The history of misinformation, along with that of disinformation and propaganda, is part of the history of mass communication. Early examples cited in a 2017 article by Robert Darnton are the insults and smears spread among political rivals in Imperial and Renaissance Italy in the form of "pasquinades". These are anonymous and witty verse named for the Pasquino piazza and "talking statue" in Rome, and in pre-revolutionary France as "canards", or printed broadsides that sometimes included an engraving to help convince readers to take their wild tales seriously.