Italy

TL;DR. Italy is one of the oldest places in European history but one of the youngest countries. The ancient city of Rome grew into a vast empire that shaped the whole Western world, but after Rome fell the Italian peninsula broke into many separate states for more than a thousand years: rich city-states like Venice and Florence, the Pope's own territory in the center, and kingdoms in the south. The Renaissance, the great rebirth of art and learning, was born here. For centuries foreign powers fought over a divided Italy, until a movement called the Risorgimento finally united it into one nation around 1861 to 1870. In the twentieth century Italy lived through the original Fascism under Benito Mussolini, fought in both World Wars, switched sides in the second, and afterward became a democratic republic. Today Italy is a founding member of the European Union, world famous for its art, food, design, and style, and home to the independent Vatican City, the center of the Roman Catholic Church.

Key takeaways

• Ancient Rome is Italy's deep foundation, but the country called Italy is young, united only in the 1860s. The two should not be confused.
• For over a thousand years the peninsula was divided into competing city-states, the Pope's lands, and southern kingdoms, often ruled or fought over by foreigners.
• The Renaissance, the rebirth of art and learning that reshaped Europe, began in Italy, above all in Florence under wealthy families like the Medici.
• Italy was united through the Risorgimento, with figures like Garibaldi, Cavour, and King Victor Emmanuel II, and with French help against Austria.
• Fascism began in Italy under Mussolini in 1922. Italy joined the Axis with Germany and Japan in World War II, then switched to the Allies in 1943, leading to a civil war.
• Modern Italy is a democratic republic, a founding member of the EU, and the home of Vatican City, a tiny independent state inside Rome.

Main events at a glance

The land and the deep past

Italy is easy to spot on a map: a long boot-shaped peninsula reaching down into the Mediterranean Sea, with the island of Sicily near its toe and the island of Sardinia off to the west. Down the middle runs a spine of mountains, the Apennines, and along the northern border rise the high Alps. Between the Alps and the Apennines lies the broad, fertile valley of the Po River, the country's farming and industrial heartland. The rest of the land is a patchwork of hills, coastal plains, and volcanoes, including Vesuvius near Naples and Etna in Sicily. The sea is never far away, and for thousands of years it carried trade, settlers, and armies to Italy's shores.

This geography helps explain Italian history. The mountains and the sea divided the peninsula into many regions that were hard to govern as one, which is part of why Italy stayed split for so long. The same position in the center of the Mediterranean made Italy a crossroads, a meeting point of peoples from Europe, Africa, and the Near East.

Long before Rome, central Italy was home to the Etruscans, a people who lived mainly in the area of modern Tuscany. They built prosperous towns, traded across the Mediterranean, made fine metalwork and pottery, and left behind colorful painted tombs. Much about them is still mysterious, including their language, which scholars can read only partly. The Etruscans deeply influenced early Rome, which began as a small town and at first was even ruled by Etruscan kings. Many Roman customs, from religious rituals to forms of dress, had Etruscan roots.

From that small town grew the most famous power of the ancient world. Ancient Rome rose to control the entire Mediterranean and much of Europe, spreading its language (Latin), its law, its roads, and later its Christianity across the West. Because Rome's story is so large and so important to all of European history, it has its own chapter in this book. Rather than repeat it here, this chapter treats ancient Rome as Italy's foundation and picks up the story after the empire fell. For Rome itself, see the chapter on Ancient Europe: Greece and Rome.

Don't be confused: Ancient Rome and modern Italy are not the same thing. The Roman Empire was a Mediterranean superpower that rose and fell long ago and once ruled lands far beyond Italy. The country called Italy is very young, united only in the 1860s. So when someone speaks of "the Romans," they mean the ancient empire, not the modern Italian nation. Italians are proud of Rome as their ancestral past, but they did not live in a single country called Italy until about a century and a half ago.

From city-states to one Italy

When the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the late 400s CE, the peninsula did not become a new single kingdom. Instead it broke apart. Different invaders and rulers came and went, including Germanic peoples and, later, the Byzantines (the surviving eastern half of the Roman world). For the next thousand years and more, there was no country called Italy, only a shifting collection of separate states. This long division is the key fact for understanding Italian history before 1861.

In the Middle Ages, some Italian cities grew enormously rich and powerful by trade and banking, becoming small independent states in their own right. These were the famous city-states and maritime republics. Venice, built on islands in a lagoon, became a sea power and trading empire that linked Europe with the East. Genoa, on the northwest coast, was its great rival on the seas. Inland, Florence grew wealthy from banking and the wool and cloth trade, while Milan dominated much of the north. Each city had its own government, army, money, and fierce local pride, and they often went to war with one another.

