Long before Rome was anything more than a handful of villages on seven hills, the Italian peninsula was already home to remarkably refined peoples. In the centre, between the Arno and the Tiber, the civilisation of the Etruscans flourished from the 8th century BC, the most advanced in ancient Italy. Organised as a confederation of city-states — Tarquinia, Cerveteri, Veii, Vulci, Chiusi — the Etruscans mastered metalwork, sea trade and town planning; they left us the semicircular arch, drainage systems, divination from the entrails of animals and painted tombs that still astonish today for their vitality. Their language, written in an alphabet derived from Greek, has still not been fully deciphered. Rome's first kings were Etruscan, and from them the Romans took the symbols of power, such as the fasces — the bundle of rods with an axe — that two millennia later would give fascism its name.
By tradition, Rome was founded in 753 BC. After a period of kings, in 509 BC the Romans expelled the last Etruscan monarch and founded the Republic, a system of consuls, Senate and assemblies that combined aristocratic government with popular participation. For five centuries the Republic expanded: it subdued the other Italic peoples, defeated Carthage in the three Punic Wars (264-146 BC) — with Hannibal crossing the Alps and Scipio winning at Zama — and conquered Greece, Hispania, Gaul under Julius Caesar and much of the Mediterranean, which the Romans called mare nostrum.
Success brought crisis. The civil wars of the 1st century BC — Marius against Sulla, Caesar against Pompey, and finally Octavian against Mark Antony and Cleopatra — bled the Republic dry. The murder of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March in 44 BC did not save the old order: his nephew Octavian won at Actium (31 BC) and in 27 BC received the title of Augustus, opening the Empire. So began the pax romana, two centuries of relative peace and prosperity in which the Empire reached its greatest extent, from Hadrian's Wall in Britain to the Euphrates, and Rome came to hold a million inhabitants.
The Empire left an indelible mark: Latin, Roman law, the network of roads and aqueducts, concrete, administrative organisation and, from the 1st century, a new religion born in Judaea, Christianity, first persecuted and then legalised by the emperor Constantine with the Edict of Milan (313) and made the state religion by Theodosius (380). In 395, on Theodosius's death, the Empire split definitively into two halves, West and East, which would follow separate paths.
The Western Empire collapsed over the course of the 5th century under pressure from the Germanic peoples. Rome, which had not been taken for centuries, was sacked by Alaric's Visigoths in 410 and by Genseric's Vandals in 455, a trauma that echoed throughout the ancient world. The formal end came in 476, when the Germanic chieftain Odoacer deposed the last emperor, the teenage Romulus Augustulus, and sent the imperial insignia to Constantinople. By convention, that date marks the end of Antiquity and the start of the Middle Ages.
On the ruins of the Empire there arose, at the end of the 5th century, Theodoric's Ostrogothic kingdom, with its capital at Ravenna, which tried to fuse Roman tradition with Germanic power. But the eastern emperor, Justinian, set out to reconquer Italy: between 535 and 553 his generals Belisarius and Narses fought the long and devastating Gothic War, which ruined much of the peninsula and returned Italy to Constantinople's orbit. Byzantine rule left its jewel in Ravenna, with the golden mosaics of San Vitale and Sant'Apollinare, the high point of late antique art.
The balance did not last. In 568 the Lombards, another Germanic people, invaded the north and created a kingdom with its capital at Pavia, along with the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento in the centre and south. Italy was thus split for centuries: the Lombards across much of the interior; the Byzantines in Ravenna, Rome, the south and the islands; and, in between, the pope in Rome, who was beginning to take on temporal power. That fragmentation — Lombard, Byzantine and papal — was the mould of the divided Italy that would last more than a thousand years.
In the power vacuum left by the fall of Rome, the city's bishop — the pope — took on ever more authority, not only spiritual but political too, as protector of the population against Lombards and Byzantines. The decisive turn came in the 8th century: harried by the Lombards, Pope Stephen II sought the protection of the king of the Franks, Pepin the Short, who defeated them in 756 and handed the pontiff a set of territories in central Italy. So the Papal State was born, a temporal power the pope would rule as sovereign for more than eleven hundred years. In the year 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor in Rome, sealing the alliance between throne and altar and founding what would become the Holy Roman Empire.
Through the Middle Ages the papacy was a political power of the first order, often at odds with the emperors over supremacy — the famous Investiture Controversy, with the humiliation of Emperor Henry IV before Gregory VII at Canossa (1077). That struggle split the Italian cities into Guelphs (backers of the pope) and Ghibellines (backers of the emperor), a fracture that shaped the peninsula's politics for centuries. The Church's power went through deep crises, such as the move of the popes to Avignon (1309-1377) and the Western Schism that followed.
The Papal States survived every storm in Italian history and disappeared only with unification: in 1860 the new Kingdom of Italy took most of their territory, and in 1870 it took Rome itself, ending the temporal power of the popes. The "Roman question" — the conflict between the Italian state and the papacy, which declared itself a "prisoner in the Vatican" — was not settled until the Lateran Pacts of 1929, which created the tiny State of Vatican City, the smallest country in the world and the last vestige of that thousand-year-old power.
While inland Italy was caught between popes and emperors, powers of another kind rose on the coasts: the maritime republics, city-states that made trade and the sea their reason for being. Taking advantage of Byzantine and Lombard weakness, Venice, Genoa, Pisa and Amalfi took to the Mediterranean, built formidable fleets and wove trading networks linking Europe with Byzantium, the Islamic world and the East. Much of modern banking, marine insurance, double-entry bookkeeping and diplomacy came out of them.
