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ITALY BY 52200114043 JUNG NA RA

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Italy i/ˈˈtəli/ (Italian: Italia [iˈtaˈlja]), officially the Ital-ian Republic (Italian: Repub-blica italiana), is a unitary parliamentary republic in Southern Europe. To the north, Italy borders France, Switzer-land, Austria, and Slovenia, and is roughly delimited by the Alpine watershed, enclosing the Po Valley and the Venetian Plain. To the south, it consists of the entirety of the Italian Peninsula and the two biggest Mediterranean islands of Sic-ily and Sardinia, in addition to many other smaller islands.

The sovereign states of San Marino and the Vatican City are enclaves within Italy, while Campione d'Italia is an Italian exclave in Switzerland. Italy covers an area of 301,338 km2 (116,347 sq mi) and has a largely temperate climate. With 61 million inhabitants, it is the 5th most populous country in Europe. Among the world's most developed coun-tries, Italy has the 4th-largest economy in the European Union, 3rd in the Eurozone and 9th in the world by GDP (IMF, 2012).

After the development of the Nuragic, Etruscan and Magna Graecia cultures among oth-ers, Italy's capital and largest comune, Rome, has for centu-ries been the leading political and religious centre of West-ern civilisation, serving as the capital of both the Roman Em-pire and Christianity. During the Dark Ages, Italy endured cultural and social decline in the face of repeated invasions by Germanic tribes, Byzan-tines, Muslims and Normans, with Greco-Roman heritage being preserved largely by Christian monks. Beginning around the 11th century, vari-ous Italian cities, communes and maritime republics rose to great prosperity through ship-ping, commerce and banking (indeed, modern capitalism has its roots in Medieval Italy); concurrently, Italian culture flourished, especially during the Renaissance, which produced many notable schol-ars, artists, and polymaths such as Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Michelangelo and Machiavelli. Meanwhile, Ital-ian explorers such as Polo, Columbus, Vespucci, and

Verrazzano discovered new routes to the Far East and the New World, helping to usher in the European Age of Dis-covery. Nevertheless, Italy would remain fragmented into many warring states for the rest of the Middle Ages, subsequently falling prey to larger European powers such as the Holy Roman Empire, France, Spain, and later Aus-tria. Italy would thus enter a long period of decline that

lasted until the beginning of the 18th century.

After many unsuccessful at-tempts, the second and the third wars of Italian indepen-dence resulted in the unifica-tion of most of present-day Italy between 1859 and 1866. From the late 19th century to the early 20th century, the new Kingdom of Italy rapidly industrialised and acquired a colonial empire becoming a Great Power.However, Southern and rural Italy remained largely ex-cluded from industrialisation, fuelling a large and influential diaspora. Despite victory in World War I as one of the Big Four with permanent member-ship in the security council of the League of Nations, Italy entered a period of economic crisis and social turmoil, which favoured the establish-ment of a Fascist dictatorship in 1922. The subsequent par-ticipation in World War II, at the side of Nazi Germany and Japan forming the Axis Alli-ance, ended in military defeat, economic destruction and civil

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war. In the years that followed, Italy abolished the monarchy, reinstated democracy, and enjoyed a prolonged economic boom, thus becoming one of the most developed nations in the world, with the fifth larg-est economy by nominal GDP by the early 1990s. Italy was a founding member of NATO in 1949 and one of the Inner Six of the European Community in 1957, which became the EU in 1993. It is part of the Schengen Area, and has been a member of the Eurozone since 1999.

Italy is considered to be a major European power able to exert its influence on a global scale,with member-ship in prominent institutions or groups such as the UN, the EU, the NATO, the OECD, the OSCE, the DAC, the WTO, the G4, G6, G7, G8, G10, G20, the Union for the Medi-terranean, the Latin Union, the Council of Europe, the Central European Initiative and the Uniting for Consensus. Italy currently maintains the world's tenth-largest nominal defence budget and is a participant in the NATO nuclear sharing policy. On 1 July 2014, Italy replaced Greece as the seat of the Presidency of the Council of the European Union.