In the center of the peninsula lay the Papal States, a band of territory ruled directly by the Pope, the head of the Roman Catholic Church. For more than a thousand years the Pope was not only a religious leader but also a worldly prince with his own lands and armies. This is important: the existence of the Papal States, cutting across the middle of Italy, was one of the obstacles to uniting the country later on.

In the south, the story was different again. The Kingdom of Naples and the Kingdom of Sicily, sometimes joined as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, covered the southern half of the peninsula and the island of Sicily. Over the centuries these southern lands were ruled by a series of outside dynasties, including Normans, Germans, French, and Spanish. The south developed differently from the wealthy, trading north, and the gap between a richer north and a poorer south is a theme that still echoes in Italy today.

The Renaissance, born in Italy

Out of these competing, prosperous city-states came one of the most important cultural movements in world history: the Renaissance, a French word meaning "rebirth." Beginning in the 1300s and flowering through the 1400s and 1500s, it was a great revival of interest in the art, writing, and ideas of ancient Greece and Rome, combined with bold new creativity. It began in Italy, and above all in Florence.

Florence was ruled in practice by the Medici, a fabulously wealthy banking family who used their money to support artists, architects, and scholars. This support, called patronage, helped produce an astonishing burst of genius. Italian artists transformed painting and sculpture, learning to show the human body, emotion, and depth with new realism. The Renaissance then spread from Italy across the rest of Europe, changing art, science, and thought everywhere it went.

Because the Renaissance was a Europe-wide turning point, this book gives it a fuller treatment of its own. For the broader story, including how new ideas, the Reformation, and exploration reshaped the continent, see the chapter on Renaissance, Reformation, and exploration. Here it is enough to say that the Renaissance was, at its heart, an Italian achievement, and that names like Leonardo and Michelangelo, whom we will meet below, belong to this remarkable age.

Centuries of foreign domination

The very wealth and division that made the Italian states brilliant also made them tempting targets. From the late 1400s onward, the larger kingdoms of Europe, especially France and Spain, fought a long series of wars on Italian soil to control the peninsula. The Italian states, divided and often at odds with one another, could not stand up to these big foreign powers.

For much of the 1500s and 1600s, Spain was the dominant force, ruling Milan, Naples, Sicily, and other areas either directly or through allies. Later, much of this control passed to Austria, ruled by the Habsburg family, which came to dominate the north. France too repeatedly intervened, and in the late 1700s and early 1800s the French general and emperor Napoleon swept through Italy, redrawing its map and, for a time, uniting parts of it under French rule.

When Napoleon was finally defeated in 1815, the European powers put Italy back together as a patchwork of separate states, much as before, with Austria again the leading outside power in the north. For Italian patriots, this was a bitter outcome: their homeland was once more divided and partly under foreign control. That frustration helped spark the movement that would finally make Italy a nation.

Big events and conflicts

Italy's path to nationhood and through the twentieth century runs through several wars. For each, it helps to be clear about who allied with whom.

The Risorgimento, the wars of unification (roughly 1848 to 1870). Risorgimento means "the resurgence" or "rising again," and it is the name for the nineteenth-century movement to unite Italy into one country. The key players were the small but ambitious Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont in the northwest, ruled by King Victor Emmanuel II; his clever chief minister, Count Camillo di Cavour, who handled the diplomacy; and the daring soldier and patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi, who led volunteer fighters. Their great obstacle was Austria, which controlled much of northern Italy and opposed unification.

Cavour understood that little Piedmont could not defeat Austria alone, so he sought a powerful ally. He allied with France, then ruled by Napoleon III. In 1859, France and Piedmont fought together against Austria, and their victory allowed Piedmont to take much of the north. Meanwhile, in 1860, Garibaldi sailed south with about a thousand volunteer fighters, known as the Redshirts, and conquered Sicily and Naples, toppling the southern Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. He then handed these lands over to King Victor Emmanuel II.

In 1861, the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed, with Victor Emmanuel II as its first king. Unification was not yet complete: Venice was added in 1866, after a war in which Italy allied with Prussia against Austria. Finally, in 1870, Italian troops took Rome, which had remained under the Pope, protected by France. Rome became the capital, and the Papal States came to an end. With that, modern Italy was, at last, one country.