Amalfi, on the Campanian coast, was the first to shine, in the 9th and 10th centuries, with its merchants in Constantinople and Cairo and its famous maritime code. Pisa dominated the Tyrrhenian and came to control Sardinia and Corsica, until Genoa crushed it at the naval battle of Meloria (1284). Genoa, "la Superba", wove a commercial empire from the Black Sea to the Strait of Gibraltar and financed half the continent; Christopher Columbus came from there. But it was Venice, la Serenissima, that was the longest-lived and most powerful: ruled by its doge and its merchant oligarchy, it controlled the Adriatic and colonies in Greece and the Aegean, and in 1204 diverted the Fourth Crusade to sack Constantinople itself, seizing a maritime empire that made it the richest city in Europe.
The maritime republics embodied a prosperous, urban, middle-class Italy, quite unlike the feudal world of northern Europe. Their rivalry was fierce — Venice and Genoa fought wars that lasted centuries — but their legacy is immense: not only the wealth that financed the Renaissance, but a whole culture of commerce, of risk and of the free city that lies at the root of modern Europe. Their four coats of arms still appear today on the flag of the Italian Navy.
From the 11th century, taking advantage of the emperor's distance and the pope's weakness, the cities of central and northern Italy gave themselves self-government: the communes were born, urban republics run by consuls and citizen councils, with their own laws, militias and foreign policy. Florence, Milan, Bologna, Siena, Pisa, Padua and Genoa became independent states in all but name, jealous of their liberties. When Emperor Frederick Barbarossa tried to subdue them, the Lombard cities joined in the Lombard League and defeated him at the battle of Legnano (1176), a milestone that 19th-century Italy would turn into a patriotic symbol.
Those communes were laboratories of an extraordinary urban civilisation, but also stages for chronic political violence: the struggles between Guelphs and Ghibellines, between rival families and between popular and aristocratic factions filled the cities with towers, vendettas and exiles — the most illustrious of the exiles was Dante Alighieri, expelled from Florence in 1302, who wrote the Divine Comedy in banishment. To put an end to those internal wars, many communes ended up handing power to a strongman.
So, between the 13th and 15th centuries, the communal republics gave way to the signorie: dynasties that took personal, hereditary power over the cities. The Visconti and then the Sforza in Milan, the Della Scala (Scaligeri) in Verona, the Este in Ferrara, the Gonzaga in Mantua and, above all, the Medici in Florence turned the old communes into principalities. Some of those lords were splendid patrons, and under their sponsorship, in the courts and cities of Italy, the greatest artistic flowering in the history of the West was about to burst into life.
Between the 15th and 16th centuries, Italy gave the world the Renaissance, the rebirth of classical art and thought that changed for ever the way we see human beings and the universe. Its cradle was Florence. Enriched by banking and the wool trade, effectively ruled by the Medici family — Cosimo the Elder and, above all, his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent — the city became a hotbed of genius: Brunelleschi raised the dome of the Duomo, the largest since Antiquity; Masaccio, Botticelli, Donatello and Ghiberti revolutionised painting and sculpture; and a young man called Leonardo da Vinci was beginning to astonish his masters. Humanism, which recovered the Greek and Latin authors and put humankind at the centre, radiated from the Florentine academies across Europe.
The focus then shifted to Rome, where the Renaissance popes — Julius II, Leo X — made the Church the great patron of art. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508-1512) and sculpted the Moses; Raphael decorated the Vatican rooms; Bramante and then Michelangelo designed the new St Peter's Basilica. Venice, for its part, developed a school of its own, dazzling in colour and light, with Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. It was also the age of Machiavelli and his Prince, of Aldus Manutius's Venetian printing press and of Galileo Galilei, who in Padua and Florence laid the foundations of modern science — and was condemned for it by the Inquisition in 1633.
The Renaissance was made possible by the wealth and the competition between the Italian states, but that same fragmentation was its political undoing: from 1494 Italy became the battleground of the great powers. The sack of Rome by Emperor Charles V's troops in 1527 — Protestant landsknechts desecrating the city of the popes — is usually pointed to as the symbolic end of the High Renaissance. The artistic splendour went on, but Italy's political initiative had been lost, and the peninsula was entering a long period of foreign rule.
In 1494 King Charles VIII of France invaded Italy to claim the kingdom of Naples, and with that unleashed the Italian Wars, half a century of conflict (1494-1559) in which France and Habsburg Spain fought over the peninsula. The result was overwhelming Spanish hegemony: under the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559), Spain directly controlled Milan, Naples, Sicily and Sardinia, and held sway over almost every other state. For more than a century and a half, much of Italy was a province of the Spanish empire, with viceroys in Naples, Palermo and Milan.
Austria took over. After the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), the Habsburgs of Vienna replaced the Spanish as the dominant power: Milan, Naples (until 1734) and later Tuscany passed into their orbit. The 18th-century Italian map was divided between Austrian Milan and Tuscany, the kingdom of Naples and Sicily under a branch of the Spanish Bourbons, the Papal States, the Republic of Venice, that of Genoa and the kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont of the House of Savoy, the only fully Italian and independent state.
Despite foreign rule, the 18th century brought the fresh air of the Enlightenment. In Milan, the Verri brothers and Cesare Beccaria — whose treatise On Crimes and Punishments (1764) founded modern criminal law and condemned torture and the death penalty — drove a reforming atmosphere; in Naples the philosopher Giambattista Vico taught, along with economists such as Antonio Genovesi; in Habsburg-Lorraine Tuscany the death penalty was abolished for the first time anywhere in the world (1786). When the French Revolution and then Napoleon burst into Italy (1796), reorganising the peninsula into satellite republics and kingdoms, they sowed — alongside plunder and occupation — the ideas of nation, constitution and citizenship that would feed the movement for Italian unity.
