Every now and then I get people in my mentions saying Italy has a colonial past because of the *Roman Empire* instead of, you know, the actual colonialism Italy did in Libya, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia. So, let me clear some things 🧵 There is absolutely *no relation* with modern day Italy and the Roman Empire, apart from certain cultural things that entered our folklore and survived generations - but that is true of every people who was under Roman rule. Past the WRE fall, Italy got conquered by

I keep going back to this. As a chemist, let me tell you that there is only one reason to use chemical weapons instead of "standard" ones, which is to inflict as much physical pain as possible. I have studied them - their chemistry, their effect - and they are the most atrocious+

https://twitter.com/ShaykhSulaiman/status/1718034925218157006

weapons to ever exist. People talk a lot about nukes and they are absolutely horrifying for their destructive power, but when it comes to the pain they can inflict, chemical weapons are the most vile thing humanity has ever invented. You have to be an absolute sadist to use them+

Yesterday was the anniversary of the biggest ecological disaster in Italy, and one of the biggest in the world - 8th place, according to Time magazine, to be precise. A disaster that caused the death of 30k animals, and changed Italy forever.

A 🧵on the SEVESO DISASTER We're in the countryside south of Milan, 1976. In the town of Meda there's a chemical factory, the ICMESA, that produced cosmetics for the Swiss company Givaudan & C. Already, the people of Meda were fighting against the factory, accusing it of dumping waste in the nearby river.

Not sure if this is unpopular, but I have some Thoughts about queernorm worlds in fantasy and how they are often based on a very specific (US-centric) idea of what queer identities are; often making the worldbuilding fall flat. A🧵

https://twitter.com/lavamonstr/status/1631229690013728769

This is something I've noticed in my reads lately. The queernorm worlds I've encountered while reading adult fantasy seem to always be shaped on what we (westerners) believe a world inclusive of queer people should look like. But queerness vary from culture to culture.

Did you know? Romans loved to drink wine. But...their wine was a bit different from ours. A thread about

🍇 ROMAN WINE 🍇

1/? Wine was produced in Italy since the time of the Etruscans, which led Sophobles to name the peninsula as the land most cherished by Bacchus. From the Etruscans, and the Greeks and the Carthaginians, the Romans will learn to appreciate wine and the secrets of its production 2/?

Today I visited the archeological museum of Bologna, which is holding a temporary exhibition on Pompeiian frescoes. I did a guided tour (the guide was amazing) and have some cool facts to share! A thread of Things I Found Cool, in no particular order 🧵 This is one of the very few surviving figurative paintings from Greece, found in a house in Hercolanum. It portrays the myth of Niobe, and it's painted over a slab of marble. The signature of the painter is also visible in the upper left corner