Central Italy

The middle of Italy, where the papacy governed a state and the Renaissance was funded. Central Italy holds Tuscany, Umbria, the Marche and Lazio, and for a thousand years its politics were shaped by the Papal States - territory the popes ruled as temporal sovereigns from the eighth century until 1870, which is why Italy could not unify around Rome earlier than it did. Around that state sat the communes: Florence, Siena, Pisa and Perugia governed themselves as republics, fought each other continuously, and channelled banking and wool money into the artistic competition that produced the Renaissance. Florence's dialect became Italian because Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio wrote in it. Etruscan civilisation preceded Rome here and gave it much of its religion and engineering. The region's landscape of walled hill towns and cultivated valleys is itself a product of that fragmented politics, since every town needed defending. Sharecropping under the mezzadria system organised the countryside into the twentieth century. Tourism is now a principal industry. Florence, Siena, San Gimignano, Urbino, Assisi and the Val d'Orcia are all World Heritage sites. The region holds around twelve million people. Rome is within it and is the national capital. Chianti, Brunello and Orvieto are its wines. The Apennines run down its spine and produce regular earthquakes, including at L'Aquila in 2009 and Amatrice in 2016. Marble from Carrara has been quarried since Roman times and was used by Michelangelo. Perugia and Siena hold two of Italy’s oldest universities. Olive oil and wine dominate its agriculture.

• Existed: 1300 CE – present
• Type: Entity