After Napoleon's fall, the Congress of Vienna (1815) restored the old sovereigns in Italy and returned the north to Austrian control. But the ideas of liberty and nation could no longer be erased. So began the Risorgimento — the "resurgence" — the movement for Italian independence and unity. Secret societies such as the Carbonari led failed uprisings in 1820-21 and 1831; the Genoese Giuseppe Mazzini, from exile, founded Young Italy and preached a united Italian republic, inspiring a whole generation of patriots. The revolutions of 1848 led to the First War of Independence against Austria, which ended in defeat, and to heroic episodes such as the short-lived Roman Republic of 1849, defended by Garibaldi and crushed by French troops.
Unity was finally forged by the kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont. Its prime minister, Count Camillo di Cavour, a skilful and pragmatic liberal, modernised the state and looked for international allies: with the backing of Napoleon III's France, Piedmont defeated Austria in 1859 (the Second War of Independence) and annexed Lombardy and, through plebiscites, the central duchies and Tuscany. Then Giuseppe Garibaldi came on stage: in 1860, at the head of his thousand red-shirted volunteers, he landed in Sicily, brought down the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and entered Naples in triumph, only to hand his conquests to the king of Piedmont, Victor Emmanuel II. On 17 March 1861, a parliament meeting in Turin proclaimed the Kingdom of Italy, with Victor Emmanuel II as its first king.
Two pieces were missing. The Veneto was taken in in 1866, after the Third War of Independence, in the context of the Austro-Prussian War. And Rome, protected by a French garrison, finally fell on 20 September 1870: taking advantage of France's war with Prussia, Italian troops breached the wall beside the Porta Pia and entered the city, putting an end to the Papal States. Rome was proclaimed capital of the kingdom. After thirteen centuries, Italy was unified; but, as one of its architects put it bitterly, "we have made Italy, now we must make Italians".
Unity was made under the sign of the north: the monarchy, the capital, the army, the laws and the taxes of the new kingdom were modelled on Piedmont, and the south — the old Kingdom of the Two Sicilies — was in practice annexed rather than integrated. The result was the "southern question" (questione meridionale): an impoverished Mezzogiorno, with great estates, illiteracy and industrial backwardness, that felt it was being treated as an internal colony. In the first years after unification a phenomenon half social rebellion, half banditry — the brigantaggio — broke out in the south, and the state put it down in a ferocious war that cost thousands of lives. The gap between the industrial north and the agrarian south would shape Italian history down to today.
Out of that poverty came one of the greatest emigrations in history. Between 1876 and the first decades of the 20th century, more than fourteen million Italians left the country, first from the north and then, in huge numbers, from the south — Calabria, Campania, Sicily, Basilicata. They went to the United States, to Brazil and, above all, to Argentina and Uruguay, which needed hands to populate and work the pampas. It is reckoned that some three and a half million Italians reached Argentina alone, close to half of all European immigration to the country.
The impact on the Río de la Plata was so deep that today most Argentines and a great many Uruguayans have Italian ancestry. From that wave come surnames, gestures and everyday words: Buenos Aires lunfardo slang is full of Italianisms, the "che", Sunday pizza and pasta, the very lilt of River Plate speech. Genoese immigrants founded the La Boca neighbourhood; Neapolitans, Calabrians and Sicilians filled the tenements and the factories. For a River Plate reader, the history of Italian emigration is not somebody else's chapter: it is, very probably, the story of their own great-grandparents.
Italy entered the First World War in 1915 on the Entente side, hoping to complete national unity at Austria's expense. It was a brutal war, fought in the mountains of the Isonzo and the Alps, with more than six hundred thousand dead and the disaster of Caporetto (1917); the final victory at Vittorio Veneto (1918) gave it Trento and Trieste, but left the country impoverished, divided and frustrated by what propaganda called the "mutilated victory". In that climate of social crisis, strikes and fear of revolution, a former socialist, Benito Mussolini, founded the Fasci di Combattimento in 1919, nationalist and anti-communist militias that spread terror against unions and left-wing parties.
On 28 October 1922, after the March on Rome, King Victor Emmanuel III asked Mussolini to form a government: fascism came to power by legal means, backed by violence. In 1924 the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti, who had denounced fascist fraud and violence in parliament, was kidnapped and murdered by squadristi; the crisis almost brought Mussolini down, but in January 1925 he took political responsibility for the crime and turned the regime into an open dictatorship, abolishing parties, the free press and civil liberties. He signed the Lateran Pacts with the Church (1929), built a totalitarian state and a cult of the Duce, and threw Italy into imperial adventures: the brutal conquest of Ethiopia (1935-36) and intervention alongside Franco in the Spanish Civil War.
In 1938, imitating the Nazi Germany it had allied with, the regime issued the racial laws, which expelled Italian Jews from schools, the professions and public life and prepared the ground for their persecution. In 1940 Mussolini dragged Italy into the Second World War alongside Hitler, with catastrophic results. In July 1943, after the Allied landing in Sicily, the regime itself removed him; the new government signed the armistice in September, but the Germans occupied the north and centre and reinstalled Mussolini at the head of the Italian Social Republic, the so-called Republic of Salò, a Nazi puppet state. Under German occupation thousands of Italian Jews were deported to Auschwitz. Against the occupiers and the fascists rose the Resistance, the partisans, who fought for two years in the mountains and the cities. On 25 April 1945 — today the national Liberation holiday — the partisans and the Allies liberated the north; days later, on 28 April, Mussolini was captured and shot as he tried to flee. The fascist adventure ended in ruin.
On 2 June 1946, in a referendum in which women voted for the first time, Italians chose between monarchy and republic: the republic won, and the House of Savoy, compromised by fascism, went into exile. A Constituent Assembly drafted the republican Constitution, in force since January 1948, one of the most advanced of its time. Political life was dominated for decades by the Christian Democrats, who governed almost without a break, facing the Italian Communist Party, the largest in the West, against the backdrop of the Cold War.
