triumphant again yesterday when a court in the Umbrian city of Perugia dismissed one of the most spectacular charges against him - that of ordering the murder of an investigative journalist in 1979, when Andreotti was at the height of his powers.

Where Was Rebecca Shot? by John Sutherland Phoenix, pounds 6.99, 213pp...

Staying in a cottage in deepest rural Sicily was always going to be unpredictable - but the surprises were all nice ones.

INVESTIGATORS IN Sicily believe the Mafia is behind an unexplained rise in cases of the animal disease brucellosis among humans.

The Royal Court Theatre has just been to Sicily to pick up a well- deserved award for its international residencies and exchange programmes. But what company does the New Theatrical Realities prize keep? Is it all it's cracked up to be?

If he's in love, it's not harrassment. Italian judges are heading back to the Dark Ages.

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ANTI-MAFIA investigators say they are tightening the noose around one of Italy's most powerful and mysterious bosses, Bernardo Provenzano. Although he has been in hiding for three decades, many believe he has never left his native Sicily.

Phillip Blom explores Catania, birthplace of the great 19th-century opera composer Bellini, where life appears to have changed little since his day

AT THE opening of Godzilla, the special-effects monster movie, New York's mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, seized on an opportunity to tout his Mafia-fighting credentials. The lizard, he pointed out, made the Fulton fish market its first stop in Manhattan. "Five years ago that would not have been possible," he quipped. "He would have been stopped by the Mafia."

A YOUNG couple from Lancashire took a cycling holiday in Sicily. Renting bicycles on the mainland is virtually impossible and so they took their own brand new mountain bikes over on the plane at some cost.