History of Italy

Italy has been inhabited by humans since the Paleolithic. During antiquity, there were many peoples in the Italian peninsula, including Etruscans, Latins, Samnites, Umbri, Cisalpine Gauls, Greeks in Magna Graecia and others. Most significantly, Italy was the cradle of the Roman civilization. Rome was founded as a kingdom in 753 BC and became a republic in 509 BC. The Roman Republic then unified Italy forming a confederation of the Italic peoples and rose to dominate Western Europe, Northern Africa, and the Near East. The Roman Empire, established in 27 BC, ruled the Mediterranean region for centuries, contributing to the development of Western culture, philosophy, science and art.

During the early Middle Ages, Italy experienced the succession in power of Ostrogoths, Byzantines, Longobards and the Holy Roman Empire and fragmented into numerous city-states and regional polities, a situation that would remain until the unification of the country. These polities and the maritime republics, in particular Venice and Genoa, rose to prosperity. Eventually, the Italian Renaissance emerged and spread to the rest of Europe, bringing a renewed interest in humanism, science, exploration, and art with the start of the modern era. In the medieval and early modern era, Southern Italy was ruled by the Norman, Angevin, Aragonese, French and Spanish crowns. Central Italy was largely part of the Papal States.

In the 19th century, Italian unification led to the establishment of an Italian nation-state under the House of Savoy. The new Kingdom of Italy quickly modernized and built a colonial empire, controlling parts of Africa and countries along the Mediterranean. At the same time, Southern Italy remained rural and poor, originating the Italian diaspora. Victorious in World War I, Italy completed the unification by acquiring Trento and Trieste and gained a permanent seat in the League of Nations's executive council. The partial infringement of the Treaty of London (1915) led to the sentiment of a mutilated victory among radical nationalists, contributing to the rise of the fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini in 1922. During World War II, Italy was part of the Axis powers until the Italian surrender to Allied powers and its occupation by Nazi Germany with Fascist collaborators and then a co-belligerent of the Allies during the Italian resistance and liberation of Italy.

Following the end of the German occupation and the killing of Benito Mussolini, the 1946 Italian institutional referendum abolished the monarchy and became a republic, reinstated democracy, enjoyed an economic boom, and co-founded the European Union (Treaty of Rome), NATO, the Group of Six (later G7), and the G20.

The arrival of the first hominins was 850,000 years ago at Monte Poggiolo. The presence of the Homo neanderthalensis has been demonstrated in archaeological findings near Rome and Verona dating to c. 50,000 years ago (late Pleistocene). Homo sapiens sapiens appeared during the upper Palaeolithic. Remains of the later prehistoric age include Ötzi the Iceman, dating to c. 3400–3100 BC (Copper Age).

During the Copper Age, Indoeuropean people migrated to Italy in four waves. A first Indoeuropean migration occurred around the mid-3rd millennium BC, from a population who imported coppersmithing. The Remedello culture took over the Po Valley. The second wave occurred in the Bronze Age, from the late 3rd to the early 2nd millennium BC, with tribes identified with the Beaker culture and by the use of bronze smithing, in the Padan Plain, in Tuscany and on the coasts of Sardinia and Sicily. In the mid-2nd millennium BC, a third wave arrived, associated with the Apenninian civilization and the Terramare culture. The Terramare people were hunters, but had domesticated animals and cultivated crops; they were fairly skilful metallurgists, casting bronze in moulds. In the late Bronze Age, from the late 2nd millennium to the early 1st millennium BC, a fourth wave, the Proto-Villanovan culture, brought iron-working to the Italian peninsula. Proto-Villanovan culture may have been part of the central European Urnfield culture system, or a derivation from Terramare culture. Various authors, such as Marija Gimbutas, associated this culture with the spread of the proto-Italics into the Italian Peninsula.

Born in Sardinia and southern Corsica (where it is called Torrean civilization), the Nuraghe civilization lasted from the 18th century BC to the 2nd century AD. They take their name from the characteristic Nuragic towers, which evolved from the pre-existing megalithic culture, which built dolmens and menhirs. Today more than 7,000 nuraghes appear in Sardinia.

No written records of this civilization have been discovered, apart from a few possible short epigraphic documents. The only written information comes from classical literature of the Greeks and Romans, and may be considered more mythological than historical. The language (or languages) spoken in Sardinia during the Bronze Age is (are) unknown since there are no written records from the period, although research suggests that around the 8th century BC the Nuragic populations may have adopted an alphabet similar to that used in Euboea.