A short history of Italy

Before Rome

Long before Rome, the peninsula was a mosaic of peoples. In Sardinia the Nuragic civilisation raised thousands of stone towers from about 1800 BC: more than seven thousand still dot the island, the best known at Barumini. In the north, the rock carvings of Valcamonica record eight thousand years of life in the Alps. From the eighth century BC Greek settlers founded cities along the southern coasts, a world the Romans later called Magna Graecia: the temples of Paestum and Agrigento are better preserved than most in Greece itself. Between the Arno and the Tiber the Etruscans built cities on tufa hills, traded across the Mediterranean and painted the tombs you can visit at Tarquinia and Cerveteri.

Rome

Tradition dates the founding of Rome to 753 BC. In five centuries a town of shepherds on the Tiber conquered the peninsula, defeated Carthage and made the Mediterranean a Roman lake. The Republic gave way to the Empire with Augustus in 27 BC. Rome left Italy its roads, many of them still traced by modern highways, its language and its law, and remains almost everywhere: the Forum and the Colosseum in the capital, Pompeii and Herculaneum sealed by Vesuvius in AD 79, the arena of Verona, the gates of Aosta, the mosaics of Aquileia. The western empire ended in 476, when a Germanic general deposed the last emperor.

The Middle Ages

After Rome, Italy was divided for fourteen centuries. Goths, Byzantines and Lombards fought over it; Ravenna, capital of the Byzantine governors, keeps the finest mosaics in Europe. The popes came to rule a state across the centre. In the south, Arabs took Sicily and Normans united it with the mainland in a kingdom whose churches in Palermo and Monreale mix Latin, Greek and Islamic art. From the eleventh century the towns of the north and centre governed themselves as free communes, while four maritime republics, Amalfi, Pisa, Genoa and Venice, grew rich on trade with the East. This is the age of the cathedrals, of the towers of San Gimignano, of Saint Francis at Assisi and of Dante.

The Renaissance and the signorie

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries most communes fell into the hands of a single family: the Medici in Florence, the Visconti and Sforza in Milan, the Este in Ferrara, the Gonzaga in Mantua, the Montefeltro in Urbino. These lords competed in splendour as much as in war, and their courts paid for the Renaissance. Brunelleschi raised the dome of Florence, Leonardo painted the Last Supper in Milan, Michelangelo the Sistine ceiling in Rome. The ideal town of Pienza and the ducal palace of Urbino show the age at its purest.

Foreign rule

Wealth without unity made Italy a prize. From 1494 French and Spanish armies fought over the peninsula; Rome itself was sacked in 1527. By 1559 Spain held Milan, Naples, Sicily and Sardinia, and kept them for a century and a half. Venice, Genoa and the papal state remained independent. It was the age of the Counter-Reformation and of the Baroque: Bernini and Borromini in Rome, the churches of Lecce, the towns of south-eastern Sicily rebuilt after the earthquake of 1693. In the eighteenth century Austria replaced Spain in the north, and the Bourbons took Naples.

The Enlightenment and Napoleon

The eighteenth century brought reforming rulers and the travellers of the Grand Tour, who came to see Venice, Florence, Rome and the newly discovered Pompeii. Tuscany was the first state in the world to abolish the death penalty, in 1786. Then came Napoleon, who invaded in 1796, ended the thousand-year Republic of Venice, redrew the map and gave northern Italy a tricolour flag. After his fall the old rulers returned in 1815, but the idea of a single country did not go away.

Unification and the southern question

The Risorgimento, the movement for unity, had three protagonists: Mazzini the republican conspirator, Cavour the Piedmontese prime minister, and Garibaldi, who in 1860 sailed from Genoa with a thousand volunteers and conquered Sicily and Naples. The Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in Turin on 17 March 1861 under the House of Savoy. Venice joined in 1866 and Rome in 1870. Unity did not bring equality. The gap between an industrialising north and a poor, rural south, known as the southern question, pushed millions to emigrate to the Americas between 1880 and 1914.

Fascism and the two world wars

Italy fought the First World War on the side of the Allies, at the cost of six hundred thousand dead on the Alpine front. In the turmoil that followed, Benito Mussolini took power in 1922 and built a dictatorship that lasted twenty years. He allied with Hitler, passed racial laws in 1938 and entered the Second World War in 1940. The regime fell in 1943; the country was split between the advancing Allies in the south and German occupation in the north, where a partisan Resistance fought until the liberation of 25 April 1945, still a national holiday.

The Republic

On 2 June 1946 Italians, with women voting for the first time, chose a republic over the monarchy. The constitution came into force in 1948. Italy was a founding member of what became the European Union, with the treaty signed in Rome in 1957, and in the years of the economic miracle a farming country became one of the world's main industrial powers. The decades since have seen political terrorism in the 1970s, the fight against the mafia, the end of the old parties in the early 1990s and the adoption of the euro in 2002.

Art and architecture

No country has more UNESCO World Heritage sites. Every age left its layer, often in the same square: Greek temples in the south, Roman theatres, Byzantine mosaics, Romanesque cathedrals in Pisa and Modena, Gothic in Siena and Milan, the Renaissance in Florence, the Baroque in Rome, Turin and Lecce, the Liberty style of the early twentieth century. The best way to read this history is on foot, in the towns described in this guide.

Famous Italians

A short list is bound to be unfair. Poets and writers: Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Manzoni. Artists: Giotto, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Caravaggio. Scientists: Galileo, Volta, Marconi, Fermi. Explorers: Marco Polo, Columbus, Vespucci, who gave his name to a continent. Composers: Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Rossini, Verdi, Puccini. Many towns keep the house where one of them was born, and it is often the best reason to stop.