" People in the Italian Apennines call them "brontidi" or thunder-like, and residents of Shikoku, Japan, have dubbed them "yan.

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Italy's north-south divide remains gaping, too (though, as the author says, there is a less well known east-west divide either side of the Apennines).

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The Apennines, the belt of mountains that runs down through the centre of Italy, is riddled with faults, and the "Eagle" city of L'Aquila has been hammered time and time again by earthquakes.

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When you are from Rome, a city that has an incredible beer scene fuelled largely by the explosion in Italian craft brewing in the last five years (a tenfold increase in breweries in that time), why would you locate your brewery in a remote village in the foothills of the central Apennines?

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