Italia once named only a toe of Calabria
The Italian Republic fills a Mediterranean peninsula braced by the Alps and nearly 800 islands. Greeks first used Italia for land of the Italói tribe in today’s Calabria before the label crawled north to cover the whole boot.
Stone tools 850,000 years old have been found at Monte Poggiolo, Neanderthals lived in Italy 200,000 years ago, and modern humans appear around 40,000 years ago at Riparo Mochi. The Alpine iceman Ötzi dates to 3400–3100 BC. Most pre-Roman peoples were Italic speakers, but the Etruscans, Sicily’s Sicani and Elymians, and the Nuragic people of Sardinia may have had older roots, while the Camunni carved rock art in Valcamonica.
Phoenicians set up trading posts on Sicily and Sardinia, and from the eighth century BC Greeks colonised Pithecusae and then the southern coasts and Sicily, the area called Magna Graecia. Rome, founded on the Tiber in 753 BC, expelled its kings in 509 BC and became a republic. By 264 BC Roman Italy ran from the Arno and Rubicon to the far south; Cisalpine Gaul was joined administratively in 42 BC, matching Cato’s definition of everything south of the Alps.
After Caesar’s murder in 44 BC the empire grew to about 5 million square kilometres, enjoyed two centuries of Pax Romana, peaked under Trajan, and declined from Commodus onward. Odoacer and then the Ostrogoths ruled after the western collapse; the Lombard invasion in the sixth century broke the peninsula’s unity, and Charlemagne absorbed the Lombard kingdom, helping create the Papal States.
Medieval politics set Ghibellines backing the emperors against Guelphs backing the popes. City-states such as Milan, Florence, and Venice pioneered banking, and maritime republics dominated Mediterranean trade with the East. Unification came in 1861, after wars of independence and Garibaldi’s Expedition of the Thousand; the kingdom lasted until 1946. Today Italy has the world’s eighth-largest nominal GDP and Europe’s second-largest manufacturing sector.
Source: Italy
