Primiero is a valley in the Dolomites, on the border between the Italian regions of Trentino Alto Adige and Veneto . Very green and crisscrossed by numerous watercourses, it is best known to tourists for the ski resorts and mountain trails of San Martino di Castrozza .

It began with Angela Merkel. When the former German chancellor opened the borders to refugees in 2015, hundreds of thousands of Syrians and others entered. Many are now settled all over the country.

Where once there were tanks, today there is a residential centre for the disabled , an art laboratory for people with mental health problems, a training centre for immigrants and ex-convicts, a restaurant, a hall for cultural events and a co-working space.

It is a familiar sight for any city dweller: the truck double parked or stopping traffic on a busy road to deliver some package at a house door. Commercial deliveries are an increasing congestion issue, particularly for European historical city centres.

Calin lives in the Romanian city of Cluj. He suffers from melanoma and his mother died from colorectal cancer, aged 58. “It took two months just for a colonoscopy,” he recalls.

Batteries are unanimously seen as key drivers of the energy transition .

Each year over 3.5 million tourists from all over the world visit Pompeii to admire the ruins left by the eruption of the Vesuvius that, in 79 AD, engulfed it together with the nearby city of Herculaneum.

A strong increase in coal-fired electricity generation and the biggest ever year-on-year increase in global electricity demand caused the global power sector's CO2 emissions to reach an all-time high in 2021 .

The Mediterranean Sea hides countless sunken ships, submerged Roman villas and ancient treasures: an underwater cultural heritage which is documented, but virtually unreachable for the large public and difficult to access even for expert scuba divers.

When Salvatore was diagnosed with brain cancer, he made headlines all over the world . International outlets like CNN and the BBC presented him as “the hacker who decrypted his medical records to create his open-source therapy”.

Tourism has rebounded strongly after Covid, with international arrivals to Europe in January-July 2022 up 190% on the year before, getting close to 2019 levels (74% of that year, according to the UNWTO World Tourism Barometer ).

“If I just look at my courtyard , three of my neighbors have an electric car" , says Christian Patermann, long-time program director at the European Commission and now internationally known as the “father of the bioeconomy”.

In architecture, there are two kinds of sustainability: one simpler, smaller, and ethical in its relationship with the environment and with people; and another which is “fashionable”, used as a label in a speculative way, without an understanding of what it really means.

Maguy Soldevila is a former art teacher. Some years ago, she quit the frenzy and the pollution of the French city of Lyon to move into a typical house of the 1960s, in the small village of Sail-sous-Couzan.

Evidence from early adoption of digitisation central to the new European Union Clinical Trials Regulation suggests that the Regulation will revolutionise the region’s competitiveness .

Ana, 32, loves going to the movies, is keen on theatre and takes regular yoga lessons. However, during the Covid pandemic she quit the frenzy of Madrid to settle in a remote village in Extremadura , a large Spanish rural area, bordering Portugal.

Federica Gasbarro was a 22-year-old biology student in Rome when she felt compelled to become an environmental activist.

The global transition from an economy underpinned by fossil fuels to an economy powered by renewable energy is well underway. The pace of that transition, however, has come under scrutiny – especially at the recent COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.

Francesco is an Italian lawyer. He lives in Rome and is now about to move into a new apartment. “It’s a way to get closer to my office,” he says. “I don’t have a car, I just ride bicycle.

Back in 1998, when my grandmother looked at my university thesis on  blue compact dwarf galaxies , she asked me, puzzled, "what  exactly  do you use this for?" I then realised that, perhaps, I had to reconsider my career ambitions.