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A La Carte Italy Tours is a luxury tour operator catering for the rich and famous in Italy. Click here to visit their website. Here are some latest news from Italy courtesy of their guides. The company has gathered information about monuments,
Leonardo da Vinci, Italian tourism, Italy’s industrial heritage or its discoveries and suggests custom special interest tours on these themes.

A new Pininfarina electric car - Italy, December 2007. Bollore and Pininfarina companies will create a joint subsidiary to produce a fully electric car. It will be marketed under the Pininfarina brand. The total amount of the investment is estimated at 150 million euros. The vehicle, a 4-seater, manufactured in Italy, will be fitted with the lithium-metal-polymer battery developped by Bollore. It will be rechargeable via a traditional socket-outlet and will have an autonomy of 150 miles in a city environment. It should be available from December 2008. The first deliveries are envisaged simultaneously in Europe, North America and in Japan.

Italy proud of its recovered treasures - Italy, December 2007. Thomas Hoving, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, held it for the absolute masterpiece. The vase of Euphronios, marvellous testimony of Greek painting, is now exposed at the Quirinal Palace in Rome until March. The New York museum was forced to return it, the vase having been plundered close to Rome. Italy thus exhibits 68 of most Antique masterpieces, restituted by large American museums. The statue of the empress from the Hadrian Villa, a couple of griffins devouring a hind from Apulia, a monumental divinity, found at sea, that Getty had paid in 1988 the equivalent of 29 million of nowadays dollars. Messages show tomb thieves, merchants-accomplices and museums’ negligence. All in all a good thing for art, probably.

Trevi Fountain’s treasures - Rome, December 2007. The famous Trevi Fountain in Rome, where one throws a coin the back turned to the jet to express a wish, collected not only money, but also telephone tokens, messages and even two dentures. The first denture was found in 2001 and the second last October. The caritative catholic association Caritas, in charge of collecting the coins which are used to finance its activities, also found small magnets attached to a wire, a means used to recover the coins, but only those of two and five cents. The annual value of the coins collected in the famous fountain, which had been immortalized by Anita Ekberg in Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita, is almost 1 million US$.