Italy

The centre of two civilisations that shaped the West, and a country only since 1861. Rome ruled the Mediterranean world and left its law, its language's descendants and its church; the peninsula then spent thirteen centuries divided among city-states, papal territory, Norman and Spanish kingdoms and Austrian provinces. That fragmentation was productive: competing courts and republics funded the Renaissance, and Florence, Venice, Milan and Rome produced an artistic and scientific concentration with no real parallel. Unification came through Piedmontese diplomacy under Cavour and Garibaldi's thousand volunteers, and Massimo d'Azeglio's remark that having made Italy they must now make Italians was the accurate summary - the north and the Mezzogiorno had different economies, dialects and institutions, and the gap has never closed. Mussolini's fascism, the first of its kind, ran from 1922 to 1943 and ended with the country a battlefield and a partisan war. The postwar republic combined rapid growth with governmental instability, over sixty governments since 1946, the Years of Lead and the Mani Pulite corruption investigations. Italy has more World Heritage sites than any country. Latin gave rise to the Romance languages. Rome is the capital. The country has about fifty-nine million people. Two independent states sit inside it, San Marino and the Vatican. The Alps and the Apennines cover much of the terrain and Vesuvius and Etna are both active. Italian descends from Tuscan and was a written language long before it was widely spoken. Italy is among the largest wine producers in the world. Its population is ageing faster than almost any other and the birth rate is among the lowest recorded.

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