The great postwar story was the "economic miracle": between the late 1950s and the early 1960s, Italy went from a poor farming country to one of the world's biggest industrial powers. Fiat, Olivetti, Pirelli and Italian fashion and design conquered markets; millions of southerners moved to the factories of the north — Turin, Milan — in an internal migration that reshaped the country. The Vespa, the Fiat 600, the films of Fellini and Antonioni, the dolce vita, were the symbols of an Italy modernising at full speed.
The flip side came in the "Years of Lead" (from the late 1960s to the early 1980s), a period of far-left and far-right political terrorism, with bombings, kidnappings and massacres. The Red Brigades kidnapped and murdered the Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro in 1978; neo-fascist bombs, such as the one at Bologna station in 1980 (85 dead), bloodied the country as part of the murky "strategy of tension". Italy came through that test without breaking its democracy, but it carried persistent ills: the corruption of the parties, exposed by the Mani pulite judicial operation (1992), which brought down the entire postwar political class, and the power of the mafias. Contemporary Italy — a founder of the European Union, the world's seventh economy, home to unrivalled artistic heritage — is still dealing with the old imbalance between north and south, with an ageing population and with the debates about the memory of fascism and the Resistance that its history left open.
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Central Italy is the setting for the decisive event in the country's whole history: the birth of Rome. On the hills of Lazio, beside the Tiber, tradition places the founding of the city in 753 BC. From a handful of Latin and Sabine villages, ruled at first by Etruscan kings, there arose a republic that in five centuries conquered first Latium, then all of Italy and finally the entire Mediterranean. The region keeps traces of that origin everywhere: the old Latin towns, the Appian Way, the aqueducts that brought water to the capital.
Imperial Rome was the largest city of Antiquity, with close to a million inhabitants, an urban marvel of forums, temples, baths and spectacles. The Colosseum, opened in the year 80, held fifty thousand spectators; Hadrian's Pantheon is still crowned by the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world; the Forum was the political centre of the Empire. When the Western Empire fell in 476, Rome shrank to a fraction of its size, but it never stopped being a symbol.
The Lazio around Rome — from the volcanic lakes of the Castelli Romani to the countryside of the imperial villas at Tivoli, Villa Adriana and Villa d'Este — was for centuries the core of the city's power, first as territory of ancient Rome and later as the heart of the Papal States. To travel through it is to walk over two and a half thousand years of layered history, from the Latin world to that of the popes.
After the fall of the Empire, the bishop of Rome — the pope — gradually took on political power over the city and its surroundings. In the 8th century, the donation of Pepin the Short created the Papal States, which made central Italy — Lazio, Umbria, the Marche, Romagna — a state ruled by the pope for more than eleven hundred years. Rome became the capital of Catholic Christendom, a goal for pilgrims, and in the early modern period, with the Renaissance and Baroque popes, one of the great artistic centres of the world: St Peter's Basilica, Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, Bernini's fountains and squares.
That temporal power ended with unification. On 20 September 1870, troops of the kingdom of Italy breached the wall beside the Porta Pia and entered Rome, putting an end to the Papal States. Rome was proclaimed capital of Italy, and the pope declared himself a "prisoner in the Vatican", opening the so-called Roman question, which would not be settled until the Lateran Pacts of 1929 and the creation of the State of Vatican City.
As capital of the kingdom and later of the Republic, Rome went through deep changes: the opening of new avenues, the monumental town planning of fascism — which dreamed of an imperial "third Rome" and built districts such as the EUR — and the huge postwar expansion. Today the city holds both the Italian state, with the Quirinal and Montecitorio, and the Vatican, spiritual capital of one thousand three hundred million Catholics: two powers, civil and religious, both heirs of old Rome.
Tuscany owes its name to the Etruscans, the most refined people of pre-Roman Italy, who between the 8th and 4th centuries BC developed here, between the Arno and the Tiber, a brilliant civilisation of cities such as Volterra, Arezzo, Cortona and Chiusi. From them come the art of the painted tombs, the goldwork, the town planning and much of the technique Rome inherited. After the Roman conquest, the region — ancient Etruria — was completely Romanised, and cities such as Florence (Roman Florentia) were born as colonies.
In the Middle Ages, Tuscany became one of the most urbanised and prosperous regions in Europe. Its cities gave themselves autonomous communal governments and grew rich on trade, banking and wool manufacturing: Florence, Siena, Pisa, Lucca, Arezzo. The Florentine gold florin, minted from 1252, became the benchmark currency of European trade, and Tuscan bankers financed kings and popes across half the continent.
That wealth had its flip side in intense rivalry. The Tuscan cities warred with each other for centuries — Florence against Siena, against Pisa, against Lucca — and tore themselves apart in internal struggles between Guelphs and Ghibellines. Out of those merchant communes, cultured and turbulent, and out of the competition between them, would come the atmosphere that made possible the greatest cultural miracle in history: the Renaissance.
Florence was the cradle of the Renaissance. Enriched by banking and the wool trade, the city lived through an unmatched explosion of creativity across the 15th century. Brunelleschi raised the dome of the Duomo, the largest since Antiquity; Ghiberti cast the Baptistery doors that Michelangelo called "the gates of Paradise"; Donatello and Masaccio revolutionised sculpture and painting; and the humanist academies recovered the Greek and Latin classics, putting human beings at the centre of thought.
