•• A BRIEF HISTORY Italy has only existed as a nation since 1871. Before then, despite the peninsula’s obvious geographical unity bounded by the Alps and the Mediterranean, its story is a fragmented tale of independent-minded cities, regions, and islands — and the outside powers who coveted them. We have abundant evidence of the ancient Etruscan, Greek, and Roman communities in Italy, but know very little of the country’s earlier, prehistoric settlers. Vestiges of dwellings survive — cabins on stilts in the frequently flooded Po valley, larger clay houses on the western marshlands of Tuscany, and Sardinia’s still visible domed dry-stone nuraghi. But the inhabitants? Perhaps North Africans and eastern Europeans peopled the Ligurian coast, while the Adriatic and south may have been settled by people from the Balkans and Asia Minor. Nobody knows much about the early Etruscans. Some historians believe that they were the first native Italians; others believe they arrived from Asia Minor. During the millennium before the Christian era, their civilization reached north beyond Tuscany to the Po valley and south toward Naples. At a time when early Roman and other Latin tribes were still primitive, Etruscan society — itself savage in many respects — was also aristocratic and highly sophisticated. Solid gold workmanship and other metal ornaments and tools showed a Greek influence, but the Etruscans’ vaulted architecture, town planning, and irrigation systems were indigenous. Arriving in the eighth century b.c. , the Greeks set up city-states in Sicily, dominated by Syracuse, as well as other settlements on the Italian mainland, such as Naples, Paestum, and Taranto. Together they formed Magna Graecia, whose zenith was reached during the 6th and 5th centuries b.c. After defeats by Greeks in the south, Latins in the center, and Gallic invaders in the north, the Etruscan empire faded in the fourth century b.c. As Greek colonial power grew weak from Athens-Sparta rivalry back home and pressure from Phoenicians in Sicily, the vacuum was filled by an uppity confederation of Latin and Sabine tribes living on seven hills known collectively as Rome. The Romans Legend says Rome was founded by Romulus, sired with twin brother Remus by Mars of a Vestal Virgin and abandoned on the Palatine Hill to be suckled by a she-wolf. Historians agree with the mythmakers that the site and traditional founding date of 753 b.c. are just about right. Under Etruscan domination, Rome had been a monarchy until a revolt in 510 b.c. established a patrician republic, which lasted five centuries. In contrast to other Italian cities weakened by internal rivalries and unstable government, Rome drew strength from a solid aristocracy of consuls and senate ruling over plebeians proud of their Roman citizenship and only rarely rebellious. Recovering quickly from the Gallic invasion of 390 b.c. , the Romans took effective control of the peninsula by a military conquest reinforced by a network of roads with names that exist to this day: Via Appia, Flaminia, Aurelia. All roads did indeed lead to — and from — Rome. By 250 b.c. , the city’s population had grown to an impressive 100,000. Roman power extended throughout the Mediterranean with a victory in the Punic Wars against Carthage (now Tunisia) and conquests in Macedonia, Asia Minor, Spain, and southern France. The rest of Italy participated only by tax contributions to the war effort and minor involvement in commerce and colonization. Resentment surfaced when former Etruscan or Greek cities such as Capua, Syracuse, and Taranto supported Hannibal’s invasion in 218 b.c. Rome followed up defeat of the Carthaginians with large-scale massacres and enslavement of their Italian supporters. The Third and final Punic War ended in 149 b.c. , though national solidarity was still a long way off. Under Julius Caesar, elected in 59 b.c. , provincial towns won the privileges of Roman citizenship. His reformist dictatorship, bypassing the senate to combat unemployment and ease the tax burden, made dangerous enemies. After being appointed dictator for life, he was assassinated by Brutus, among others, on the Ides of March, 44 b.c. This led to civil war and the despotic rule of Octavian, nephew and heir of Julius Caesar whose new title of Augustus Caesar signified the collapse of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire in 27 b.c. Conquest of the Greeks accelerated rather than halted the influence of their culture in Italy. Romans infused Greek refinement with their own energy to create a unique mixture of elegance and realism, delicacy and strength, which have remained the essence of Italian life and art. In architecture, the Romans made a quantum leap forward from the Greek structures of columns and beams by developing the arch, vault, and dome, well suited to the needs of the empire. The Romans built basilicas for public administration, pioneered the new engineering of aqueducts and bridges, and erected triumphal arches for victorious