History of Italy

Prehistory and antiquity

Thousands of Lower Paleolithic artefacts have been recovered from Monte Poggiolo, dating as far back as 850,000 years.

Excavations throughout Italy revealed a Neanderthal presence dating back to the Middle Palaeolithic period some 200,000 years ago, while modern humans appeared about 40,000 years ago at Riparo Mochi.

Archaeological sites from this period include Addaura cave, Altamura, Ceprano, and Gravina in Puglia.

The Ancient peoples of pre-Roman Italy – such as the Umbrians, the Latins, Volsci, Oscans, Samnites, Sabines, the Celts, the Ligures, the Veneti, the Iapygians, and many others – were Indo-European peoples, most of them specifically of the Italic group.

The main historic peoples of possible non-Indo-European or pre-Indo-European heritage include the Etruscans of central and northern Italy, the Elymians and the Sicani in Sicily, and the prehistoric Sardinians, who gave birth to the Nuragic civilisation.
Other ancient populations being of undetermined language families and of possible non-Indo-European origin include the Rhaetian people and Cammuni, known for their rock carvings in Valcamonica, the largest collections of prehistoric petroglyphs in the world.

Etruschi: descrizione ed eventi di questa storica civiltà — Etruschi

A well-preserved natural mummy known as Ötzi the Iceman, determined to be 5,000 years old (between 3400 and 3100 BCE, Copper Age), was discovered in the Similaun glacier of South Tyrol in 1991.

Ötzi the Iceman: What we know 30 years after his discovery — Otzi

The first foreign colonisers were the Phoenicians, who initially established colonies and founded various emporiums on the coasts of Sicily and Sardinia. Some of these soon became small urban centres and were developed parallel to the ancient Greek colonies; among the main centres there were the cities of Motya, Zyz (modern Palermo), Soluntum in Sicily, and Nora, Sulci, and Tharros in Sardinia.

Between the 17th and the 11th centuries BC Mycenaean Greeks established contacts with Italy and in the 8th and 7th centuries BC a number of Greek colonies were established all along the coast of Sicily and the southern part of the Italian Peninsula, that became known as Magna Graecia.

Ionian settlers founded Elaia, Kyme, Rhegion, Naxos, Zankles, Hymera, and Katane. Doric colonists founded Taras, Syrakousai, Megara Hyblaia, Leontinoi, Akragas, Ghelas; the Syracusans founded Ankón and Adria; the megarese founded Selinunte.
The Achaeans founded Sybaris, Poseidonia, Kroton, Lokroi Epizephyrioi, and Metapontum; tarantini and thuriots found Herakleia.

The Greek colonization placed the Italic peoples in contact with democratic forms of government and with high artistic and cultural expressions.

The Roman Empire

After Etruscan, Latin and Sabine cultures, as well as Celtic settlements, Greek and Phoenician–Carthaginian colonies, ancient Italy was federated by the Roman Republic and became the center of the Roman Empire.

Siti Archeologici più belli da visitare e vedere a Roma | Lazio Nascosto A first administrative regulation in regions was given by Caesar Augustus (27 BC-14 AD).

In the following centuries it became a land with a Christian majority, abandoning the ancient polytheism, between the promulgation of the edict of Milan, which guaranteed freedom of worship, and that of the edict of Thessalonica, which imposed to follow the religion of the bishop of Rome.

With the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Italy was invaded by barbarian armies from Northern Europe: the Heruli of Odoacer, the Ostrogoths of Theodoric, the Byzantines of Justinian, and the Lombards of Alboin.

Barbarian Kingdoms

After the invasion of Italy by the Babaris (Heruli, Ostrogoths, Byzantines and the Lombards) the process of political division was:

– southern Italy was disputed between the Longobards, Byzantines and Saracens
– the central one was consolidated as the Papal State;
– the north was incorporated by Charlemagne into the Holy Roman Empire with the coronation of the latter by Pope Leo III in the year 800.

With the humiliation of Canossa (1077) first and the peace of Venice (1177) then, the Pope weakened the Germanic Emperor, favoring the rise of autonomous Communes in imperial Italy.