World War I (1915 to 1918). When the war broke out in 1914, Italy at first stayed neutral, even though it had earlier signed a treaty with Germany and Austria-Hungary. In 1915, after secret negotiations and promises of territory, Italy entered the war on the side of the Allies, fighting against Austria-Hungary and Germany. Its main enemy was neighboring Austria-Hungary, and the fighting in the northern mountains was brutal and costly. Italy ended the war on the winning side, but it gained less than its leaders had hoped, and the war left the country exhausted, indebted, and bitter. This disappointment helped feed the rise of Fascism.

The rise of Fascism (1922). It is important to state plainly that Fascism began in Italy. In the troubled years after World War I, with economic hardship, unemployment, and fear of revolution, a former journalist named Benito Mussolini built a movement of black-shirted followers who used violence against their opponents and promised to restore order and national greatness. In 1922, after a show of force known as the March on Rome, the king appointed Mussolini head of government. Over the following years Mussolini dismantled democracy, banned other parties, silenced the press, and turned Italy into a one-party dictatorship. He took the title Il Duce, "the leader." His system, called Fascism, glorified the nation and the state above the individual, crushed opposition, and would later inspire and lend its name to similar movements elsewhere, including in Nazi Germany.

World War II (1940 to 1945). Mussolini allied Italy with Nazi Germany. In 1940 Italy entered World War II on the side of the Axis powers, joined with Germany and, on the other side of the world, Japan. They fought against the Allies, including Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States, and others. The war went badly for Italy. Its armies suffered defeats in Africa, Greece, and Russia, and the country was poorly prepared for a long conflict.

In 1943, with Allied forces landing in Sicily and southern Italy, the Italian system cracked from within. Mussolini was removed from power in July 1943, arrested on the king's orders, and the new Italian government switched sides, joining the Allies against Germany. The Germans responded by occupying northern and central Italy and rescuing Mussolini, who set up a puppet Fascist state in the north under German protection. The result was a painful split: the south and the official government fought alongside the Allies, while the German-occupied north was the scene of a bitter civil war. On one side were the Fascists and the Germans; on the other, an armed resistance movement, the partisans, who fought to free the country. The war in Italy ended in 1945. Mussolini, trying to flee, was captured and killed by partisans in April 1945.

After the war. Italy emerged from the war defeated, divided, and impoverished, but also having played a real part, through its resistance, in its own liberation. In 1946 the Italian people voted in a referendum to abolish the monarchy, which had been tainted by its cooperation with Fascism, and Italy became a republic. From the rubble it would build a new democracy.

How people lived: daily life and lifestyle

Because Italy was made of many states for so long, regional identity runs very deep. People often feel a strong loyalty to their own city or region first, and to Italy as a whole second. A person may think of themselves as Sicilian, Venetian, Neapolitan, or Tuscan in a way that shapes their dialect, food, festivals, and pride. Local dialects can differ so much that they are almost separate languages, though standard Italian, based on the Tuscan of Florence, is shared across the country.

One of the deepest divides is between the north and the south. The industrial north, around cities like Milan and Turin, is generally wealthier, while much of the south has historically been poorer and more rural. This north-south gap has shaped politics, migration, and daily life since unification, and bridging it remains an ongoing challenge.

Family and food sit at the center of Italian life. Strong family ties are a famous part of the culture, with relatives often staying close and gathering around long, leisurely meals. A beloved everyday ritual is the passeggiata, an unhurried evening stroll through town to see neighbors, chat, and enjoy the open air. Coffee culture is just as cherished: a quick espresso standing at the bar, taken at set times of day, is part of the rhythm of life, and Italians have firm ideas about how and when coffee should be drunk.

Other passions bind the country together. Football (called calcio) is a national obsession, and the fortunes of local and national teams stir deep emotion. Italians also share a strong attachment to local tradition, from saints' day festivals to the careful, proud making of regional foods and wines. The result is a way of life that values beauty, pleasure, good food, and human connection, often summed up in the phrase la dolce vita, "the sweet life."

Music and the arts

Italy's contribution to the arts is one of the richest of any nation on Earth.

Italy is, above all, the home of opera, a dramatic art form that combines singing, orchestra, and theater, and which was invented in Italy around 1600. In the 1800s, Giuseppe Verdi composed operas, such as Aida and La Traviata, that became beloved worldwide, and his music also became a kind of anthem for Italian unity. Around 1900, Giacomo Puccini wrote some of the most popular operas ever, including La Bohème and Tosca. Many of the words used in music everywhere, like piano, forte, and tempo, are Italian, a sign of how central Italy has been to Western music.