armies. They adopted the Greeks’ gods, convertingZeus into Jupiter, Aphrodite into Venus, and placing the emperor —  serving the interests of the Roman state — at the apex of the gods. Throughout the centuries of imperial expansion, decline, and fall, Italy took a back seat as the realm of power moved with the armies away from Rome, east to Byzantium and to the north as far as Gaul or Germany. Despite the dramatic persecution under Nero in the first century a.d. , Christianity spread from Rome through southern Italy, then continued northward. Constantine the Great declared Christianity the official state religion in a.d. 313; he later boldly transferred the capital to Byzantium (Constantinople) in 324. At the end of the fourth century, Emperor Theodosius the Great organized the Church into dioceses, making Ravenna the new capital of the Western Empire (with Constantinople as capital of the Eastern Empire). Rome would never be the same again. The position of Bishop of Rome as primate of the Western Church (pope derived from “papa,” the Latin word for father), first claimed in the second century, was later asserted by Pope Leo I (440–461), who traced the succession back to St. Peter. The invasion of Attila’s Huns and the Goths and Vandals who came to sack, rape, murder, and pillage Rome brought an end to the Western Empire in 476 with the abdication of Emperor Romulus Augustus. After the Empire Wars between the Goths and Byzantines followed by new waves of invasions made Italian unity impossible. The dual influence of Greek and Latin culture persisted. Emperor Justinian (527–565) and his wife Theodora reannexed Italy to the Byzantine Empire and codified Roman law as the state’s legal system. Under Heraclius (610–641), Greek was extended to Italy as its official language. Hellenistic and Oriental influences were most evident in religion. Byzantine ritual colored the Roman liturgy. The Roman basilica’s long colonnaded nave leading to an apse gave way to the Greek cross with a central space surrounded by arches and topped by a dome. Sculptural reliefs flattened out to symbolic decorative, non-human forms, and painting and mosaics were rich in color, but more rigid and formal. Spiritual preoccupations turned away from the world’s few joys and woes in the present, to mystic contemplation of the ineffable hereafter. Things were much too ineffable, it seems, for Italian tastes. The monastic movement, founded by St. Benedict of Umbria in the sixth century, reasserted involvement in the realities of social life. The Benedictine order emphasized moderation in the austerity of its food, clothing, and sleep, not unlike the habits of any peasant of the times. Flagellation and similar rigors introduced into other Italian monasteries by the Irish monk Columbanus were soon modified by the gentler Benedictine rule. By the eighth century, the Byzantines held the balance of power with the Lombards (a Germanic tribe), who had invaded Italy in 568 and set up their capital at Pavia four years later. The Lombards controlled the interior in a loose confederation of fiercely independent duchies. Lombard territory split Byzantine Italy up into segments ruled from the coasts. The divisions resulted in Veneto (Venice and its hinterland), Emilia (between Ravenna and Modena), and Pentapolo (between Rimini and Perugia), plus Rome and Naples (with Sicily and Calabria). In Rome, the highly political popes played the Lombard duchies against those of the Byzantine Empire. They cited a forged document, the Donation of Constantine, supposedly bequeathing them political authority over all of Italy. Seeking the powerful support of the Franks, Pope Leo III crowned their king, Charlemagne, Emperor of the West on Christmas Day in 800. But in turn the pope had to kneel in allegiance, and this exchange of spiritual blessing for military protection laid the seeds of future conflict between the papacy and secular rulers, compounded in 962 when Otto I was crowned Emperor of the newly formed Holy Roman Empire. Venice, founded on its islets and lagoons in the sixth century by mainland refugees fleeing Lombard raiders, prospered from a privileged relationship with Byzantium and an uninhibited readiness to trade with Muslims and others farther east. The merchants of Venice that were the backbone of the Most Serene Republic were only too happy to dessiminate their Oriental cargoes of exotic goods to the dour lives of Lombards in the Po valley and beyond the Alps to the courts of northern Europe. Naples held on to its autonomy by combining links with Rome and Constantinople. When Arabs conquered Sicily in the ninth century and turned to the mainland, Naples at first sought an alliance. But as the invaders advanced north towards Rome, Naples successfully linked up with the then powerful maritime republic of neighboring Amalfi. Despite military expeditions by the Franks and Byzantines, however, the Arabs remained on the Italian scene for two centuries. Their influences in the sciences and foods