Quali sono le Repubbliche marinare? - FocusJunior.it Among these, the maritime republics of Genoa, Venice, Pisa and Amalfi acquired great weight during the crusades, which caused a commercial and mercantile revolution throughout Italy.

At the same time, the South was unified in the kingdom of Sicily by the Norman Vikings. Through dynastic interweaving, the crown of Sicily and the imperial diadem both came to Frederick II of Swabia, who was at the head of an empire that expanded into the Baltic countries and the Holy Land, but which fell apart after the failure of the absolutist project to dominate all Italy for the resistance of the Papal State, southern barons and central-northern Municipalities.

Renaissance

Il Rinascimento: innovazione artistica - FineArt by Di Mano in Mano

After the dramatic crises of the fourteenth century, the peninsula experienced a new era of economic and cultural prosperity between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a period known as the Renaissance.

Due to its wealth and centrality in European affairs, it became the main battlefield of the Italian Wars, which involved the main powers of the time, including the Kingdom of France, the Germanic Empire, the Spanish Empire, the Confederation Helvetica, England and the Ottoman Empire.

On a cultural level, Italy then experienced the Counter-Reformation, the Baroque and Neoclassicism.

After the Napoleonic parenthesis, the Italians fought for their independence and unification in a series of wars under the leadership of the Savoy Kingdom of Sardinia, occupying the north, directly or indirectly subjected to the Austrian Habsburgs, and the Two Sicilies, governed by the Bourbons of Naples, a cadet branch of the Bourbons of Spain. Rome, in the midst of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), was made the capital at the end of the Risorgimento.

Unification

161 anni fa l'unificazione dell'Italia - Ermes

The unification of Italy, also known as the Risorgimento, was the 19th-century political and social movement that resulted in the consolidation of different states of the Italian Peninsula into a single state in 1861, the Kingdom of Italy. Inspired by the rebellions in the 1820s and 1830s against the outcome of the Congress of Vienna, the unification process was precipitated by the Revolutions of 1848, and reached completion in 1871 after the Capture of Rome and its designation as the capital of the Kingdom of Italy.

Some of the states that had been targeted for unification (terre irredente) did not join the Kingdom of Italy until 1918 after Italy defeated Austria-Hungary in the First World War. For this reason, historians sometimes describe the unification period as continuing past 1871, including activities during the late 19th century and the First World War (1915–1918), and reaching completion only with the Armistice of Villa Giusti on 4 November 1918.

Kingdom of Italy

The Kingdom of Italy was a state that existed from 17 March 1861, when Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia was proclaimed King of Italy, until 2 June 1946.

The state resulted from a decades-long process, the Risorgimento, of consolidating the different states of the Italian Peninsula into a single state. That process was influenced by the Savoy-led Kingdom of Sardinia, which can be considered Italy’s legal predecessor state.

In 1866, Italy declared war on Austria in alliance with Prussia and received the region of Veneto following their victory. Italian troops entered Rome in 1870, ending more than one thousand years of Papal temporal power.

Italy entered into a Triple Alliance with the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1882, following strong disagreements with France about their respective colonial expansions.

Although relations with Berlin became very friendly, the alliance with Vienna remained purely formal, due in part to Italy’s desire to acquire Trentino and Trieste from Austria-Hungary.

As a result, Italy accepted the British invitation to join the Allied Powers during World War I, as the western powers promised territorial compensation (at the expense of Austria-Hungary) for participation that was more generous than Vienna’s offer in exchange for Italian neutrality.

Victory in the war gave Italy a permanent seat in the Council of the League of Nations.

In 1922, Benito Mussolini became prime minister of Italy, ushering in an era of National Fascist Party government known as “Fascist Italy“.

The Italian Fascists imposed totalitarian rule and crushed the political and intellectual opposition while promoting economic modernization, traditional social values, and a rapprochement with the Roman Catholic Church through the Lateran Treaties which created the Vatican City as a rump sovereign replacement for the Papal States.

In the late 1930s, the Fascist government began a more aggressive foreign policy.

This included war against Ethiopia, launched from Italian Eritrea and Italian Somaliland, which resulted in its annexation;confrontations with the League of Nations, leading to sanctions; growing economic autarky; and the signing of the Pact of Steel.

