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All of us at the news office sincerely appreciate all the feedback (good and bad) you have given us these past few years. It has given us the will and joy to continue bringing you the news of wacky incidents that can only happen in our befuddled but beloved country.

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Bolzano - March 29, 2007 - An Italian conman has been caught playing dead for the second time in six years in a bid to escape prosecution.

Stefano Ramunni, 44, from the southern city of Bari, sent in forged certificates of his own death to a court in this northern city. The court let Ramunni off the forgery charge, deciding to prosecute the forger, a friend of the conman but Ramunni is still up on several counts of fraud.

In 2001 Ramunni was arrested for fraud in another northern city, Sondrio, and found to be carrying two bogus death certificates. On that occasion he did not have time to use them.

Ramunni has also donned other disguises to evade justice.

In 2000, in Verona, he posed as a justice ministry psychiatrist and gave evidence that helped clear him of fraud.

Two years earlier he slipped into Genoa police headquarters and got hold of a prosecution dossier after persuading officials he was a young assistant to his lawyer.

Naples - February 28, 2007 - A 74-year-old Italian grandmother who bought a sack of potatoes at the her local market found a live grenade among the spuds.

"I found a bomb in the potatoes," Olga Mauriello said in a telephone interview with reporters.

"I went to the market to buy some potatoes and that's where the bomb was. But this bomb was covered in dirt, and I put it in water and got all dirt off. And then I realized 'It's a bomb'!"

Police said the pine cone-shaped grenade, which had no pin and was still active, was the same type used by U.S. soldiers in Europe in World War Two. Authorities believe the mix-up happened at a farm in France, where the grenade was plucked from the ground along with potatoes.

To the woman's relief, police and explosives experts in the small town of San Giorgio a Cremano, near Naples, recovered the grenade and safely detonated it on Wednesday.

But Mauriello was still shaking off her close brush with death. It didn't look like a potato and it was heavier than one. But what if she had cooked it?

"If I hadn't felt its weight, I wouldn't even have realized that it was a bomb," she said.

Milan - March 17, 2007 - Avant-garde theater is under attack in Italy for pushing the boat out too far after police raided a Milan playhouse to save a lobster from being bludgeoned to death and eaten on stage.

Following complaints from animal rights groups, the first-night performance of Incident: Kill to Eat by Argentinian playwright Rodrigo Garcia was broken up by three plainclothes officers who spared the lobster from an all-too-real death scene.

A full house was expecting to see Garcia's examination of death and meat eating, during which an unlucky crustacean is suspended from a nylon cord and a microphone picks up the sounds of its squirming. In his program notes, Garcia, a former butcher, denounced the dishonesty of not killing what you eat. "You need plenty of imagination, and I don't have it, to feel the fear of death as you open a can of meatballs with peas in the kitchen at home," he wrote.

That did not wash with Milan's assessor for animal rights, Gianluca Comazzi, who backed the police raid.

"There is a law here which forbids exposing audiences to animals experiencing drawn out and useless stress," he said. "I know this goes on in restaurants, but there it is not turned into a spectacle."

Theater staff protested to the police that the lobster was due to be eaten on stage by the cast at the finale of the show, but to no avail, forcing them to show videos of the death scene to the audience.

"This ban has been enforced by judges wearing leather shoes and carrying leather bags, and policemen wearing shirts sewn by children in Asia," Garcia wrote in an angry press release before flying to Madrid to join his theater group La Carnicería Teatro, or The Butchery Of Theater.