In the visual arts, Italy's Renaissance and Baroque achievements are world treasures. Renaissance masters reshaped painting and sculpture, and the later Baroque style, dramatic, grand, and emotional, filled Italy's churches and palaces with sweeping ceilings, fountains, and statues. The works of these centuries fill the museums and squares of Italy and draw visitors from across the globe.

In modern times, Italy became a great center of cinema. After World War II, Italian directors led a movement called neorealism, telling honest stories of ordinary life. The director Federico Fellini became famous worldwide for his imaginative, dreamlike films. Italy is also a global capital of design and fashion: the city of Milan is one of the world's fashion centers, and Italian names in clothing, cars, and furniture are bywords for style and craftsmanship. From sports cars to elegant clothing, "made in Italy" carries a reputation for beauty and quality.

Notable people

• Dante Alighieri (around 1265 to 1321). The Florentine poet whose great work, the Divine Comedy, is one of the masterpieces of world literature. By writing in the everyday Italian of his region rather than Latin, he helped shape the Italian language itself, and he is often called the father of Italian.
• Leonardo da Vinci (1452 to 1519). The supreme example of the "Renaissance man," a painter, inventor, scientist, and engineer of boundless curiosity. He painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with designs and studies far ahead of his time.
• Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475 to 1564). A towering sculptor, painter, and architect. He carved the statue of David, painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, and helped design St. Peter's Basilica.
• Galileo Galilei (1564 to 1642). A scientist and astronomer often called a father of modern science. Using the newly improved telescope, he gathered evidence that the Earth orbits the Sun, which brought him into conflict with the Church of his day.
• Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807 to 1882). The bold soldier and patriot whose volunteer fighters conquered the south and helped unite Italy. He is honored as one of the great heroes of the Risorgimento.
• Count Camillo di Cavour (1810 to 1861) and King Victor Emmanuel II (1820 to 1878). The shrewd statesman and the king under whom the many Italian states were finally joined into one kingdom in 1861.
• Benito Mussolini (1883 to 1945). It is necessary to name him honestly as the founder of Fascism and the dictator who led Italy into alliance with Nazi Germany and into World War II. He is remembered not as a hero but as the author of dictatorship and disaster, and he was killed by partisans in 1945.

Religion, coexistence, and minorities

For most of its history Italy has been overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, and the Catholic Church has shaped its art, calendar, festivals, and daily customs more deeply than almost anywhere else. This is no accident: Rome is the historic center of the worldwide Catholic Church, and the Pope has lived there for nearly two thousand years.

At the heart of Rome sits the Vatican. When Italy took Rome in 1870 and ended the Pope's old territory, the question of the Pope's status stayed unsettled for decades. It was resolved in 1929, when an agreement created Vatican City, a tiny independent state, the smallest country in the world, ruled by the Pope and surrounded entirely by the city of Rome. From there the Pope leads the Roman Catholic Church for more than a billion believers around the globe.

Don't be confused: Italy and the Vatican are two different countries. Italy is the large nation that fills the peninsula, with its capital in Rome. Vatican City is a separate, independent state, only a fraction of a square mile in size, located entirely inside the city of Rome. It is the home of the Pope and the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church. So Rome is unusual: it is the capital of one country and contains another country within it.

Italy also has long-standing minority communities, including a historic Jewish community with roots going back to Roman times, one of the oldest in Europe, which suffered under Fascist racial laws and the wartime occupation. In recent decades immigration has made Italy more diverse than before, with newcomers arriving from Eastern Europe, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia, many of them crossing the Mediterranean. As in many countries, this has brought both new energy and honest debates about how to welcome and integrate new arrivals. While Catholicism remains the cultural backdrop, the share of Italians who actively practice the faith has fallen, and other religions now have a growing presence.

Food: Italy's own table

Few countries are as famous for their cooking as Italy, and Italian food is, above all, regional. There is no single "Italian dish," but rather countless local traditions, each tied to its own area, history, and ingredients. The thread that runs through them is a respect for fresh, simple, high-quality ingredients allowed to shine.

