Italy
Italy runs 1,200 kilometres into the Mediterranean, a peninsula whose fragmented geography kept it politically divided until 1861 — and whose city-states, competing rather than combining, produced the Renaissance.
- Capital
- Rome
- Region
- Southern Europe
- Area
- 301,336 km²
Geography
Italy covers about 301,000 square kilometres, shaped by two mountain systems. The Alps close the northern border with France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia, while the Apennines run the length of the peninsula like a spine, leaving narrow coastal plains on either side.
The exception is the Po valley in the north, the country's largest lowland and its industrial and agricultural heartland. Italy is also volcanically alive in a way few European countries are: Vesuvius buried Pompeii in AD 79 and still overlooks Naples, while Etna in Sicily, at roughly 3,300 metres, is among the most active volcanoes on earth. Two independent states, San Marino and Vatican City, sit entirely within Italian territory.
History
Rome grew from a city on the Tiber into a republic and then an empire that ringed the Mediterranean, and whose language, law and administrative habits outlived it everywhere in Europe. The Western Empire ended in 476.
What followed was not a successor state but a thousand years of plurality — maritime republics at Venice and Genoa, duchies and papal territories, Spanish and Austrian rule in turn. The competition between these small states, each wanting the best architects and painters, is the practical explanation for the Renaissance.
Unification, the Risorgimento, came only in 1861, with Rome added in 1870 and made the capital the following year. Fascism under Mussolini lasted from 1922 until the collapse of 1943; Italians voted the monarchy out and the republic in by referendum in June 1946.
Literary heritage
Italian as a literary language was effectively chosen by one man. Dante wrote the Divine Comedy in Tuscan rather than Latin, finishing it shortly before his death in 1321, and the dialect he used became the basis of the national language six centuries before there was a nation to speak it.
Petrarch gave Europe the sonnet sequence and Boccaccio, in the Decameron, gave it the frame narrative — ten young people fleeing the plague and telling stories to pass the time. Manzoni's The Betrothed, published in the 1820s and endlessly revised, did for the modern language something like what Dante had done for the medieval one.
Post-war writing is dominated by witness and invention in equal measure: Primo Levi's If This Is a Man, an account of Auschwitz written with a chemist's precision, and Italo Calvino's fables and puzzles, which took the novel somewhere entirely different.