The engine of that splendour was the Medici family. Bankers to the pope and the richest men in Europe, the Medici effectively ruled Florence for generations without holding titles: Cosimo the Elder and, above all, his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449-1492) were splendid patrons who protected Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci and the young Michelangelo. The family also produced four popes and two queens of France. This was also the Florence of Machiavelli, whose Prince founded modern political science, and of the preacher Savonarola, who in 1497 led the famous "bonfires of the vanities" before dying at the stake himself.
The Medici later turned the city into the capital of a duchy — the Grand Duchy of Tuscany — which they governed until their line died out in 1737, when Tuscany passed to the House of Habsburg-Lorraine. Under those enlightened rulers the death penalty was abolished for the first time anywhere in the world (1786). Florence's artistic legacy — the Uffizi, the David, the Ponte Vecchio, the palaces and the churches — made it one of the most visited cities on the planet and a living museum of Renaissance genius.
Not all of Tuscany was Florence. For centuries, Siena was its great rival. A prosperous republic thanks to banking and trade, medieval Siena peaked in the 13th and 14th centuries, when it built its cathedral and its unique shell-shaped Piazza del Campo, home ever since to the Palio, the famous horse race between the city's contrade. In 1260 the Sienese defeated the Florentines at the battle of Montaperti, but the Black Death of 1348 — which carried off more than half the population — and pressure from Florence sapped its strength. In 1555, after a terrible siege, Siena fell and was annexed to Florentine rule, which froze its medieval centre and preserved it almost intact to this day.
Pisa, on the coast, was one of the four great maritime republics. Between the 11th and 13th centuries it dominated the Tyrrhenian Sea, controlled Sardinia and Corsica and traded across the Mediterranean; its wealth raised the extraordinary ensemble of the Piazza dei Miracoli, with the cathedral, the baptistery and the famous bell tower that began to lean while it was still being built, the Leaning Tower. But the naval defeat by Genoa at the battle of Meloria (1284) began its decline, and in 1406 Pisa was conquered by Florence.
Both cities embody the fate of communal Tuscany: proud, creative republics that ended up absorbed by Florence and its duchy. Pisa also gave world history Galileo Galilei, born there in 1564, the father of modern science, of whom legend says — probably without foundation — that he experimented with falling bodies from its leaning tower. Siena and Pisa, with their historic centres listed as World Heritage, keep the splendour of medieval Tuscany intact.
Because of its position in the middle of the Mediterranean, Sicily was for three thousand years a crossroads of civilisations and a prize fought over by every power. The first great protagonists were the Greeks: from the 8th century BC they founded splendid cities on the island — Syracuse, Agrigento, Selinunte, Segesta, Gela — that were among the richest in the Hellenic world. Syracuse came to rival Athens itself, defeating it in 413 BC in a disastrous siege, and it was the home of the greatest scientist of Antiquity, Archimedes, killed during the Roman capture of the city in 212 BC.
Alongside the Greeks, the west of the island was under the influence of the Phoenicians and then of Carthage, and Sicily was the scene of the wars between Greeks and Carthaginians. Its enormous grain wealth then made it the first prize of Roman expansion: the Punic Wars began over Sicily, which in 241 BC became Rome's first province and its "granary".
Of that Greek Sicily there remain some of the most impressive archaeological ensembles in the world: the Valley of the Temples at Agrigento, the Greek theatre of Syracuse — where classical tragedies are still performed — and the temples of Segesta and Selinunte. World Heritage Sites, they bear witness to an age when the island was one of the centres of Mediterranean civilisation, centuries before the Arab, Norman and Spanish layers that would be laid over it.
After Roman and Byzantine rule, Sicily lived one of its most brilliant periods under Islam. From 827, the Arabs progressively conquered the island and governed it for more than two centuries, with Palermo as capital: they introduced new crops — citrus, sugar cane, cotton — irrigation techniques, remarkable urban development and a relatively tolerant coexistence between Muslims, Christians and Jews. Palermo became one of the great cities of the Mediterranean.
In the 11th century the Normans arrived: adventurers from northern Europe who, under Roger de Hauteville, took the island from the Arabs between 1061 and 1091. Far from destroying the Islamic world they found, the Norman kings — culminating in Roger II, crowned king of Sicily in 1130 — created an extraordinary state that fused the three cultures: Arab, Byzantine Greek and Latin. Out of that unique synthesis came jewels such as the Palatine Chapel in Palermo, the cathedral of Monreale and that of Cefalù, with their golden Byzantine mosaics, their Arabic inscriptions and their Norman arches, today World Heritage Sites.
The kingdom later passed to the Swabian dynasty of the Hohenstaufen and reached new splendour under Frederick II (13th century), the "stupor mundi", who made Palermo a cosmopolitan and cultured capital. That multicultural Sicily, a crossroads of East and West, left an indelible mark on the language, the architecture, the cooking and the identity of the island, which still today sees itself as heir to Greeks, Arabs and Normans.
When the Swabian dynasty died out, the pope handed Sicily to Charles of Anjou, brother of the king of France, whose government soon became hated for its taxes and abuses. On 30 March 1282, in Palermo, an incident during Easter vespers set off a popular revolt against the French: the Sicilian Vespers, an insurrection that within days wiped out the Angevins on the island. The Sicilians offered the crown to Peter III of Aragon, and Sicily was thus tied to the Crown of Aragon, beginning centuries of Catalan-Aragonese and later Spanish rule.
Through the early modern period, Sicily was a kingdom governed by viceroys in the name of the Spanish Crown, and later, in the 18th century, it was joined to the kingdom of Naples under the Bourbons, forming the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. It was an age of feudal rule, of great estates and of a powerful landowning nobility, with a brilliant capital and an impoverished countryside, a tension that would run through the island's history into the 20th century.