• Pasta. Italy's best-known food comes in a vast number of shapes and forms, from long strands to little stuffed parcels, each often paired with particular sauces according to local custom. Pasta is eaten across the country, but the styles and sauces vary widely from region to region.
• Pizza. The classic pizza, with its thin base, tomato, and cheese, comes from Naples in the south, where it began as humble street food and grew into one of the most popular foods on Earth.
• Risotto. A creamy dish of rice cooked slowly in broth, this is a specialty of the north, especially the rice-growing areas of the Po valley, and shows how different northern cooking can be from the south.
• Olive oil. Pressed from olives grown across the country, this is the foundation of much Italian cooking, used in place of butter in many regions, especially the center and south.
• Espresso and coffee. The strong, small coffee that Italy made famous is both a daily ritual and a point of pride.
• Wines and cheeses. Italy is one of the world's great wine countries, with distinctive regional wines, and it produces a huge range of celebrated cheeses, each tied to its own area and traditions.

Don't be confused: Italian food is its own proud tradition, and it should not be blended together with French cooking or any other. The flavors, ingredients, and dishes of Italy, the pasta, the pizza, the olive oil, the espresso, are distinctly Italian. And within Italy itself, food is intensely local: what people eat in Sicily can be very different from what they eat in Venice or Naples.

Everyday life: relationships, family, and home

In modern Italy, dating and marriage are matters of individual choice, and people often marry later than past generations did. One well-known pattern is that young adults tend to live with their parents longer than in many other countries. Italians sometimes affectionately tease such young people, especially sons who stay close to home, as mammoni, meaning roughly "mama's boys." This reflects both strong family bonds and practical pressures like the cost of housing and finding steady work. Italy also has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, with smaller families now the norm.

The extended family is at the heart of life. Grandparents, parents, children, aunts, uncles, and cousins often stay closely connected, and the long Sunday lunch is a cherished tradition where several generations gather around the table for hours. Children are usually raised with great warmth and indulgence within this close circle, and grandparents play a large role. The nonna, the grandmother, holds a special, respected place, often as the keeper of family recipes and traditions. Pets are common and well loved in many households, especially dogs and cats.

Appearance and presentation matter. The idea of la bella figura, literally "the beautiful figure," means making a good impression through how you dress, behave, and carry yourself. It is less about vanity and more about showing respect for yourself and others by taking care with how you appear. Alongside this, home and food sit at the center of daily life, and inviting someone to share a meal is one of the warmest gestures one can make.

These are general tendencies, not rules, and they vary a great deal between regions, between city and countryside, and between generations. The differences between north and south are especially strong.

School, work, and the economy

Italian children attend free public schooling, moving from primary school through middle school and then to upper secondary school, where students choose among different tracks such as the academic liceo or more technical and vocational schools. Exams matter a great deal, ending with a demanding final school examination (the esame di maturità) and, for many, tough university entrance and final exams. Education is widely respected, and titles such as dottore (for a university graduate) are used with some formality.

Work habits vary by region and sector. A traditional long lunch break in the middle of the day is still common in smaller towns and some businesses, though large cities and modern companies increasingly keep continuous hours. In August, much of the country slows down for summer holidays, and many shops and businesses close for part of the month, a custom linked to the mid-August holiday of Ferragosto. Dealing with public-sector bureaucracy can be slow, with a reputation for paperwork and long procedures.

The economy shows a clear north-south gap. The north is an advanced industrial region, home to manufacturing, engineering, banking, and the famous worlds of fashion and design centered on Milan. Italy is a global leader in clothing, cars, furniture, and machinery, and "made in Italy" is a mark of quality. Food and wine and tourism are major industries across the country. At the same time, Italy carries a high level of public debt, growth has often been slow, and much of the south remains poorer, with higher unemployment, which has long driven migration from south to north and abroad.

Language, idioms, and words to know

The national language is Italian, which grew out of the Tuscan speech of Florence and was shaped by writers like Dante. Across the country there are also many regional dialects and languages, some so different from standard Italian that speakers from distant regions may struggle to understand one another. In a few areas other languages are official too, such as German in parts of the far north.

A few real, well-known Italian expressions:

• In bocca al lupo ("into the wolf's mouth") is a way of wishing someone good luck, a bit like "break a leg." The reply is often crepi il lupo ("may the wolf die").
• Dolce far niente means "the sweetness of doing nothing," the pleasure of relaxed idleness.
• La dolce vita means "the sweet life," a life of enjoyment and ease.

Useful everyday phrases include ciao (an informal "hi" or "bye"), buongiorno ("good day," used as a polite greeting), grazie ("thank you"), and prego (a flexible word meaning "you're welcome," "please," or "go ahead"). Conversation in Italy is often lively and expressive gestures with the hands are a genuine and natural part of communication, used to add emphasis and feeling.

Italy's literary heritage is immense. Dante Alighieri opened his masterpiece, the Divine Comedy, with the famous line Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, "Midway upon the journey of our life," words known to schoolchildren across the country.

