Giacomo Puccini has his first success when his opera Manon Lescaut opens in Turin

In Falstaff Giuseppe Verdi writes his last opera, and his only comedy since the early days of his career.

The tenor Enrico Caruso makes his debut in his home town of Naples

21-year-old Guglielmo Marconi succeeds in transmitting a radio signal more than a mile at his home near Bologna

Giacomo Puccini's opera La Bohème has an unsuccessful premiere in Turin

Giacomo Puccini's Tosca brings in the new century with a January premiere in Rome

Humbert I, the king of Italy, is assassinated by an Italian-American anarchist, Gaetano Bresci

Vast crowds line the streets for the Milan funeral of a national hero, the 87-year-old composer Giuseppe Verdi

The tenor Enrico Caruso cuts his first phonograph records in Milan, beginning an immensely successful recording career

Giuseppe Sarto is elected pope and takes the name Pius X

Giacomo Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly falls victim at La Scala to claques paid for by rivals

Maria Montessori establishes her first Casa dei Bambini in the deprived San Lorenzo district of Rome

Europe's worst earthquake, centred on the Strait of Messina, kills up to 200,000 people in Sicily and southern Italy.

Italian educational pioneer Maria Montessori publishes The Montessori Method

Italy finds a reason to invade Libya, a province of the Turkish empire.

The Italian premier, Giovanni Giolitti, introduces reformist legislation including a national insurance act

Benito Mussolini, an active revolutionary Socialist, becomes editor of the party newspaper in Italy

Turkey, beset by troubles elsewhere, cedes to Italy her north African province of Libya

Giacomo Balla attempts to paint movement in his futurist Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash

Italian Futurist sculptor Umberto Boccioni suggests human movement in his Unique Forms of Continuity in Space

The tenor Beniamino Gigli wins an international singing competition in Parma, and makes his operatic debut later in the same year

Giacomo della Chiesa is elected pope and takes the name Benedict XV

Benito Mussolini, advocating Italian entry into the war on the side of the Allies, is expelled from the Socialist party

Benito Mussolini founds a newspaper, Il Popolo d'Italia' ('The People of Italy'), to argue the case for Italy joining the war

Italy declares neutrality amid the rush of other major European powers into war