In 2009 almost 300 people died in a quake in L'Aquila in the central Abruzzo region.

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George Clooney plays a professional assassin who lays up in a medieval hill town in the Abruzzo region of Italy.

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Central Italy is also hit with the Abruzzo region losing four courts.

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It is a profitable and growing business with its own sartorial workshops, the largest of which is located in Penne in the Abruzzo region.

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In 1978, three American balloonists, Ben Abruzzo, Maxie Anderson and Larry Newman, completed the first crossing of the North Atlantic in their balloon, Double Eagle II.

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Last year the race, believed to be the oldest in the world, claimed the lives of two American pilots, Richard Abruzzo, 47, and Carol Rymer Davis, 65.

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If it is a little more basic, such as a margherita, he recommends a Montepulciano, a wild, robust red wine from Abruzzo, the mountainous region in central Italy.

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First you pick a specific tree from one of over a dozen olive groves scattered across the eastern coast of central Italy, in the Le Marche and Abruzzo regions.

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But two years ago, my friend Cristina Di Benigno invited me to lunch in her village near Corvara, a tiny, little-known ruin of a town in Abruzzo, about an hour by car from the port city of Pescara.

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