Famous places to know

• Rome. The capital and an open-air museum of history, home to the ancient Colosseum and, within it, the independent Vatican, center of the Catholic Church.
• Venice. A city built on water, with canals instead of streets, famous for its gondolas, bridges, and St. Mark's Square.
• Florence. The birthplace of the Renaissance, rich in art and architecture, including Michelangelo's David and the great cathedral with its dome.
• The Amalfi Coast. A stretch of dramatic cliffs and colorful seaside towns in the south, much loved for its beauty.
• Pompeii. An ancient Roman town buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE and preserved in remarkable detail.
• Milan. Italy's business and fashion capital in the north, home to a famous cathedral and to The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci.

Fitting in: visiting, impressing people, and being a good citizen

Visitors are usually welcomed warmly, and a little courtesy goes a long way. Greet people with friendliness, using buongiorno or buonasera ("good evening") when entering a shop or cafe. Dressing well is appreciated, in keeping with la bella figura, and modest, neat dress is expected when visiting churches, where bare shoulders and very short clothing may not be allowed.

Food customs carry their own gentle etiquette. Coffee habits are taken seriously: a cappuccino is generally considered a morning drink, and ordering one after a meal is seen as unusual, while a small espresso after lunch or dinner is normal. Meals tend to be unhurried and served in courses, and lingering at the table is part of the pleasure. Showing respect for family and for food, accepting hospitality graciously, and not rushing your hosts all help make a good impression.

Beyond etiquette, being a good guest means simple, respectful conduct: be patient with bureaucracy, learn a few words of Italian, and treat historic sites with care. Entry and visa rules depend on your nationality and the purpose and length of your stay, and they can change. Always check the current, official requirements with the Italian authorities or your nearest Italian embassy or consulate before traveling. This is general information, not legal advice.

Suggested reading, news, and links

Books. For history, The Pursuit of Italy by David Gilmour is a well-regarded one-volume account of the country and its strong regional differences. Among the great Italian classics are Dante's Divine Comedy and, for modern fiction, the novels of writers such as Italo Calvino and Elena Ferrante. If you are unsure of a title, look for a reputable general history of Italy from an established publisher or university press.

News. International outlets such as the BBC and major international newspapers offer reliable coverage. Leading Italian sources include the newspapers Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica, and the national news agency ANSA, which publishes some material in English.

Links. For travel, the official Italian tourism website is a good starting point (italia.it). For background and country profiles, the BBC country profiles and Britannica (britannica.com) are reputable, stable references. Always confirm official rules, such as visas, through official government sources.

Today, and how to talk about it

Modern Italy is a lively democratic republic and one of the world's larger economies, known for industry, design, tourism, and food. After World War II it experienced a remarkable surge of growth often called the economic miracle, transforming from a war-torn, partly rural country into a modern industrial one in just a couple of decades. Italy was also a founding member of the project that became the European Union, signing the original treaties in 1957, and it remains a central member of that partnership of European nations.

Italian political life has a reputation for instability. Since becoming a republic, Italy has had a great many governments, with coalitions forming and falling often. This sounds dramatic, but it is worth understanding calmly: the frequent changes happen within a stable democratic system, and daily life, the economy, and local government carry on through the turnover at the top.

It is also honest to note the problem of organized crime. Several powerful criminal organizations, the best known being the Mafia in Sicily, have long histories in parts of Italy, especially the south, and have caused real harm through violence, corruption, and extortion. This is a genuine part of the country's story, and the Italian state and many brave officials, judges, and ordinary citizens have fought hard against it, sometimes at the cost of their lives. At the same time, it would be unfair and inaccurate to reduce Italy or southern Italians to the Mafia, which is a criminal minority, not a picture of the country or its people.

When talking about Italy, a few points help keep things accurate and fair. First, remember the difference between ancient Rome and modern Italy: admiring Roman history is fine, but the country itself is young. Second, handle the Fascist era soberly and honestly. Fascism began in Italy and led the country into dictatorship and a disastrous war, and that should be faced plainly, while also remembering the Italians who resisted it and the postwar democracy that replaced it. Third, respect Italy's deep regional variety: there is no single Italy, but many, each with its own voice, food, and pride. Above all, Italy is a country that has given the world an extraordinary inheritance of art, music, science, and beauty, and that continues to live with warmth, style, and a love of the good things in life.

Next we cross the western Mediterranean to two neighboring nations with their own age of global empire and their own long road to democracy: Spain and Portugal. 👉