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| Etymology | |
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The assumptions on the etymology of the name "Italia" are very numerous and the corpus of the solutions proposed by historians and linguists is very wide.[19] According to one of the more common explanations, the term Italia, from Latin: Italia,[20] was borrowed through Greek from the Oscan VÃteliú, meaning "land of young cattle" (cf. Lat vitulus "calf", Umb vitlo "calf").[21] The bull was a symbol of the southern Italian tribes and was often depicted goring the Roman wolf as a defiant symbol of free Italy during the Samnite Wars. Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus states this account together with the legend that Italy was named after Italus,[22] mentioned also by Aristotle[23] and Thucydides.[24]
The name Italia originally applied only to a part of what is now Southern Italy–according to Antiochus of Syracuse, the southern portion of the Bruttium peninsula (modern Calabria: province of Reggio, and part of the provinces of Catanzaro and Vibo Valentia). But by his time Oenotria and Italy had become synonymous, and the name also applied to most of Lucania as well. The Greeks gradually came to apply the name "Italia" to a larger region, but it was during the reign of Emperor Augustus (end of the first century B.C.E.) that the term was expanded to cover the entire peninsula until the Alps.[25]
Tags:Italian,It,Alps,Italia,Latin,Greek,Oscan,Lat,Umb,Samnite Wars,Italus,Aristotle,Thucydides,Antiochus Of Syracuse,Calabria,Reggio,Catanzaro,Vibo Valentia,Lucania,Emperor,Augustus, | |
| Prehistory and antiquity | |
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Main articles: Prehistoric Italy and Ancient Rome
The Colosseum in Rome, built ca. 70 – 80 AD, is considered one of the greatest works of Roman architecture and engineering.
Excavations throughout Italy reveal a modern human presence dating back to the Paleolithic period, some 200,000 years ago.[26] The Italic tribes of pre-Roman Italy — such as the Umbrians, the Latins (from which the Romans emerged), Volsci, Samnites, the Celts and the Ligures which inhabited northern Italy, and many others — are most of Indo-European stock; main historic peoples of non-Indo-European heritage include the Etruscans, the Elymians and Sicani in Sicily and the prehistoric Sardinians.
Between the 17th to the 11th century BC Mycenaean Greeks established contacts with Italy[27][28][29][30][31][32][33] and in the 8th and 7th centuries BC Greek colonies were established all along the coast of Sicily and the southern part of the Italian Peninsula became known as Magna Graecia. Also the Phoenicians established colonies on the coasts of Sardinia and Sicily.
Ancient Rome was at first a small agricultural community founded c. the 8th century BC, that grew over the course of the centuries into a colossal empire encompassing the whole Mediterranean Sea, in which Ancient Greek and Roman cultures merged into one civilization. This civilization was so influential that parts of it survive in modern law, administration, philosophy and arts, forming the ground that Western civilization is based upon. In a slow decline since the late 4th century AD, the empire finally broke into two parts in 395 AD: the Western Roman Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire. The western part — under the pressure of the Franks, the Vandals, the Huns, the Goths and other populations from Eastern Europe — finally dissolved, leaving the Italian peninsula divided into small independent kingdoms and feuding city states for the next 1,300 years. The eastern part became the sole heir to the Roman legacy.
Tags:Euro,Eur,Europe,Italian Peninsula,Sicily,Sardinia,Mediterranean Sea,Roman Empire,Cultural,Ancient Rome,Colosseum,Rome,Roman Architecture,Umbrians,Latins,Romans,Volsci,Samnites,Celts,Indo-european,Etruscans,Elymians,Sicani,Prehistoric Sardinians,Greek Colonies,Magna Graecia,Phoenicians,Empire,Ancient Greek,Law,Administration,Philosophy,Arts,Western Civilization,Western Roman Empire,Eastern Roman Empire,Franks,Vandals,Huns,Goths,City States,Eastern Part, | |
| Middle Ages | |
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Main article: Italy in the Middle Ages
Italy's Naval Jack, featuring the coats of arms of the four major Maritime Republics. Clockwise from upper left: Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Amalfi.
In the 6th century the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I reconquered Italy from the Ostrogoths. The invasion of another Germanic tribe (the Lombards) late in the same century reduced the Byzantine presence to a strip of land between Ravenna and Rome plus other lands in southern Italy, breaking the unity of the peninsula until 1870.
The Lombard reign of northern and central Italy was absorbed into the Frankish Empire by Charlemagne in the late 8th century. The Frankish kings also helped the formation of the Papal States in central Italy, extending from Rome to Ravenna, although for most of the Middle Ages the Papacy effectively controlled only Latium. Until the 13th century, Italian politics were dominated by the relationship between the German Holy Roman Emperors and the popes, with most of the Italian cities siding for the former (Ghibellini) or for the latter (Guelfi) depending from momentary convenience.
It was during this vacuum of authority that the Italy saw the rise of a peculiar institution, the medieval commune. In the anarchic conditions that often prevailed in medieval Italian city-states, people organised themselves to restore order and disarm the feuding elites. In the 12th century, a league of comuni, the Lombard League, defeated the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa, leading to a process granting effective independence to most of northern and central Italian cities. Despite the devastation of the numerous wars, Italy maintained, especially in the north and center, a relatively developed urban civilization, which later evolved in the peculiar phenomenon of its merchant Republics.
