The news coming out of Italy this past week has been tragic. Twenty-nine dead, eleven rescued from an avalanche that engulfed the Hotel Rigopiano after a 5.3 magnitude earthquake struck the foot of Gran Sasso mountain a few days earlier. Unimaginably sad.

A bright spot, of course, was that eleven people were rescued alive, but also that three puppies who’d been buried for six days were recovered unscathed.

The puppies’ parents, “Nuvola” and “Lupo,” lived at the hotel and had bolted earlier. They were later found unharmed in an alley. These dogs’ story is prompting some people to ask: What’s an Abruzzi Sheepdog?

In some parts of the world, we know these Livestock Guardian Dogs as “Maremma Sheepdogs.”  The breed has been protecting flocks from the Abruzzi to the Maremma plains of southern Tuscany for at least 2,000 years, and was even mentioned by the ancient Roman scholar and writer, Varro, writing in the 1st century BC.

At one time there was a slight difference between the Abruzzi dogs, and the dogs from the Maremma plains. At the time, they were even called different names, but Italian breed experts decided in the 1950s that the Abruzzese’s thicker coat and coarser build wasn’t enough to warrant a separate breed status, so the official Italian title for both dogs became the Cane da Pastore Maremmano-Abruzzese. A mouthful. These days, it seems that the breed is still known by the two names, Maremma in some parts of the world, and at least in Italy, the Abruzzi, as seen in the video.  Read more about the dogs in this article from which the photo comes.