Fascist Italy became a leading member of the Axis powers in World War II.

By 1943, the German-Italian defeat on multiple fronts and the subsequent Allied landings in Sicily led to the fall of the Fascist regime.

Mussolini was placed under arrest by order of the King Victor Emmanuel III. The new government signed an armistice with the Allies on September 1943. German forces occupied northern and central Italy, setting up the Italian Social Republic, a collaborationist puppet state still led by Mussolini and his Fascist loyalists. As a consequence, the country descended into civil war, with the Italian Co-belligerent Army and the resistance movement contending with the Social Republic’s forces and its German allies.

Shortly after the war and the country’s liberation, civil discontent led to the institutional referendum on whether Italy would remain a monarchy or become a republic. Italians decided to abandon the monarchy and form the Italian Republic, the present-day Italian state.

Republic Era

Italy became a republic after the 1946 Italian institutional referendum held on 2 June 1946, a day celebrated since as Festa della Repubblica.
This was the first time that Italian women voted at the national level, and the second time overall considering the local elections that were held a few months earlier in some cities.
Victor Emmanuel III‘s son, Umberto II, was forced to abdicate and exiled.
The Republican Constitution was approved on 1 January 1948.
The Italian border that applies today has existed since 1975, when Trieste was formally re-annexed to Italy.

Fears of a possible Communist takeover proved crucial for the first universal suffrage electoral outcome on 18 April 1948, when the Christian Democrats, obtained a landslide victory.
Consequently, in 1949 Italy became a member of NATO.

In the 1950’s, Italy became one of the six founding countries of the European Communities, following the 1952 establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community, and subsequent 1958 creations of the European Economic Community and European Atomic Energy Community.
In 1993, the former two of these were incorporated into the European Union

In the early 1990s, Italy faced significant challenges, as voters – disenchanted with political paralysis, massive public debt and the extensive corruption system (known as Tangentopoli) uncovered by the Clean Hands (Mani Pulite) investigation – demanded radical reforms.

The scandals involved all major parties, but especially those in the government coalition: the Christian Democrats, who ruled for almost 50 years, underwent a severe crisis and eventually disbanded, splitting up into several factions.

During the 1990s and the 2000s, centre-right (dominated by media magnate Silvio Berlusconi) and centre-left coalitions (led by university professor Romano Prodi) alternately governed the country.

Amidst the Great Recession, Berlusconi resigned in 2011, and his conservative government was replaced by the technocratic cabinet of Mario Monti.

Following the 2013 general election, the Vice-Secretary of the Democratic Party Enrico Letta formed a new government at the head of a right-left Grand coalition.

In 2014, challenged by the new Secretary of the PD Matteo Renzi, Letta resigned and was replaced by Renzi.
On 4 December the constitutional reform was rejected in a referendum and Renzi resigned; the Foreign Affairs Minister Paolo Gentiloni was appointed new Prime Minister.

The 2018 general election was characterised by a strong showing of the Five Star Movement and the League and the university professor Giuseppe Conte became the Prime Minister at the head of a populist coalition between these two parties.
However, after only fourteen months the League withdrew its support to Conte, who formed a new unprecedented government coalition between the Five Star Movement and the centre-left.

In 2020, Italy was severely hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.
From March to May, Conte’s government imposed a national lockdown as a measure to limit the spread of the disease, while further restrictions were introduced during the following winter.
The measures, despite being widely approved by the public opinion, were also described as the largest suppression of constitutional rights in the history of the republic.
With more than 155,000 confirmed victims, Italy was one of the countries with the highest total number of deaths in the worldwide coronavirus pandemic. The pandemic caused also a severe economic disruption, in which Italy resulted as one of the most affected countries.

In February 2021, after a government crisis within his majority, Conte was forced to resign and Mario Draghi, former president of the European Central Bank, formed a national unity government supported by almost all the main parties, pledging to oversee implementation of economic stimulus to face the crisis caused by the pandemic.
On 22 October 2022, Giorgia Meloni was sworn in as Italy’s first female prime minister. Her Brothers of Italy party formed a right-wing government with the far-right League and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia.