The history of Italy

Italy has been at the centre of European history for more than two thousand years. Etruscans, Greeks and Italic peoples built cities on the peninsula before one of them, Rome, conquered it and then the whole Mediterranean. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire the land broke into rival kingdoms, papal territories and city republics, and it was in those cities that the Renaissance began. For three centuries Italy was largely ruled by Spain, Austria and France, until the Risorgimento united it as a kingdom in 1861; that kingdom fell to Fascism and defeat in the Second World War, and the republic founded in 1946 became one of Europe's leading economies.

Hominins reached the peninsula at least 850,000 years ago, as stone tools at Monte Poggiolo near Forlì show, and Neanderthals lived in caves near Rome and in the Veneto. Modern humans arrived during the Upper Palaeolithic and left cave art, such as the engravings of the Grotta dell'Addaura near Palermo. Farming spread along the coasts from the east in the sixth millennium BCE. The best-known prehistoric Italian is Ötzi, a Copper Age man killed by an arrow high in the Alps around 3300 BCE, whose body was preserved in ice with his clothes, axe and food.

In the Bronze Age the Po valley was dotted with the moated villages of the Terramare culture, while Sardinia developed its own Nuragic civilisation, named after the stone towers called nuraghi, of which more than 7,000 survive. The Villanovan culture of the early Iron Age, from around 900 BCE, spread iron-working and cremation burial across central and northern Italy and is usually seen as the forerunner of the Etruscans. By then the peninsula was home to many peoples speaking different languages, among them Latins, Umbrians, Samnites, Oscans, Veneti and Ligurians, while Elymians, Sicani and Sicels lived in Sicily.

From about 800 BCE the Etruscans built a league of wealthy cities in the land between the Arno and the Tiber, including Tarquinia, Veii, Cerveteri and Volterra. They spoke a language unrelated to the Indo-European tongues around them, traded metals across the western Mediterranean, and left painted tombs and fine bronze work. Their power spread north into the Po valley and south into Campania.

In the eighth century BCE Greeks began founding colonies along the southern coasts and in Sicily. Cumae, Naples, Taranto, Croton, Sybaris and Syracuse, founded by Corinth in 733 BCE, became so numerous and rich that the region was later called Magna Graecia, "Great Greece", and became part of the world of ancient Greece. Pythagoras taught at Croton and the philosophers of Elea debated the nature of being. From Cumae the Greek alphabet passed to the Etruscans and from them to the Latins. Western Sicily was held by Phoenician and then Carthaginian settlements such as Motya and Panormus, the future Palermo, and Greeks and Carthage fought over the island for centuries. Greek victories over Carthage at Himera in 480 BCE and over the Etruscan fleet off Cumae in 474 BCE began a slow Etruscan decline, which invading Gauls from north of the Alps hastened in the fourth century.

According to legend Rome was founded by Romulus in 753 BCE, and it was ruled by kings, the last of them Etruscan, until about 509 BCE, when the aristocracy expelled Tarquin the Proud and set up the Roman Republic. The young state survived a Gallic sack around 390 BCE and fought its neighbours one by one: the Latin League, the Etruscan city of Veii, and in three hard wars the Samnites of the central mountains. After defeating Pyrrhus of Epirus, who had come to help Taranto, Rome controlled the whole peninsula south of the Po by 264 BCE, binding defeated peoples to it as allies who supplied soldiers.

The Punic Wars against Carthage brought Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica under Roman rule as its first provinces. In the second war Hannibal crossed the Alps in 218 BCE and destroyed Roman armies at Lake Trasimene and Cannae, but Italy's allies mostly stayed loyal and Rome won in 201 BCE. Within a century Rome was master of the Mediterranean. The wealth of conquest transformed Italy: great estates worked by enslaved people spread, while many small farmers were ruined. The Italian allies, who fought Rome's wars without its rights, rose in the Social War of 91 to 88 BCE and won Roman citizenship, so that for the first time the free people south of the Alps shared one political identity. Civil wars between generals followed until Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, the river marking the edge of Italy, in 49 BCE and made himself dictator, before his assassination in 44 BCE.

Caesar's heir Octavian defeated his rivals and in 27 BCE became Augustus, the first emperor of the Roman Empire. He divided Italy into eleven regions, and for two centuries the peninsula was the privileged heart of the empire, exempt from the land tax paid by the provinces. Rome grew to perhaps a million people, fed by grain from Egypt and Africa, and roads, aqueducts and amphitheatres spread through the towns of Italy. The eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE buried Pompeii and Herculaneum, preserving a picture of daily life in ancient Rome and its countryside.

From the second century Italy's position slowly declined as emperors came from the provinces and the frontiers absorbed the empire's attention. In the crisis of the third century cities built walls, and the emperor Aurelian ringed Rome itself with new defences. Diocletian made Italy pay taxes like any province, and Milan, closer to the Alpine passes, became an imperial residence. There in 313 Constantine I and his co-emperor agreed to tolerate Christianity, and in 330 he moved the capital to Constantinople. Rome remained the seat of its bishop, the pope, whose authority over the Western church was growing.

In the fifth century the Western empire disintegrated. The Visigoths under Alaric sacked Rome in 410, the Vandals sacked it again in 455, and the capital of the West moved to the marsh-protected city of Ravenna. In 476 the general Odoacer deposed the boy emperor Romulus Augustulus, the event traditionally taken as the fall of Rome. In 493 Theodoric the Great and his Ostrogoths took Italy and ruled it from Ravenna in relative peace, keeping the Roman senate and administration.

The Eastern emperor Justinian I sent armies to reconquer Italy for the Byzantine Empire, and the Gothic War of 535 to 554 devastated the peninsula far more than the barbarian invasions had. Only fourteen years later, in 568, the Lombards crossed the Alps and seized most of the north and much of the interior. Italy was divided for the next 1,300 years. The Lombard kingdom was centred on Pavia, with semi-independent duchies at Spoleto and Benevento, while the Byzantines held Ravenna, Rome, Naples, Sicily and the far south. Cut off from Constantinople, the popes became the real rulers of Rome. When the Lombards threatened the city, the pope turned to the Franks; Pepin the Short defeated the Lombards and in 756 gave the pope the lands that became the Papal States. In 774 Charlemagne conquered the Lombard kingdom, and on Christmas Day 800 Pope Leo III crowned him emperor in Rome.

After the Carolingian Empire broke up, the crown of Italy was fought over by local magnates until the German king Otto I was crowned emperor in Rome in 962. From then on northern and central Italy formed part of the Holy Roman Empire, but emperors lived north of the Alps and their authority was often distant. The struggle between emperors and popes over who controlled the church came to a head under Pope Gregory VII, who forced Henry IV to seek forgiveness at Canossa in 1077.

The south took a different path. Arab forces from North Africa landed in Sicily in 827 and took Palermo in 831, and under Muslim rule the island flourished with new crops and irrigation, a period associated with the Islamic Golden Age. Norman adventurers arrived in the eleventh century; Robert Guiscard took Byzantine Apulia and Calabria, and his brother Roger conquered Sicily between 1061 and 1091. In 1130 Roger II was crowned king of Sicily, ruling Latin, Greek and Arabic-speaking subjects from a brilliant court at Palermo. The kingdom passed to the German Hohenstaufen dynasty, whose emperor Frederick II made Sicily the base of a quarrel with the papacy that ended with the destruction of his house and the arrival of the French Angevins. The Sicilian Vespers revolt of 1282 drove the French from the island, which passed to Aragon, while the Angevins kept the mainland kingdom ruled from Naples.

In the north, trade revived and towns governed themselves as communes. When Frederick Barbarossa tried to reassert imperial rights, the Lombard League of cities defeated him at Legnano in 1176. The Republic of Venice, Venice itself, and its rival Genoa built maritime empires stretching to the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, profiting from the Crusades; Venice led the Fourth Crusade to sack Constantinople in 1204, and the Venetian Marco Polo travelled to China. Italian cities were divided between factions supporting the pope (Guelphs) and the emperor (Ghibellines), and many communes fell under single lords, such as the Visconti in Milan. Florentine bankers lent to the kings of Europe, and Dante Alighieri wrote the Divine Comedy in the Tuscan dialect that became the basis of modern Italian. The popes left Rome for Avignon from 1309 to 1377. In 1347 the Black Death reached Sicily from the Black Sea on Genoese galleys and killed perhaps a third or more of Italy's people.

By the fifteenth century the peninsula was dominated by five powers: Milan, Venice, Florence, the Papal States and the Kingdom of Naples, which in 1442 was united with Sicily under Alfonso of Aragon. The Peace of Lodi in 1454 brought four decades of relative balance between them. In Florence the Medici family, bankers who dominated the republic from 1434, sponsored artists and scholars, and the city became the cradle of the Renaissance, the revival of classical learning and the new art of perspective and observation. Brunelleschi raised the dome of Florence cathedral, and Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael worked for popes, princes and republics. Humanists collected ancient texts and Italian printers spread them.

Italy's wealth also made it a prize. In 1494 Charles VIII of France invaded to claim Naples, opening the Italian Wars, in which France, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire fought over the peninsula for more than half a century. Niccolò Machiavelli, a Florentine official who watched his city's helplessness, wrote The Prince in 1513 in response. Imperial forces of Charles V defeated the French at Pavia in 1525, and in 1527 his unpaid mutinous troops sacked Rome. Italian sailors served other states in the Age of Discovery: the Genoese Christopher Columbus sailed for Castile in 1492, and Atlantic trade slowly shifted Europe's economic centre away from the Mediterranean.

The Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559 confirmed the dominance of the Spanish Empire, which ruled Milan, Naples, Sicily and Sardinia directly and influenced most other states. Only Venice, the Papal States and the Duchy of Savoy kept real independence. The Council of Trent, held between 1545 and 1563, launched the Counter-Reformation, and the Roman Inquisition grew powerful; in 1633 it forced Galileo Galilei to renounce his support for the view that the earth moves around the sun. Rome was rebuilt in Baroque splendour, but the economy of northern Italy, one of the richest regions in Europe in 1600, declined as its industries lost markets. Plague killed perhaps a million people in the north in 1630 and much of the population of Naples in 1656.

After the War of the Spanish Succession, the treaties of 1713 and 1714 gave Milan, Naples and Sardinia to the Austrian Habsburgs, and the Habsburg Monarchy replaced Spain as the leading foreign power. The Duke of Savoy received Sicily, exchanged it for Sardinia in 1720, and from then on his house ruled as kings of Sardinia from Turin. In the 1730s a branch of the Spanish Bourbons took Naples and Sicily. In the later eighteenth century reforming rulers in Austrian Lombardy and Tuscany, influenced by the Age of Enlightenment, modernised law and administration, and the Milanese jurist Cesare Beccaria argued for the abolition of torture and the death penalty.

In 1796 the young Napoleon led a French army into Italy and defeated the Austrians. He created republics on the French model, and in 1797 he ended the thousand-year independence of Venice, handing it to Austria. In 1805 he made the north a Kingdom of Italy with himself as king, while his brother Joseph and then his brother-in-law Joachim Murat ruled Naples. French rule brought heavy taxes and conscription, but also new law codes, the end of many feudal privileges and the idea of an Italian state; the green, white and red tricolour first appeared in these years.

After the Napoleonic Wars, the Congress of Vienna in 1815 restored the old dynasties. Austria annexed Lombardy and Venetia and dominated the peninsula, as the chancellor Klemens von Metternich dismissed Italy as merely a geographical expression. Secret societies such as the Carbonari staged revolts in 1820 and 1831, which Austrian troops crushed. Giuseppe Mazzini founded Young Italy in 1831 to work for a united, republican Italy.

In the revolutions of 1848 Milan and Venice rose against Austria, King Charles Albert of Sardinia granted a constitution, the Statuto Albertino, and declared war on Austria, and a Roman Republic was proclaimed after the pope fled. All failed: Sardinia was defeated at Novara in 1849, and French troops restored the pope. Sardinia, though, kept its constitution, and under its prime minister Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, it became the base of the unification of Italy. Cavour won an alliance with Napoleon III of France, and in 1859 French and Sardinian armies defeated Austria at Magenta and Solferino. Lombardy passed to Sardinia, the states of central Italy voted to join, and Savoy and Nice were handed to France in return.

In May 1860 Giuseppe Garibaldi landed in Sicily with about a thousand volunteers, the Redshirts, and overthrew the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in a few months. He handed his conquests to Victor Emmanuel II, and on 17 March 1861 the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed, with Turin as capital. Venetia was added in 1866, after Italy sided with Prussia against Austria, and on 20 September 1870 Italian troops entered Rome after the French garrison had been withdrawn. Rome became the capital in 1871, and the pope, refusing to recognise the new state, considered himself a prisoner in the Vatican.

The new state was poor, mostly rural and deeply divided. Only a small minority of its people spoke standard Italian, the right to vote was limited by property and literacy, and in the south a long war against brigandage cost thousands of lives in the 1860s. The gap between the industrialising north and the impoverished south became a lasting "southern question". Between the 1880s and the First World War millions of Italians emigrated, above all to the United States, Argentina and Brazil.

Italy joined Germany and Austria-Hungary in the Triple Alliance in 1882 and sought colonies in Africa. It took Eritrea and part of Somalia, but its invasion of Ethiopia ended in defeat at Adwa in 1896. In 1911 and 1912 it seized Libya and the Dodecanese islands from the Ottoman Empire. When the First World War began, Italy stayed neutral, then in 1915 joined Britain and France under the secret Treaty of London, which promised it Austrian territory. Eleven battles on the Isonzo river brought little gain, and in 1917 the Austro-German breakthrough at Caporetto drove the army back to the Piave. Italy recovered and won the final battle of Vittorio Veneto in 1918, gaining Trentino, South Tyrol, Trieste and Istria from Austria's collapsed empire, but some 650,000 Italian soldiers had died. Nationalists complained of a "mutilated victory" because Dalmatia had not been won, and strikes and factory occupations shook the country in 1919 and 1920.

Benito Mussolini, a former socialist, founded the Fascist movement in 1919. His blackshirt squads attacked socialists and trade unions with the tolerance of many landowners, industrialists and police. After the March on Rome in October 1922, King Victor Emmanuel III appointed him prime minister. The murder of the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti in 1924 led to a crisis, which Mussolini answered by establishing a dictatorship from 1925: opposition parties were banned, the press controlled and opponents imprisoned or exiled. The Lateran Pacts of 1929 settled the Roman Question by creating the independent state of Vatican City.

Fascist Italy pursued empire by violence. In Libya Italian forces crushed resistance in the 1920s and early 1930s by herding much of the population of Cyrenaica into concentration camps, where tens of thousands died. In 1935 Italy invaded Ethiopia, using poison gas against soldiers and civilians, and proclaimed an empire in 1936. Mussolini drew closer to Adolf Hitler, introduced antisemitic racial laws in 1938, invaded Albania in 1939 and entered the Second World War on Germany's side on 10 June 1940. Italian armies were defeated in Greece and North Africa, and Italian occupation forces in Yugoslavia interned tens of thousands of civilians in camps.

After the Allies landed in Sicily in July 1943, the Fascist Grand Council and the king removed Mussolini on 25 July. The government signed an armistice announced on 8 September, but Germany immediately occupied the north and centre and installed Mussolini at the head of a puppet Italian Social Republic. For twenty months Italy was a battlefield, as the Allies fought slowly north and the Italian resistance waged a partisan war, met by German and Fascist reprisals such as the massacre of 335 people at the Ardeatine Caves in Rome in 1944. The Holocaust reached Italy with the occupation: the Germans, helped by Fascist authorities, deported 8,564 Jews from Italy and Italian-held territories, most to Auschwitz, and only 1,009 returned. On 25 April 1945 the resistance called a general insurrection in the north, and on 28 April partisans executed Mussolini.

On 2 June 1946, in the first national vote in which women took part, 54 percent of voters chose a republic over the monarchy, which had been discredited by its support for Fascism. A constitution came into force on 1 January 1948. Under the peace treaty of 1947 Italy lost its colonies and ceded most of Istria and the Dalmatian city of Zara to Yugoslavia, and between 230,000 and 350,000 Italians left those lands; the border around Trieste was settled only in 1975. In the Cold War Italy had the largest communist party in Western Europe, but the Christian Democrats won the election of 1948 and led every government for decades. Italy joined NATO as a founding member in 1949 and signed the Treaty of Rome in 1957, founding the European Economic Community.

The economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s turned Italy into an industrial power, with growth of over five percent a year, while millions of southerners moved to the factories of Milan, Turin and Genoa. The late 1960s brought labour unrest, and the Years of Lead of the 1970s saw terrorism from both the far right, as in the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan in 1969 and the Bologna railway station bombing of 1980, and the far left; the Red Brigades kidnapped and murdered the former prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978.

In 1992 the Sicilian Mafia murdered the anti-Mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, and the same year the Clean Hands investigations exposed systematic corruption. The parties that had governed since the war, including the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, collapsed, and a new party system emerged. The media owner Silvio Berlusconi first became prime minister in 1994 and dominated politics, alternating with centre-left coalitions led by Romano Prodi, for almost two decades. Italy adopted the euro in 1999, but its economy stagnated, and the financial crisis of 2008 and the European debt crisis hit it hard; in 2011 Berlusconi resigned and the economist Mario Monti led a technocratic government of austerity. Large numbers of migrants crossing the Mediterranean, especially from 2015, fed support for populist parties.

The election of 2018 produced a coalition of populist parties under Giuseppe Conte. In early 2020 Italy became one of the first countries outside Asia to be severely hit by the COVID-19 pandemic and imposed a national lockdown; more than 100,000 people died. A national unity government under the former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi followed in 2021. After it fell, a snap election gave a centre-right coalition a majority, and on 22 October 2022 Giorgia Meloni, leader of the Brothers of Italy, became the country's first woman prime minister. Italy faces a shrinking and ageing population, with births in 2023 the lowest since unification, and a persistent gap in wealth between north and south. In February 2026 it hosted the Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo, its third Winter Games.