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t’s becoming the new normal: An American entrepreneur heads to Italy, finds a top-notch artisanal shoe factory, then sells the shoes online at a fraction of the price charged by designer brands making shoes in comparable factories. Sneaker brands Koio and Greats have done this, and women’s shoe brands M.Gemi and Idoni. This trend is fundamentally disrupting the luxury market, giving customers a more affordable alternative to European heritage brands like Louis Vuitton and Prada.

Last month, Conan O’Brien and his favorite coworker Jordan Schlansky headed to Italy to tape a new remote special, and while it doesn’t air on TBS for another two weeks, there’s still plenty of entertainment in O’Brien and Schlansky’s planning session, which you can check out above. What begins as a pretty typical planning session between these two (“I’ve always wanted to understand Italy the way you understand Italy. I want to see Italy through your cold, lifeless eyes”) somehow gets sidetracked into an in-depth discussion about what these two don’t like about each other’s faces: “Do you think people adore your face because of the physical structure of your face or perhaps what it might represent beneath?” Watch the full Conan in Italy special when it airs Wednesday, April 11th at 10:00pm on TBS.

Two hundred yards from the Colosseum - where condemned men once fought wild animals - modern-day prison inmates face a rather different task: cleaning up rubbish in a park frequented by dog walkers and toddlers.

An Italian man has finally been acquitted of stealing an aubergine nine years after being charged, ending a legal wrangle that cost taxpayers thousands.

The man, then 49, had the aubergine in his bucket when police caught him trying to escape through a privately owned field near Lecce, in the southern region of Puglia, in 2009.