The end of the old order came with Garibaldi. On 11 May 1860, with his thousand red-shirted volunteers, he landed at Marsala; within weeks, with the support of Sicilian peasants, he defeated the Bourbon army — a decisive victory at Calatafimi — and took Palermo. From Sicily, the Expedition of the Thousand crossed to Naples and brought down the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, joining the whole south to the new kingdom of Italy. But unification soon disappointed peasant hopes: the land was not shared out, and the old social question of the great estates, together with the weakness of the new state, prepared the ground for the birth of the mafia.
Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian mafia, was born in the 19th century in the power vacuum of the estate-owning countryside, as a network of "men of honour" who mediated between large landowners and peasants through violence and extortion. Over time it turned into a hierarchical, secret criminal organisation bound by omertà — the law of silence — that infiltrated the economy, construction, politics and institutions, first in Sicily and then, through emigration, in the United States. Fascism repressed it harshly, but it re-emerged after the Second World War stronger still.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the mafia gained immense power through heroin trafficking and unleashed a bloody war, killing police officers, magistrates, politicians and journalists who stood up to it. The state's answer had heroic names: judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, who with the so-called Palermo "maxi-trial" (1986-1987) managed to convict hundreds of mafiosi. The revenge was appalling: on 23 May 1992, Cosa Nostra murdered Falcone, his wife and his escort with a brutal bomb on the motorway, in the Capaci massacre; barely 57 days later, on 19 July 1992, a car bomb killed Borsellino and five of his bodyguards on via d'Amelio in Palermo.
Far from breaking society, those attacks provoked an unprecedented civic reaction against the mafia. The state toughened the law, arrested the big bosses — boss Salvatore Riina fell in 1993 — and an anti-mafia movement was born that upholds the memory of the victims and a culture of legality. Falcone and Borsellino became national symbols; Palermo airport bears their names. The fight against the mafia is far from over and remains one of the great challenges for Sicily and for all of Italy, and it is told today with the pride of a society that decided not to keep quiet.
Sardinia, the Mediterranean's second-largest island, had a history very different from Sicily's and a strongly distinct identity. Its most original and mysterious age is the prehistoric one: between 1800 and 500 BC the Nuragic civilisation flourished, covering the island with thousands of nuraghi, imposing truncated-cone towers of dry stone — around seven thousand survive — with no equivalent anywhere in the world. The Su Nuraxi complex at Barumini is a World Heritage Site and testimony to that enigmatic people of shepherds and warriors. Then came Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals and Byzantines.
In the Middle Ages, isolated and hard to govern from outside, Sardinia organised itself into four autonomous kingdoms of its own, the judicates (giudicati) — Cagliari, Arborea, Torres and Gallura — ruled by sovereign judges, a unique case in Europe. The most resilient was Arborea, whose woman judge Eleanor issued the Carta de Logu at the end of the 14th century, a famous code of laws. In 1297 the pope granted Sardinia to the Crown of Aragon, which from 1323 set about conquering the island; the kingdom of Arborea held out for decades before succumbing, and Sardinia was absorbed into the Catalan-Aragonese and later Spanish world, of which it keeps traces in the language — Catalan is still spoken in Alghero — and in the architecture.
In 1720, after the War of the Spanish Succession, Sardinia passed to the House of Savoy, which joined the island to its territories in Piedmont to form the Kingdom of Sardinia. That kingdom, with its effective capital in Turin, would be precisely the state that in the 19th century led the Risorgimento and unified Italy under Victor Emmanuel II. The island, with its own language — Sardinian, the most conservative Romance language — and its strong sense of identity, keeps to this day turquoise beaches and unspoilt coves that, together with the glamorous Costa Smeralda developed from the 1960s, have made it one of the most sought-after destinations in the Mediterranean.
Venice was born of flight: in the 5th and 6th centuries, people from the Veneto escaping the barbarian invasions took refuge on the islands of an unhealthy lagoon and, on wooden piles driven into the mud, built the most improbable and magnificent city in the world. Under Byzantium's nominal protection, Venice soon gave itself its own government headed by the doge, and took to sea trade. Its alliance and its rivalry with Constantinople, its control of the spice and silk routes to the East and its formidable arsenal made it the greatest commercial power in the Mediterranean.
The Republic of Venice — la Serenissima — was an exceptional state for its longevity and its stability: it survived more than a thousand years, until 1797. Ruled by an oligarchy of merchant families through a complex system of councils that prevented the tyranny of any one man, it wove a maritime empire (the Stato da Mar) with colonies in Dalmatia, Greece, Crete and Cyprus. In 1204 it diverted the Fourth Crusade to sack Constantinople itself; from there it brought the bronze horses of St Mark's. Its fleet defeated the Turks at Lepanto (1571), although the Ottoman advance gradually whittled away its overseas possessions.
Venice was also a dazzling cultural centre: the painting school of Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese; the printing press of Aldus Manutius; the music of Vivaldi; the theatre of Goldoni; the carnival. Its political decline in the 18th century ended abruptly when Napoleon conquered it in 1797 and put an end to the thousand-year Republic, later handing it to Austria. Only with unification, in 1866, did Venice and the Veneto join Italy. The city on the water, a World Heritage Site, is still one of the most astonishing places on the planet.
Before falling to Venice, the Veneto had lords of its own. Verona, a city of Roman origin — it keeps one of the largest arenas of Antiquity, still used for opera — was an important medieval centre on the route between Italy and the Alpine passes. In the 13th and 14th centuries it was ruled by the Della Scala family, the Scaligeri, Ghibelline lords who turned it into a regional power and a refuge for exiles: among them Dante Alighieri himself, taken in by Cangrande della Scala during his banishment.
The Verona of the Scaligeri was a rich and cultured city, with its monumental tombs, its castles and its fortified bridges. But its expansion collided with Venice, and in 1405 Verona and much of the Veneto passed under the rule of la Serenissima, where they stayed for almost four centuries, until Napoleon arrived. The city also owes its worldwide fame to literature: Shakespeare set the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet here, and crowds still visit Juliet's supposed balcony.
