Place your finger on a street map and it's far more likely to land on a road named after a man than one named after a woman. You may not have given it much thought, but Maria Pia Ercolini has. The geography teacher in Rome says her city's landscape is dominated by men and wants that to change.

"During the research I realised that you never see traces of women. History just cancelled the women - they're not here," she says.

 

Ercolini and a team of 26 women painstakingly went through every one of Rome's 16,550 streets to determine the gender balance.

They found that 7,575 (45.7%) of the city's streets were named after men and just 580 (3.5%) were named after women.

"That's proof of the discrimination," she says.

"Men made the history - the known history. In Italy it is very strong because we have so many [male] saints and religious people like the Pope. Religion is so full of men."