The assumptions on the ety-mology of the name "Italia" are very numerous and the corpus of the solutions pro-posed by historians and lin-guists is very wide. According

to one of the more common explanations, the term Italia, from Latin: Italia, was bor-rowed through Greek from the Oscan Víteliú, meaning "land of young cattle" (cf. Lat vitu-lus "calf", Umb vitlo "calf"). The bull was a symbol of the southern Italic tribes and was often depicted goring the Ro-man wolf as a defiant symbol of free Italy during the Social War. Greek historian Diony-sius of Halicarnassus states this account together with the legend that Italy was named after Italus, mentioned also by Aristotle and Thucydides.The name Italia originally ap-plied only to a part of what is now Southern Italy – accord-ing to Antiochus of Syracuse, the southern portion of the Bruttium peninsula (modern Calabria: province of Reggio, and part of the provinc-es of Cat-anzaro and Vibo Val-entia). But by his time Oenotria and Italy had become synony-mous, and the name also applied to most of Excavations through-out Italy revealed a Neander-thal pres-ence dating back to

the Paleolithic period, some 200,000 years ago,[34] mod-ern Humans arrived about 40,000 years ago. The Ancient peoples of pre-Roman Italy – such as the Umbrians, the Latins (from which the Ro-mans emerged), Volsci, Sam-nites, the Celts and the Ligures which inhabited northern Italy, and many others – were Indo-European peoples; the main historic peoples of non-Indo-European heritage include the Etruscans, the Elymians and Sicani in Sicily and the prehis-toric Sardinians.

Between the 17th and the 11th centuries BC Mycenaean Greeks established contacts with Italy[35][36][37][38] and in the 8th and 7th centuries BC Greek colonies were estab-lished all along the coast of

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In the 14th and 15th centuries, northern-central Italy was divided into a number of war-ring city-states, the rest of the peninsula being occupied by the larger Papal States and the Kingdom of Sicily, referred to here as Naples. The strongest among these city-states gradu-ally absorbed the surrounding territories giving birth to the Signorie, regional states of-ten led by merchant families which founded local dynasties. War between the city-states was endemic, and primarily fought by armies of merce-naries known as condottieri,

Sicily and the southern part of the Italian Peninsula became known as Magna Graecia. Also the Phoenicians estab-lished colonies on the coasts of Sardinia and Sicily.

Rome, a modest agricultural community conventionally founded in 753 BC, grew over the course of centuries into a massive empire, stretching from Britain to the borders of Persia, and engulfing the whole Mediterranean basin, in which Greek and Roman (and many other) cultures merged into a unique civilisation. The Roman Imperial legacy has deeply influenced Western civilisation for the follow-ing millennia. Ancient Rome shaped most of the Modern World.[39] In a slow decline since the late 2nd century AD, the Empire broke into two parts in 395 AD. The West-ern Roman Empire, under the pressure of the Barbarian inva-sions, eventually dissolved in

476 AD, when the last west-ern Emperor was deposed by the Germanic chief Odoacer, while the Eastern half of the Empire survived for another thousand years.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, Italy was seized by the Ostrogoths,[40] followed in the 6th century by a brief re-conquest under Byzantine Em-peror Justinian. The invasion of another Germanic tribe, the Lombards, late in the same century, reduced the Byzan-tine presence to a rump realm (the Exarchate of Ravenna) and started the end of political unity of the peninsula for the next 1,300 years. The Lom-bard kingdom was subsequent-ly absorbed into the Frankish Empire by Charlemagne in the late 8th century. The Franks also helped the formation of the Papal States in central Italy. Until the 13th century, Italian politics was dominated by the relations between the

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Spain, in Europe and outside.

In 1935 Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, resulting in an inter-national alienation and leading to Italy's withdrawal from the League of Nations. Conse-quently, Italy allied with Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan and strongly supported Francisco Franco in the Span-ish civil war. In 1939, Italy annexed Albania, a de facto protectorate for decades. Italy entered World War II on 10 June 1940. After initially ad-vancing in British Somalialand and Egypt, the Italians suf-fered heavy defeats in Greece, Russia and North Africa.

Sicily was then invaded by the Allies in July 1943, leading to the collapse of the Fascist re-gime and the fall of Mussolini on 25 July. On 8 September 1943, Italy surrendered. The Germans shortly succeeded in taking control of northern and central Italy. The country

remained a battlefield for the rest of the war, as the Allies were slowly moving up from the south.