After Venice fell, Verona and the Veneto came under Austrian rule, from which they were freed only in 1866, when they joined the kingdom of Italy. The region later lived through dramatic pages: it was a front in the First World War — the Venetian Alps and the Piave — and the scene, in the Second, of German occupation and of the Republic of Salò, whose puppet government had its seat on the shore of Lake Garda. Today the Veneto is one of the most prosperous and most visited regions in Italy.
Milan, capital of Lombardy, was for centuries the great city of northern Italy. As early as late Antiquity it was capital of the Western Empire — here Constantine issued the Edict of Milan in 313 tolerating Christianity, and here St Ambrose preached. As a medieval commune, Milan led the Lombard League that defeated Emperor Barbarossa at Legnano (1176), defending the cities' liberties against the Empire.
In the 14th century the Visconti family seized power and turned Milan into a powerful duchy that dominated much of the north; the start of the lavish Gothic cathedral, the Duomo, is down to them. When the Visconti line died out, a condottiero took over, Francesco Sforza, who founded a new dynasty in 1450. The Milan of the Sforza, above all under Ludovico il Moro, was one of the most brilliant courts of the Renaissance: Leonardo da Vinci worked there for almost twenty years, painting The Last Supper in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie and designing machines, canals and fortifications.
That splendour ended with the Italian Wars. From 1499, the duchy of Milan became the main prize fought over by France and Spain; it finally came under Spanish rule and, after 1714, Austrian. Under the Habsburgs, Milan was a centre of the Enlightenment — that of Beccaria and the Verri brothers — and then capital of the Napoleonic kingdom of Italy. In the 19th century it led anti-Austrian feeling, with the heroic Five Days of 1848. Once Italy was united, Milan became the country's economic, financial and industrial capital, and today it is its centre for fashion, design and business.
On the narrow strip of coast between the sea and the Apennines that makes up Liguria rose another of the great maritime republics: Genoa, "la Superba". From the 11th century, the Genoese built a commercial and naval power that rivalled Pisa — which it defeated at Meloria (1284) — and Venice, with which it fought wars for centuries. The Genoese empire spread across the western Mediterranean and, above all, the Black Sea, with colonies such as Caffa, from where they brought slaves, grain and the goods of the Silk Road. Genoese bankers financed the Spanish Crown, and Christopher Columbus was from Genoa.
The Republic of Genoa, ruled like Venice by a merchant oligarchy under a doge, saw its architectural heyday in the 16th century with the Rolli palaces, today a World Heritage Site. Although it lost ground to the Atlantic powers, it survived as an independent state until Napoleon annexed it; the Congress of Vienna handed it in 1815 to the kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont. Genoa, and nearby Nice, was the home of the great hero of the Risorgimento, Giuseppe Garibaldi, and it was from here that the Expedition of the Thousand set sail in 1860.
The Ligurian coast, steep and magnificent, holds one of the most famous landscapes in Italy: the Cinque Terre, five fishing villages — Monterosso, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola and Riomaggiore — perched on cliffs and surrounded by terraced vineyards built over centuries of peasant labour. Isolated until the railway arrived, today they are a World Heritage Site and one of the most photographed destinations in the country, testimony to the hard, beautiful relationship of Ligurians with the sea and the mountains.
At the foot of the Apennines, between Lombardy and Tuscany, Bologna is one of the most singular cities in Italy. Home to the oldest university in the western world, founded in 1088, it is nicknamed "the learned"; for its kilometres of medieval porticoes — today a World Heritage Site — and its cooking it is also called "the fat"; and for its long left-wing political tradition, "the red". As a medieval commune it was rich and free; in 1249 its militias captured no less than King Enzo, son of Emperor Frederick II. Later it became part of the Papal States, under whose rule it stayed until unification.
Bologna is the capital of Emilia-Romagna, a fertile and enterprising region that was the border between the Byzantine world of Ravenna — capital of the Eastern Empire in Italy, with its incomparable mosaics — and the Lombard and papal world. In the 20th century, Emilia-Romagna became a model of development based on small and medium-sized firms, cooperatives and precision engineering: Ferrari, Lamborghini, Maserati and Ducati came out of its workshops, the so-called "land of motors".
Northern Italy as a whole — Lombardy, Piedmont, the Veneto, Liguria, Emilia — was the great protagonist of the postwar economic miracle that turned Italy into an industrial power. The "industrial triangle" of Milan-Turin-Genoa, with Fiat, Pirelli, Olivetti and the shipyards, drew millions of migrants from the south. That prosperity, together with that of the industrial districts of the Veneto and Emilia, made the north the country's economic engine and, by contrast, sharpened the old gap with the Mezzogiorno. Bologna also suffered, in 1980, the worst attack of the Years of Lead: a neo-fascist bomb in its station killed 85 people, a wound the city commemorates every year.
Long before Rome, southern Italy was Greek land. From the 8th century BC, colonists arriving from Greece founded dozens of cities along the southern coasts and in Sicily, so prosperous and cultured that the Romans called the region Magna Graecia, "Great Greece". In Campania, Greeks from Euboea founded Cumae around 740 BC, the oldest Greek colony on the Italian mainland, famous for its Sibyl, the prophetess consulted from across the ancient world; and further south they raised Paestum, whose three Doric temples are among the best preserved in the Greek world.
From the same Greek orbit came the city that would give the Neapolitan region its name: around the 6th century BC, colonists founded Parthenope and then Neapolis, the "new city", the origin of present-day Naples. For centuries these Hellenic cities were centres of trade, philosophy and art, in contact and in conflict with the Etruscans to the north and with the Italic peoples of the interior, such as the Samnites.
