four play

Once again, I’m about to head off to the UK for the summer, and as usual I have a puzzle that I hope someone will have solved by the time I get back online. However, also as usual, you should expect it to tax your brain cells quite severely (it wouldn’t be worth posing otherwise). Here it is:

What connects the following:
• a football team playing in Italy’s Serie A;
• a nineteenth-century battle;
• an African city;
• an ornamental tree of the subtropics with purplish blue flowers; and
• a Bond villain?

This is an example of an ‘open’ question, meaning that there are more entities that meet the connection criterion. Obviously, there is more than one ‘answer’ to each of these clues, so it will be necessary to identify which of these is ‘correct’.

As usual, I will acknowledge all correct answers, but I won’t actually publish the solution at all unless I’ve received at least one correct answer, and that answer will be flagged up with a ‘spoiler alert’ to give later readers a chance to work it out for themselves.

currently unsolved puzzles
A Hard Question
An English Question
A Rotten English Question
A Light-hearted Question
…French and