Overview
Italy, the Mediterranean peninsula centered on Rome, was the heart of the Roman world and later the birthplace of the Renaissance. Its long history reaches from the peoples of the pre-Roman peninsula down to the modern republic.
The major eras
In the 1st millennium BC the peninsula was home to the Etruscans of central Italy and to the Greek colonies of the south known as Magna Graecia. From this world rose Rome — a Kingdom traditionally from 753 BC, a Republic from 509 BC, and an Empire from 27 BC — which came to rule the whole Mediterranean, until the Western Roman Empire fell in AD 476. The medieval peninsula was fragmented among the Papal States, a Norman and Byzantine south, and the communes and maritime republics of the north such as Venice and Genoa. The Italian Renaissance flowered in the 14th to 16th centuries in cities like Florence, under patrons such as the Medici and artists such as Leonardo and Michelangelo. Centuries of Spanish and then Austrian domination followed, until the Risorgimento unified the peninsula as the Kingdom of Italy in 1861, with Rome added in 1870. The kingdom passed through the First World War, Fascism under Mussolini, and the Second World War; then, after a referendum in 1946, Italy became a republic — a founding member of NATO and of the European Communities, and a G7 economy.