Magna Graecia left a deep mark on all later civilisation: it was through these colonies that Rome — and with it all of Europe — absorbed much of Greek culture, mythology, alphabet and philosophy. The temples of Paestum, the acropolis of Cumae and the treasures in the museums of Naples and Reggio bear witness to that brilliant world which flourished in southern Italy centuries before Rome dominated the Mediterranean.
With the Roman conquest, Campania became one of the richest and most coveted regions in Italy. Its climate, its fertile land and the beauty of the Bay of Naples made it the favourite summer retreat of the Roman aristocracy, who filled the bay with pleasure villas. On its slopes, trading cities such as Pompeii and Herculaneum prospered, and the emperor Tiberius found an imperial retreat on the island of Capri.
On 24 October — or, by the dating most accepted today, 24 August — in the year AD 79, Vesuvius erupted catastrophically. Within hours, a rain of ash and pumice and then surges of burning gas buried Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae, killing thousands of people. The disaster was described in two famous letters by Pliny the Younger, whose uncle, the naturalist Pliny the Elder, died trying to rescue the population. The cities lay buried and forgotten for centuries.
Their rediscovery and excavation, from the 18th century, was a revelation to the world: under the ash, streets, houses, shops, paintings, mosaics and even casts of the victims' bodies had been preserved, a unique snapshot of Roman daily life. Pompeii and Herculaneum, World Heritage Sites, are today the most famous archaeological sites on the planet, and Vesuvius — the only active volcano in continental Europe, which threatens the three million people living at its foot — still keeps watch over the Bay of Naples.
After the fall of Rome, Naples was a Byzantine duchy and then an autonomous city, until in the 12th century it was absorbed into the Norman kingdom of the south. From then on, Naples and peninsular southern Italy formed a kingdom that passed through many hands: the Normans, the Swabian dynasty of Frederick II — one of the most fascinating rulers of the Middle Ages, a patron and a man of science — the French Angevins, who made Naples their capital, and then the Aragonese. Under Alfonso V of Aragon, in the 15th century, Naples was a splendid Renaissance court.
Through the 16th and 17th centuries, Naples was the capital of a Spanish viceroyalty and one of the largest cities in Europe, a crowded, creative ferment that produced painters such as Caravaggio (who worked there) and Ribera, and that saw episodes such as Masaniello's popular revolt (1647) against Spanish taxes. In 1734 the city regained its status as capital of a kingdom of its own under a branch of the Bourbons, who drove works such as the immense palace of Caserta, the San Carlo opera house and the first excavations at Pompeii.
That kingdom, joined with Sicily, took the name Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the largest of the Italian states before unification. It was a kingdom of contrasts: a brilliant, populous capital and a vast backward, feudal interior. In 1860, Garibaldi's expedition brought it down in a matter of weeks: the landing in Sicily, the march north and the triumphal entry into Naples ended the Bourbon dynasty and handed the whole south to the new kingdom of Italy. For the Mezzogiorno, however, unification did not bring prosperity but the beginning of the long "southern question".
On the steep coast south of the Bay of Naples, a small port wedged between mountains and sea was, in the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries, the first of Italy's great maritime republics: Amalfi. Before Venice or Genoa, Amalfitan merchants sailed the Mediterranean trading with Byzantium, Egypt and the Islamic world; they had colonies in Constantinople and the Holy Land, and they are credited with spreading — though not inventing — the use of the compass in Mediterranean navigation. Their Amalfitan Tables were one of the first maritime law codes in Europe.
Amalfi's splendour was as intense as it was brief. In 1073 it fell to the Normans, and in the 12th century it was sacked by its rival Pisa; a tidal wave in 1343 destroyed much of the port. The republic disappeared, absorbed into the southern kingdom, and Amalfi was reduced to a quiet fishing village, with its Byzantine-Norman cathedral as a reminder of lost greatness.
That same rugged coast, with its villages hanging above the sea — Positano, Amalfi, Ravello — its terraced lemon groves and its dizzying views, became in modern times the Amalfi Coast, one of the most celebrated landscapes in the world, a refuge for artists, writers and travellers since the Grand Tour and today a World Heritage Site. The beauty of the coast hides the memory of that republic which, a thousand years ago, was one of the powers of the Mediterranean.
For the south, the unification of 1861 was an annexation rather than an integration. The new Italian state imposed the north's laws, taxes and model on the Mezzogiorno, dismantled the few Bourbon industries and harshly repressed the rural resistance of the brigantaggio. The result was the "southern question": a deep gap between a north that was industrialising and an agrarian south, impoverished and dominated by great estates, which felt it was being treated as an internal colony. That imbalance, never fully closed, is one of the keys to understanding contemporary Italy.
Out of that poverty came the great emigration. Between the end of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, millions of peasants from Campania, Calabria, Sicily and Basilicata left their villages for the Americas. A great many reached Argentina and Uruguay: Neapolitans, Calabrians and Sicilians filled the tenements of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, worked in the port, in the factories and in the fields, and left behind in the Río de la Plata their food, their music and much of the everyday vocabulary. For many River Plate families, southern Italy is, literally, the land of their grandparents.
Against that background of a weak state and poverty, the camorra also took root, the Neapolitan criminal organisation, one of the Italian mafias alongside the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta. Born in the underworld of the 19th century, the camorra infiltrated commerce, construction, waste trafficking and politics, and bloodied Naples and its province with wars between clans. The phenomenon, denounced with courage by journalists and magistrates, remains an open wound in the south; it is worth looking at without folklore or sensationalism, for what it is: a serious criminal and social problem that Italian institutions have been fighting for decades.