On May 2, 2021, more than 3,000 local residents in the city of Vicenza, Italy received a message from the government.

Pack a bag for the day.

Leave your homes and evacuate now.

A 500-pound undetnated bomb left over from the British during World War II had been discovered in the city.

All residents within 1,500 feet of the device had to get out, stat, so a group of technicians could come in and disarm the bomb.

The day would become known as Bomba Day, and it all sounds pretty dramatic to me.

But apparently, this isn't a hugely unusual occurrence in Italy.

This is something that routinely pops up in national media in Italy.

You know, every once in a while there'll be a story about, hey, so that they found this unexploded bomb that needed to evacuate.

Alessio Perone is an Italian writer and journalist, and as he kept hearing all of these semi-routine stories about unexploded bombs in his own country, he began to think about the people doing this work.

And so I read about these things and I thought, how exactly do they do these things? How do they search for bombs? How do they find them?

So Alessio decided to find out.

I'm Johanna Mayer, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today, I'm talking with Alessio Perone about what he learned from the people who hunt for Italy's unexploded bombs.

More after this.

No one knows exactly how many unexploded bombs, grenades, and bullets are still lurking under the ground in Italy, leftover from the two world wars.

But the country recovers about 60,000 pieces of unexploded ordinance every year.

Which made me wonder, are you walking around scared all the time?

No, no. I guess that's one of the things that makes this story fascinating.

Is that we don't think about this, it's been 80 years, it doesn't really cross our minds now.

And I think there's actually now people starting to become fascinated by this stuff.

For example, there's a site in Lombardi that was an ammunition and weaponry deposit built by Napoleon 200 years ago.

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