Central Italy

Central Italy — the belt of Renaissance Tuscany and the Papal States. Its peculiarity is the Papacy: from 754 to 1870 the Pope ruled the centre as a temporal monarch, a theocratic belt across the peninsula that physically blocked national unification until Rome itself fell in 1870 — a wholly different origin from both the civic North and the feudal South. It is the cradle of the Renaissance and of the Italian language itself (Tuscan Florentine), the country's artistic heart in Florence, Siena, Assisi and Rome. Today it blends an art-and-tourism economy with small-firm industrial districts, a hill-town landscape of vines and olives, and a historically 'red', cooperative political tradition.

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