The Italian Peninsula presents a wide variety of climates: from Alpine to subcontinental.
Central and southern Italy are marked by warm summers and mild, cool winters. The territory is divided into 20 regions, five of which have special status: Valle d’Aosta, Trentino-Alto Adige, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Sicily and Sardinia.
The Etruscans and Greeks constituted Italy’s two major pre-Roman civilizations. Both appeared in or around the 8th century BC, establishing Etruria and Magna Grecia respectively, the former in central Italy and the latter in the south. The Etruscans were organized politically in city-states along an axis running through Tuscany, Umbria and Lazio, whereas the Greeks, who had set out from Greece as such, settled in southern Italy, giving birth to major schools of philosophy, including those of Parmenides and Pythagoras.
The city of Rome grew up out of a settlement of herdsmen and farmers who had taken up residence on the Palatine Hill between the end of the 9th and the beginning of the 7th century BC. Tradition puts the date at 753 BC. Rome became a power in the republican period and consolidated its absolute rule over the “Mare Nostrum” in the Mediterranean.
Julius Caesar took the process further, establishing a full-fledged empire extending from Hadrian’s Wall, almost on the Scottish border, to Persia, as well as taking in vast areas of Sub-Saharan Africa. The Roman Empire remained at the height of its splendor until the death of Marcus Aurelius (180 AD), at which point the Roman Empire sank into its long period of decline lasting until 476 AD, when it collapsed, sacked by the barbarian invasions.
Italy was overrun by a whole series of barbarian tribes in the Middle Ages, meanwhile seeing the appearance on the scene of Charlemagne and his Holy Roman Empire. Cultural and artistic life burgeoned again in the Renaissance, a phenomenon that spread over the whole of Europe but was triggered by the first stirrings of Florentine humanism.
As a cultural movement, it encompassed a resurgence of learning based on ‘Classical antiquity’ classical sources, the development of linear ‘perspective in painting,’ and gradual but widespread ‘history of education’ educational reform. Traditionally, this intellectual transformation has resulted in the Renaissance being viewed as a bridge between the middle ages and the modern era.
From the 16th to the 19th centuries, Italy fell prey to the division of spoils among foreign powers (France and Spain primarily, and Austria and Britain to a lesser extent). The south was long ruled first by the Spanish monarchs and then by the Bourbons, whereas the center of the country continued to be ruled by the popes. In the north, France and Austria vied for Lombardy and Veneto. After an eventful, but brief Napoleonic revolutionary period, which gave Italy a flag and an initial administration by prefects, the country arrived at the Congress of Vienna still split into states and statelets.
The organization imposed on the peninsula by the Congress of Vienna, which split Italy into seven states and placed the north under Austrian control, was repeatedly opposed, up to 1848, by attempts at revolution, largely the work of secret societies, such as the Carbonari. The Risorgimento’s undisputed leading figures included Giuseppe Mazzini, Giuseppe Garibaldi and Camillo Benso di Cavour, whose endeavors led to the unification of part of the Italian nation under the Savoy throne, which annexed to its kingdom first the center and north of the country, from Lombardy to Tuscany, then, after the expedition of Garibaldi’s Thousand, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. At last, after the inhabitants of the conquered areas had voted in favor of annexation in referendums, the first session of the new Italian Parliament in Turin set the seal on the birth of the Kingdom of Italy on March 17, 1861.
Albeit divided over government policy, the political parties shared the great aspiration to complete national unity by winning Rome, which was still under papal rule, and the Veneto, still in Austrian hands. The latter was annexed to the Kingdom of Italy after the Third War of Independence (in 1866), whereas Rome joined the Kingdom of Italy four years later, in 1870, with the breeching of Porta Pia, which marked the end of the Catholic Church’s millenary temporal power. The outbreak of World War I between the Central Empires and the Entente powers in 1914 provided an opportunity for completing the national unification process with Trentino, Venezia Giulia and Istria. Italy joined the Entente coalition against the Central Empires in 1915.
The war effort, which was kept up for three years and cost over 600,000 lives, led the country to victory and the completion of unity, but into a serious crisis as well. The years between 1919 and 1922 saw a period of great political, economic and social instability that paved the way for the rise to power of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Party, which seized leadership of the government with the 1922 march on Rome. From then on, the democratic life of the state was gradually stamped out and a dictatorship set in. In the next few years, Mussolini launched his policy of rapprochement with National Socialist Germany. This political maneuver began with the Rome-Berlin Axis of 1936 and culminated with the military alliance (the 1939 Pact of Steel) between the two countries and Japan.
The military defeats during World War II led to Mussolini’s removal from the government after being placed in a minority at the Grand Council of Fascism meeting held on July 24-25, 1943, and to his subsequent arrest. The reins of government were handed over to Gen. Pietro Badoglio, the deed of unconditional surrender to the Allies was signed the following September. Thus began a dramatic period for Italy, marked by dual occupation, Allied south of Rome and German to the north, and by Mussolini’s founding, again in northern Italy, of the Italian Social Republic. The Allied troops entered Rome in June 1944 and continued their advance northward, jointly with the partisan forces fighting the German occupation achieving the liberation of Italy on April 25, 1945. The Italian people voted in the constitutional referendum held on June 2, 1946 to abolish the monarchy and introduce the Republic. The referendum and the preceding local elections were also the first time that voting rights were extended to women.
The proceedings of the Constituent Assembly, which was elected on the same occasion, led to the drafting of the current constitution, which entered into force on Jan. 1, 1948.
The election for the first republican Parliament was held on April 18,1948 and handed an absolute majority of seats to the Christian Democratic Party, the Catholic party that was to dominate the Italian political scene until the end of the Cold War.
The signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1947 brought Italy back into the international community, by then marked by the bipolar standoff between the two superpowers of the day, the United States and the Soviet Union. The country opted unambiguously for the Western camp by taking a number of important steps, such as subscribing to the Marshall Plan in 1947 and joining the Council of Europe and, above all, the Atlantic Alliance in 1949; an advocate of international brotherhood in the days of Mazzini and a forerunner of the European Union with Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi, Italy was one of the founder members of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951. A member of the UN since 1955, Italy has been one of the countries most committed to the road to European integration, major milestones along which have been laid right here in the peninsula: from the Messina Conference in 1955 and the Venice Conference in 1956 to the historic signing of the Treaties of Rome in 1957, which established the European Economic Community and the European Atomic Energy Community.
1968 brought far-reaching political and social changes in Italy, making a significant impact on its inhabitants’ way of life and mindset. The seventies saw the introduction of major institutional and social reforms, such as the regional administrative system, the divorce law and the abortion law.
The Christian Democratic Party, whose electorate was made up of centrist conservative moderates, dominated post-war political life until 1993: with rare exceptions, the post of prime minister was held by Christian Democrats. In 1992 the numerous corruption scandals and the resulting investigations sent shock waves through the political system. The disintegration of the previous political setup fostered the birth of a new party, ‘Forza Italia,’ which won the 1994 election, taking the center-right coalition into government. The principle of bipolarism and alternation in government of the two lineups asserted itself in this period, which has been dubbed the Second Republic: center-left governments from 1996 to 2001 and a center-right government from 2001 to 2006. The coalition of center-left parties returned to government from 2006 to 2008, whereas the April 2008 election returned the current center-right government led by Silvio Berlusconi, Italian prime minister for the third time.