In the north, the Germans set up the Italian Social Republic (RSI), a Nazi puppet state with Mussolini installed as leader. The post-armistice period saw the rise of a large anti-fascist resistance movement, the Resistenza. Hostilities ended on 29 April 1945, when the German forces in Italy sur-rendered. Nearly half a million Italians (including civilians) died in the conflict, Italy’s offi-cial language is Italian. Ethno-logue has estimated that there are about 55 million speakers of the language in Italy and a further 6.7 million outside of the country. However, between 120 and 150 million people use Italian as a second or cul-tural language, worldwide.Italian, adopted by the state after the unification of Italy, is based on the Florentine variety

of Tuscan and is somewhat in-termediate between the Italo-Dalmatian languages and the Gallo-Romance languages.Italy has numerous idioms spoken all over the country and some Italians cannot speak Italian at all. However, the establishment of a national education system has led to decrease in variation in the languages spoken across the country. Standardisation was further expanded in the 1950s and 1960s thanks to economic growth and the rise of mass media and television (the state broadcaster RAI helped set a standard Italian).Several linguistic groups are legally recognised,and a number of minority languages have co-official status along-side Italian in various parts of the country. The following minority languages are rec-ognised: Albanian, Catalan, German, Greek, Slovene, Croatian, French, Franco-Provençal, Friulian, Ladin,

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he birth of the Kingdom of Italy was the result of efforts by Italian nationalists and monarchists loyal to the House of Savoy to establish a united kingdom encompassing the entire Italian Peninsula. In the context of the 1848 liberal revolutions that swept through Europe, an unsuccessful war was declared on Austria. The Kingdom of Sardinia again attacked the Austrian Empire in the Second Italian War of Independence of 1859, with the aid of France, resulting in liberating Lombardy.

In 1860–61, general Giuseppe Garibaldi led the drive for unification in Naples and Sicily,[57] allowing the Sar-dinian government led by the

Italy, nominally allied with the German Empire and the Empire of Austria-Hungary

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Occitan and Sardinian (Law number 482 of 15 December 1999). French is co-official in the Valle d’Aosta—although in fact Franco-Provencal is more commonly spoken there. German has the same status in the province of South Tyrol as, in some parts of that province and in parts of the neighbour-ing Trentino, does Ladin. Slo-vene is officially recognised in the provinces of Trieste, Gori-zia and Udine in Friuli Venezia Giulia.In these regions official doc-ments are bilingual (trilin-gual in Ladin communities), or available upon request in either Italian or the co-official language. Traffic signs are

Count of Cavour to declare a united Italian kingdom on 17 March 1861. In 1866, Victor

Emmanuel II allied with Prus-sia during the Austro-Prussian War, waging the Third Italian War of Independence which allowed Italy to annexe Vene-tia. Finally, as France during the disastrous Franco-Prussian War of 1870 abandoned its garrisons in Rome, the Italians rushed to fill the power gap by taking over the Papal States.

The Piedmontese Albertine Statute of 1848, extended to the whole Kingdom of Italy in 1861, provided for basic freedoms, but electoral laws excluded the non-propertied and uneducated classes from voting. The government of the new kingdom took place in a framework of parliamen-tary constitutional monarchy dominated by liberal forces. In 1913, male universal suffrage was adopted. As Northern Italy quickly industrialised, the South and rural areas of North remained underdeveloped and overpopulated, forcing millions of people to migrate abroad, while the Italian So-cialist Party constantly in-creased in strength, challeng-ing the traditional liberal and conservative establishment. Starting from the last two decades of the 19th century, Italy developed into a colonial power by forcing Somalia, Eritrea and later Libya and the Dodecanese under its rule.

in the Triple Alliance, in 1915 joined the Allies into the war with a promise of substantial territorial gains, that included western Inner Carniola, former Austrian Littoral, Dalmatia as well as parts of the Otto-man Empire. The war was initially inconclusive, as the Italian army get struck in a long attrition war on the Alps mountains, making little prog-ress and suffering very heavy losses. Eventually, in October 1918, the Italians launched a massive offensive, culminat-ing in the victory of Vittorio Veneto. The Italian victory[59][60][61] marked the end of the war on the Italian Front, secured the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and was chiefly instrumental in ending the First World War less than two weeks later.

During the war, more than 650,000 Italian soldiers died[62] and the kingdom went on the brink of bank-ruptcy. Under the Peace Trea-ties of Saint-Germain, Rapallo and Rome, Italy obtained most of the promised territories, but not Dalmatia (except Zara), allowing nationalists to define the victory as "mutilated". Moreover, Italy annexed the Hungarian harbour of Fiume, that was not part of territo-ries promised at London but had been occupied after the end of the war by Gabriele D'Annunzio.

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The socialist agitations that followed the devastation of the Great War, inspired by the Russian Revolution, led to turmoil and anarchy through-out Italy. The liberal establish-ment, fearing a Soviet-style revolution, started to endorse the small National Fascist Party, led by Benito Mus-solini. In October 1922 the blackshirts attempted a coup (the "March on Rome"). The coup itself was a failure, but at the last minute king Vic-tor Emmanuel III refused to proclaim the state of siege and appointed Mussolini prime minister. Over the next few years, Mussolini banned all political parties and curtailed personal liberties, thus form-ing a dictatorship, who attract-ed international attention and that served as the inspiration, among others countries, for Nazi Germany and Francoist

LanguagesMain article: Languages of Italy

Main regional languages and dialects spoken in Italy.Italy's official language is Italian.[159] Ethnologue has estimated that there are about 55 million speakers of the language in Italy and a further 6.7 million outside of the country.[160] However, between 120 and 150 million people use Italian as a second or cultural language, worldwide.[161]

Italian, adopted by the state after the unification of Italy, is based on the Florentine variety of Tus-can and is somewhat intermedi-ate between the Italo-Dalmatian languages and the Gallo-Ro-mance languages.

Italy has numerous idioms spoken all over the country and some Italians cannot speak Ital-ian at all.[162] However, the es-tablishment of a national educa-tion system has led to decrease in

variation in the languages spoken across the coun-try. Standardisation was further expanded in the 1950s and 1960s thanks to economic growth and the rise of mass media and television (the state broadcaster RAI helped set a standard Italian).

Several linguistic groups are legally recognised,[163] and a number of minority languages have co-official status alongside Italian in various parts of the coun-try. The following minor-ity languages are recog-nised: Albanian, Catalan, German, Greek, Slovene, Croatian, French, Franco-Provençal, Friulian, Ladin,

Occitan and Sardinian (Law number 482 of 15 December 1999).[164] French is co-official in the Valle d’Aosta—although in fact Franco-Provencal is more commonly spoken there. German has the same status in the prov-ince of South Tyrol as, in some parts of that province and in parts of the neighbouring Trentino, does Ladin. Slovene is officially recognised in the provinces of Trieste, Gorizia and Udine in Friuli Venezia Giulia.

In these regions official docu-ments are bilingual (trilingual in Ladin communities), or available upon request in either Italian or the co-official language. Traffic signs are also multilingual, ex-cept in the Valle d’Aosta where – with the exception of Aosta itself which has retained its Latin form in Italian (as in English) – French toponyms are generally used, attempts to italianise them during the Fascist period having been abandoned. Education is possible

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Modern Italian cuisine has developed through centuries of social and political changes, with roots as far back as the 4th century BC. Italian cuisine in itself takes heavy influenc-es, including Etruscan, ancient Greek, ancient Roman, Byz-antine, and Jewish. Significant changes occurred with the discovery of the New World with the introduction of items such as potatoes, tomatoes, bell peppers and maize, now central to the cuisine but not introduced in quantity until the 18th century. Italian cuisine is noted for its regional diver-sity, abundance of difference in taste, and is known to be one of the most popular in the world, wielding strong influ-ence abroad.The Mediterranean diet forms

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in minority languages where such schools are operating.

Because of significant recent immigration, Italy has sizeable populations whose first language is not native to Italy. According to the Italian National Institute of Statistics, Romanian is the most common mother tongue among foreign residents in Italy: almost 800,000 people speak Romanian as their first language (21.9% of the foreign residents aged 6 and over). Other prevalent mother tongues are Arabic (spoken by over 475,000 people; 13.1% of foreign residents), Albanian (380 thousand people) and Spanish (255,000 people). Other languag-es spoken in Italy are Ukrainian, Hindi, Polish, and Tamil amongst others.

the basis of Italian cuisine, rich in pasta, fish and veg-etables and characterised by its extreme simplicity and variety, with many dishes having only four to eight ingredients.[240] Italian cooks rely chiefly on the quality of the ingredients rather than on elaborate prepa-ration. Dishes and recipes are often derivatives from local and familial tradition rather than created by chefs, so many recipes are ideally suited for home cooking, this being one of the main reasons behind the ever increasing worldwide popularity of Italian cuisine, from America to Asia.Ingredi-ents and dishes vary widely by region.A key factor in the success of

Italian cuisine is its heavy reli-ance on traditional products; Italy has the most traditional specialities protected under EU law. Cheese, cold cuts and wine are a major part of Italian cuisine, with many regional declinations and Protected Designation of Origin or Pro-tected Geographical Indication labels, and along with coffee (especially espresso) make up a very important part of the Italian gastronomic culture. Desserts have a long tradition of merging local flavours such as citrus fruits, pistachio and almonds with sweet cheeses like mascarpone and ricotta or exotic tastes as cocoa, vanilla and cinnamon.

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