they brought with them are still felt today. The Middle Ages In the 11th century, the adventurous Normans put an end to Arab control of Sicily and southern Italy. Exploiting a natural genius for assimilating the useful elements of the local culture rather than indiscriminately imposing their own, they adopted Arab-style tax collectors and customs officials and Byzantine fleet-admirals for their navy. In Palermo, churches and mosques stood side-by-side, feudal castles next to Oriental palaces and their exotic gardens. The Crusades against the Islamic threat to Christendom brought great prosperity to Italy’s port cities. Pisa sided with the Normans in Sicily and profits from its new commercial empire in the western Mediterranean paid for its magnificent cathedral, baptistery, and campanile (today’s Leaning Tower). Genoa’s equally powerful merchant empire spread from Algeria to Syria. Supreme master of the art of playing all sides, Venice stayed out of the First Crusade to expand its trade with the faraway East while ferrying pilgrims to Palestine. Later, when Byzantium threatened its eastern trading privileges, Venice persuaded the armies of the Fourth Crusade to attack Constantinople in 1204; conquering Byzantium strengthened its position even more. The Po valley’s economic expansion through land clearance and new irrigation works brought a rapid decline of feudalism. Dukes, administrators, and clergy lived in towns rather than isolated castles, absorbing the hinterland into communes, forerunners of the city-states. The communes were strong enough to confine German Emperor Frederick Barbarossa’s Italian ambitions to the south, where he secured Sicily for his Hohenstaufen heirs by marrying his son into the Norman royal family. Ruling from Palermo, Barbarossa’s highly cultured but brutal grandson Frederick II (1194–1250) was a prototype for the future Renaissance prince. His power struggle with the papacy divided the country into two highly volatile camps — Guelfs supporting the pope and Ghibellines supporting the emperor. The backbone of the Guelfs was in communes such as Florence and Genoa. In 1266, they financed the mercenary army of Charles d’Anjou to defeat the imperial forces — and take the Sicilian throne. But Palermo rose up against the French in the murderous Sicilian Vespers of 1282, when the locals massacred everyone who spoke Italian with a French accent and forced Charles to move his capital to Naples. The Sicilians offered their crown to the Spanish house of Aragon. The Guelf-Ghibelline conflict became a pretext for settling family feuds (such as the one typified in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet) or communal rivalries, from which Genoa and Florence emerged stronger than ever. In Rome, the dissolute popes repeatedly switched factions for temporary advantage and lost all political and moral authority in the process. After two centuries of religious heresy, the Church needed a spiritual renewal, finding the perfect ally in Francis of Assisi (1182–1226), pious without being troublesomely militant. His sermons had immense popular appeal. He chose not to attack Church corruption but instead to preach the values of a Christly life. The Franciscan order provided a much needed manageable revival. The architecture of the church built in his name at Assisi contradicted Francis’s humble testament denouncing “temples of great dimension and rich ornament. ” But Assisi’s frescoes of the saint’s life, painted by Cimabue and disciples of Giotto (which barely survived the severe earthquake of 1997), proved an immensely effective act of artistic propaganda against the prevalent libertinism and heresy. The City-States By the end of the 13th century, with the independent-minded communes growing into full-fledged city-states, Italy was clearly not to be subjugated to the will of one ruler. The Middle Ages in Italy were far from being the murky era that many humanist scholars liked to contrast with the brilliance of the Renaissance. Bologna founded Europe’s first university, famous above all for its law studies, in the 11th century, followed by institutions of learning in Padua, Naples, Modena, Siena, Salerno, and Palermo. Unlike other Church-dominated European universities, Italian universities emphasized the sciences, medicine, and law over theology. In the absence of political unification, it was the universities that awakened the national consciousness. Scholars traveling across the country needed a common tongue beyond the elitist Latin to break through the barriers of regional dialects. It was a foreigner, German Emperor Frederick II, who launched the movement for a national language at his court in Palermo, but Florentine-born Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) provided the ardor, moral leadership, and literary example to bring it to fruition. The maritime republic of Genoa rose to challenge Venice’s supremacy. It dislodged Pisa in the western Mediterranean, whittled away at Venice’s hold on eastern