On the Italian island Lampedusa— “politically Europe, but geographically Africa”—as a wave of African immigrants is due to arrive from Libya by boat, ruining the tourist season.

They were florists working in Amsterdam’s largest flower market. They were also members of one of the most powerful arms of the Italian mafia. An investigation into how organized crime has gone global.

The disappearance of the Ghost Boat and its 243 passengers off the Libyan coast.

How an Italian businessman facing fraud charges and a Brazilian politician turned a billion dollar project to build the high speed Rio-São Paulo rail line into a farce.

Since exposing the Neapolitan mafia by publishing Gomorrah at age 27, Roberto Saviano has lived for nearly a decade under armed guard, shuttling between anonymous hotels and army barracks.

“‘It’s like a novel,’ a newspaper editor once told me, shaking his head. When I recently asked Ruggeri, the chief investigator, to sum up the case, she stared at her desk and just said ‘incredible’ four times.”

Tracing the steps of migrants from the Middle East and Africa to the Kent countryside.

How seven Italian scientists came to be convicted of manslaughter following a catastrophic quake.

On Silvio Berlusconi’s hedonism.

Berlusconi is Italy’s waning Hugh Hefner, alternately reviled and admired for his loyalty to his own appetites—except that he’s supposed to be running the country.

Rosario Crocetta is a reform-minded leader in a highly corrupt place that hates change. That’s only one of the reasons his life is in danger.

On paleopathologist Gino Fornaciari and his investigations into murders from centuries past.

A journey into the world of Italy’s racist soccer thugs.

Inside the most sensational murder in the history of study abroad.

How Bernardo Provenzano, “boss of all bosses of the Sicilian Mafia” and fugitive for more than 40 years, got caught.

An American mystery writer and an Italian journalist join forces to identify a serial killer that targeted couples having sex in cars in the rolling hills above Florence.

The profile of a crime syndicate which dominates the European cocaine trade.

A profile of fashion designer Roberto Cavalli.

It’s 11 a.m. Cavalli has just risen from his wolf-fur-covered bed and said good morning to Boy, his tiger-striped Bengal cat, and Gino, his miniature monkey. At a breakfast table covered with a cloth of one of his swirling bird patterns, on which are placed four packs of cigarettes and two cigars, Cavalli sinks down on a leopard-print cushion. While he eats applesauce and drinks orange juice from Cavalli tableware, he is surrounded by his four parrots and three beautiful publicists. “Give me some bad questions,” he tells me, lighting a cigar. “I will try to be nice.”

A shipping container spewing radiation appears mysteriously at an Italian port, prompting a larger look at the anonymous world of international shipping.

How an Italian thug looted MGM, brought Credit Lyonnais to its knees, and made the Pope cry.

In 2009, 300 people perished in an earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy. Next week, six Italian scientists and one government official will stand trial for manslaughter.

How two Italian teenagers hacked the Soviet space program and may have heard the dying breaths of a lost cosmonaut.

How sex scandals have made Silvio Berlusconi even more powerful in Italy.