1669
Lava reaching Catania in 1669, in a fresco by Giacinto Platania in Catania Cathedral.Image: Giacinto Platania · Public domainscience · Europe
Etna’s most destructive eruption begins
On 11 March 1669 a fissure opened on the southern slope of Mount Etna in Sicily, above the village of Nicolosi. Over the next four months the volcano poured out more lava than in any other eruption in its recorded history, building the twin cones of the Monti Rossi. The lava buried villages, reached the western part of the city of Catania and flowed into the sea, pushing the coastline out by about a kilometre. The eruption ended in July.
Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Mount Etna ↗
The poster for the first performance of Rigoletto at La Fenice, Venice, on 11 March 1851.Image: 
Park Place in Brooklyn after the blizzard, 14 March 1888.Image: 
President Roosevelt signing the Lend-Lease bill, 11 March 1941.Image: 
General Douglas MacArthur.Image: 
Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985.Image: 
The Act of the Re-Establishment of the State of Lithuania, signed on 11 March 1990.Image: 
President Patricio Aylwin and General Augusto Pinochet at the handover of power, 1990.Image: 
The International Criminal Court’s permanent building in The Hague, 2016.Image: 
A plaque in Madrid in memory of the victims of 11 March 2004.Image: 
The former Kesennuma Koyo High School, struck by the tsunami and now kept as a memorial museum, photographed in 2019.Image: 
The World Health Organization’s headquarters in Geneva.Image: