Italy

Your complete guide to Italy

Quick Facts

Capital

Rome

Population

62,402,659

Languages

Italian (official), German (parts of Trentino-Alto Adige region are predominantly German speaking), French (small French…

Currency

euros (EUR)

Area

301,340 sq km

Government

Parliamentary republic

About Italy

Italy is a boot-shaped peninsula extending into the Mediterranean, a country whose contributions to art, architecture, cuisine, fashion, and music have shaped Western culture more profoundly than perhaps any other nation. From the canals of Venice to the ruins of Pompeii, from Tuscan hill towns to the Amalfi Coast, Italy is a sensory feast at every turn.

Rome, the Eternal City, layers 2,700 years of history — the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the Vatican, Renaissance piazzas — in a living, chaotic, magnificent whole. Milan is a global capital of fashion and design, Florence the cradle of the Renaissance, Naples the birthplace of pizza, and the smaller cities — Bologna, Siena, Lecce — each possess a distinct cultural gravity.

Italy's economy is the euro zone's third largest, driven by manufacturing, tourism, fashion, and food production. Despite persistent regional disparities between the prosperous north and the developing south, Italian quality of life — the coffee, the passeggiata, the long family lunches — remains the envy of the world.

History

Italy's history spans the Roman Republic and Empire, which at its zenith governed the entire Mediterranean world. After Rome's fall, the peninsula fragmented into city-states, papal territories, and foreign-dominated kingdoms — yet this fragmentation produced the extraordinary cultural flowering of the Renaissance. Unification (the Risorgimento) came only in 1861 under the House of Savoy.

The twentieth century brought the trauma of two World Wars, Mussolini's fascist dictatorship (1922–1943), and postwar reconstruction under the Marshall Plan. The 'Economic Miracle' of the 1950s–60s transformed Italy from an agrarian society into an industrial power. Italy was a founding member of the EEC in 1957, and despite frequent political instability, it remains one of Europe's cultural and economic cornerstones.

Italy became a nation-state in 1861 when the regional states of the peninsula, along with Sardinia and Sicily, were united under King Victor EMMANUEL II. An era of parliamentary government came to a close in the early 1920s when Benito MUSSOLINI established a Fascist dictatorship. His alliance with Nazi Germany led to Italy's defeat in World War II. A democratic republic replaced the monarchy in 1946 and economic revival followed. Italy is a charter member of NATO and the European Economic Community (EEC) and its subsequent successors the EC and the EU. It has been at the forefront of European economic and political unification, joining the Economic and Monetary Union in 1999. Persistent problems include sluggish economic growth, high youth and female unemployment, organized crime, corrupt…
CIA World Factbook

Culture & Society

Italian culture is a civilization-shaping force: Renaissance art (Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael), opera (Verdi, Puccini), cinema (Fellini, Rossellini), and fashion (Armani, Prada) are merely the highlights. Food is the connective tissue of Italian life — each region guards its recipes jealously, from Emilia-Romagna's ragù and Parmigiano to Sicily's arancini and granita. The Italian approach to la dolce vita — savoring beauty, food, and human connection — is itself a cultural export.

Languages: Italian (official), German (parts of Trentino-Alto Adige region are predominantly German speaking), French (small French-speaking minority in Valle d'Aosta region), Slovene (Slovene-speaking minority in the Trieste-Gorizia area)

Religions: Christian 83.3% (overwhelmingly Roman Catholic with very small groups of Jehovah's Witnesses and Protestants), Muslim 3.7%, unaffiliated 12.4%, other 0.6% (2010 est.)

Ethnic Groups: Italian (includes small clusters of German-, French-, and Slovene-Italians in the north and Albanian-Italians and Greek-Italians in the south)