ports, and set up colonies on the Black Sea for trade with Russia and faraway Cathay. But Genoa’s 1381 participation in the ruinous Chioggia War on the Venetian lagoon exhausted its resources. Its newly formed Bank of St. George had to sell off overseas colonies. It ran the town like a private company for the benefit of a local oligarchy, seeking future prosperity as international financiers for the kings of Spain or France. Venice and its Repubblica Serena rebounded to turn to the mainland, extending its Veneto territory from Padua across the Po valley as far as Bergamo. After relying exclusively on overseas trade, Venice created a new land-owning aristocracy through this expansion. In its fertile Po valley, Milan prospered from trade with Germany, principally in textiles and armor. Escaping unscathed from the Black Death of 1348 and subsequent plagues, it built up a sound economic base and maintained a strong army with plentiful manpower. Florence was the first Italian town to mint its own gold coin (fiorino or florin), a prestigious instrument for trade in European markets, and it organized textile manufacture on an advanced large-scale basis. Despite uprisings such as that of the Ciompi (wool-workers), the resilient Florentines were well-fed and highly literate compared to the rest of the country. The wealthy and ambitious Medici (not doctors, as their name implied) emerged as the dominant merchant family. Cosimo the Elder (1389–1464) became the city’s ruler and founder of the Medici dynasty in 1434. A building boom underlined the prosperity: Giotto’s Campanile was at last completed, as were Ghiberti’s great baptistery doors, and Brunelleschi’s dome on the cathedral. Divided in the 14th century between the Spanish in Sicily and the French in Naples, southern Italy remained solidly feudal. Its almost exclusively agricultural economy suffered much more than the north from plague and famine. Landlords resorted to banditry to replenish their treasury. As Palermo was in decline, Naples flourished as a brilliant cosmopolitan capital. In 1443, it was reunited with Sicily and known as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies under the Spanish King Alfonso V of Aragon. With the papacy in comfortable exile in Avignon since 1309, the brutal rule of the Orsini and Colonna families reduced Rome to a half-urban, half-rural backwater village. Self-educated visionary Cola di Rienzo governed briefly in 1347 until the nobles drove him out. After thirty years, the papacy returned. The Renaissance A new national fraternity of scholars with expertise in the arts, sciences, and law emerged as itinerant consultants to visionary rulers eager to make their city-states centers of cultural prestige and political propaganda. Men like Leon Battista Alberti, brilliant architect-mathematician-poet, brought about a new spirit of inquiry and scepticism. From their detailed study and translation of the Greek philosophers, they developed principles of objective scientific research, independent of all the political, religious, and emotional bias characterizing medieval scholarship. The emphasis switched from heaven to earth. Leonardo da Vinci eagerly applied the new method to architecture, civil and military engineering, urban planning, geography, and map-making. It was Giorgio Vasari, facile artist but first-rate chronicler of this cultural explosion, who allegedly dubbed it a rinascita, or rebirth, of the glories of Italy’s Greco-Roman past. But even more, it proved, with the humanism of Leonardo and Michelangelo and the political realism of Machiavelli, to be the birth of our modern age. Unfortunately, the creative ferment by no means precluded new horrors of war, assassination, persecution, plunder, and rape. It was the heyday of the brilliant but lethal Spanish-Italian Borgias: lecherous Rodrigo, who became Pope Alexander VI, and treacherous son Cesare, who stopped at nothing to control and expand the papal lands. His sister Lucrezia, forever smeared by anti-Spanish propaganda of the day as mistress of both her father and brother, was in fact, as Duchess of Ferrara, a generous patroness of the arts and benefactress of the poor. In Florence, where his family had to fight tooth and nail to hold on to their supremacy, Lorenzo “il Magnifico” de’ Medici (1449–1492) found time to encourage the art of Perugino, Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, the young Leonardo, and tempestuous Michelangelo. But decadence set in and Dominican monk and rabble-rousing preacher Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498) denounced the corruption of a Church and society more devoted to pagan classics than to the Christian gospel. At the Carnival of 1494, he shamed the Florentines into throwing their “vanities” — not only clothes, jewelry, and cosmetics, but books and paintings, with Botticelli contributing some of his own — onto a giant fire on the Piazza della Signoria. Four years later, when Savonarola declined to test the validity of his