Imagine all the casinos of Vegas sudden­ly bolted shut. How would Siem Reap fair if Angkor Wat were not just down the road, and what would become of Niagara Falls (the city) without Niagara Falls (the falls)? Imagine, then, Calcata's dilemma when the parish priest, one day in 1983, announced that the foreskin of Jesus Christ, which he had kept in a shoebox at the back of his wardrobe, had "vanished".

The Santissimo Prepuzio, the "blessed foreskin", had drawn pilgrims to the ancient Italian village for centuries, and the fate of the holy relic remains a mystery. Calcata, however, shrugged off the loss of the weirdest visitor attraction in the world. By the early 1980s, the picturesque hamlet, located just 50km north of Rome, was well on its way to reinvention anyway.

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Source: http://www.scmp.com/