During the same period, Italy saw the rise of numerous Maritime Republics, the most notable being Venice, Genoa, Pisa and Amalfi. These maritime republics were also heavily involved in the Crusades, taking advantage of political and trading opportunities. Venice and Genoa soon became Europe's main gateways to trade with the East, establishing colonies as far as the Black Sea and often controlling most of the trade with the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic Mediterranean world. The county of Savoy expanded its territory into the peninsula in the late Middle Ages, while Florence developed into a highly organized commercial and financial city, becoming for many centuries the European capital of silk, wool, banking and jewelry.
The city-states, oligarchical in reality, had a dominant merchant class which under relative political freedom nurtured academic and artistic advancement. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the strongest among these city-states annexed the surrounding territories giving birth to the Signorie, regional states led by merchant families which founded local dynasties. Notable amongst them, in northern Italy, were the Duchy of Milan, that of Ferrara and of Mantua, which with Florence, Venice, Siena and Rome became centers of the Italian Renaissance.
In the south, byzantine Sicily had become an Islamic emirate in the 9th century, thriving until the Italo-Normans conquered it in the late 11th century together with most of the Lombard and Byzantine states of southern Italy. Through a complex series of events, southern Italy developed as a unified kingdom, first under the House of Hohenstaufen, then under the Capetian House of Anjou and, from the 15th century, the house of Aragon (although Sicily was a separate Aragonese kingdom from the late 13th to the 15th century). In Sardinia, the former Byzantine provinces became independent states known as giudicati, although most of the island was under Genoese or Pisan control until the Aragonese conquered it in the 15th century.
Tags:Lombards,Ostrogoths,Maritime Republics,Renaissance,Duchy Of Milan,Unified, | |
| Early Modern | |
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Main articles: Italian Renaissance, Italian Wars, and Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy
The Vitruvian man by Leonardo da Vinci, representing the ideal human proportions as described by Roman architect Vitruvius, is a quintessential masterpiece of the Renaissance.
The Black Death pandemic in 1348 left its mark on Italy by killing one third of the population.[34][35] However, the recovery from the disaster of the Black Death led to a resurgence of cities, trade and economy which greatly stimulated the successive phases of Humanism and Renaissance, cultural movements both born in the peninsula, and later spread in Europe.
In the 14th and 15th centuries, Northern and upper Central Italy were divided into a number of warring city-states, the rest of the peninsula being occupied by the larger Papal States and Naples. Warfare between the states was common, invasion from outside Italy confined to intermittent sorties of Holy Roman Emperors. These wars were primarily fought by armies of mercenaries known as condottieri, bands of soldiers drawn from around Europe, but especially Germany and Switzerland, led largely by Italian captains.[36]
Decades of fighting eventually saw Florence, Milan and Venice emerge as the dominant players that agreed to the Peace of Lodi in 1454, which saw relative calm brought to the region for the first time in centuries. This peace would hold for the next forty years, and Venice's unquestioned hegemony over the sea also led to unprecedented peace for much of the rest of the 15th century. The Italian Renaissance peaked in the mid-16th century as foreign invasions plunged the region into the turmoil of the Italian Wars. However, the ideas and ideals of the Renaissance endured and even spread into the rest of Europe, setting off the Northern Renaissance, and the English Renaissance.
In the meantime, the discovery of the Americas, the new routes to Asia discovered by the Portuguese and the rise of the Ottoman Empire — all factors which eroded the traditional Italian dominance in trade with the East — started the economic decline of the peninsula.
The triumph of Napoleon at the Battle of Marengo placed Italy under French control and paved him the way to become Emperor.
Following the Italian Wars (1494 to 1559), Italy saw a long period of relative peace, first under Habsburg Spain (1559 to 1713) and then under Habsburg Austria (1713 to 1796). The plague repeatedly returned to haunt Italy throughout the 14th to 17th centuries. In the first half of the 17th century, a plague claimed some 1.7 million victims, or about 14% of Italy’s population.[37] As Spain declined in the 17th century, so did its Italian possessions in Naples, Sicily, Sardinia, and Milan. Southern Italy was impoverished, stagnant, and cut off from the mainstream of events in Europe.[38] Despite that, Italy kept making its contribution to the European culture, giving birth to the Baroque Style.
In the 18th century, as a result of the War of Spanish Succession, Austria replaced Spain as the dominant foreign power, while the House of Savoy emerged as a major regional power expanding to Piedmont and Sardinia. In this century, the ideas of the Enlightenment influenced the Italian rulers, paving the way to reforms which started an economic recovery in northern Italy and Tuscany.
During the Napoleonic Wars, the northern and central parts of the country were invaded and later partly annexed to the Empire and partly reorganized as a new Kingdom of Italy — essentially a client state of the French Empire — [39] while the southern half of the peninsula was administered by Joachim Murat, Napoleon's brother-in-law, who was crowned as King of Naples. The 1814 Congress of Vienna restored the situation of the late 18th century, but the ideals of the French Revolution could not be eradicated.
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| Italian unification and Liberal Italy | |
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Main articles: Italian unification and Military history of Italy during World War I
The legendary "handshake of Teano" between Giuseppe Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel II: on 26 October 1860, General Garibaldi sacrificed republican hopes for the sake of Italian unity under a monarchy.
The creation 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 state 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, Giuseppe Garibaldi led the drive for unification in Naples and Sicily,[40] allowing the Sardinian government led by the Count of Cavour to declare a united Italian kingdom on 17 March 1861. In 1866, Victor Emmanuel II allied with Tags:France,Kingdom Of Sardinia,World War I,Military, | |
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