apocalyptic prophesies with an ordeal by fire, he was arrested, hanged, and ironically burned on the Piazza della Signoria. On the international scene, the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453 closed Genoa’s Black Sea markets, but competitor Venice worked out a new deal in Cyprus and even a modus vivendi in Constantinople itself. But the Venetians’ empire declined as they lost their taste for the adventure of commerce in favor of the safety of their landholdings. From 1494 to 1530, the Spanish Hapsburgs and the French turned Italy into a battleground for the Kingdom of Naples and the Duchy of Milan. Genoa sided with the Spanish to give Emperor Charles V access, via Milan, to his German territories, and later became a lucrative clearinghouse for Spain’s newly discovered American silver. Rome was plundered by imperial armies in 1527; the Medici were driven out of Florence and returned to power only under tutelage of the Spanish, who won effective control of the whole country. When the dust of war settled, it was the dazzling cultural achievements that left their mark on the age. The true father of Rome’s High Renaissance, Pope Julius II (1503–1513) began the new St. Peter’s cathedral, and commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel and Raphael to decorate the Stanze. Architect Donato Bramante was nicknamed maestro ruinante because of all the ancient monuments he dismantled to make way for the pope’s megalomaniac building plans. With the treasures uncovered in the process, Julius founded the Vatican’s magnificent collection of ancient sculpture. Counter-Reformation Badly shaken by the Protestant Reformation, the Church convoked the Council of Trent (north of Lake Garda) in 1545. Non-Italian bishops urged the Church to carry out its own reform, hoping to democratize relations with the pope. But the threat of Lutherans, Calvinists, and other heretics shifted the emphasis to repression, culminating in the Counter-Reformation formally proclaimed in 1563. The Church reinforced the Holy Office’s Inquisition and the Index to censor the arts. The Jesuits, founded in 1534, quickly became an army of theologians to combat heresy. Italian Protestants fled and Jews in Rome were restricted to a ghetto (50 years later than the Venice ghetto, Europe’s first) and expelled from Genoa and Lucca. Cardinal Carlo Borromeo, nephew of Pope Pius IV and Archbishop of Milan (1565–1584), was the exemplary spiritual leader of Italy’s Counter-Reformation. In alliance with the Jesuits, he weeded out corrupt clerics and what he considered too soft Umiliati order of Catholic laymen. As a symbol of his crusading spirit, he consecrated Milan’s new Flamboyant Gothic cathedral, which took centuries to complete and remains one of the world’s largest and most famous Gothic structures. Art proved to be a major instrument of Counter-Reformation propaganda, but it had to undergo some important changes. The vigor and intellectual integrity of the High Renaissance had softened into the stylized sophistication of Mannerism, the transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque. Condemning the preoccupation with pagan gods and worldly decadence, the Church urged artists to deliver a strong, clear message to bring the troubled flock back to the fold. The Madonna and saints of Annibale Carracci further paved the way for the Baroque, attracting the faithful with a sensuous image of ideal beauty, while Caravaggio made a more brutal, but no less effective, appeal with a proletarian Mary and barefoot Apostles. As the Church regained ground, it promoted a more triumphant image, epitomized by the works of Bernini, the most productive of them all: His grandiose Baroque altar in St. Peter’s speaks rather effectively to the time. But such self-confidence had its limits. For example, in 1633, the Vatican ordered Galileo to deny the evidence of his own eyes, as assisted by the new telescope he had designed, and stop teaching that God’s earth was only one of many planets in orbit around the sun. After a 16th century in which Naples had become the largest town in Europe — and one of the liveliest — the south was increasingly oppressed and impoverished. The army had to crush revolts in Sicily and Naples against heavy taxes and conscription for Spain’s wars in northern Europe. Towards Nationhood Lacking the solidarity to unite and too weak to resist by themselves, Italian kingdoms and duchies were reduced to convenient pawns in Europe’s 18th-century dynastic power plays. At the end of the Wars of Spanish, Austrian, and Polish Succession, the Austrians had taken over northern Italy from the Spanish. The Age of Enlightenment engendered a new cultural ferment. The theater of La Scala opened in Milan, and La Fenice opened in Venice. Stimulated by the ideas of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, the country’s intellectuals were more keenly aware of being Europeans, but also Italians. The hopes of progressives were raised by Austrian reforms in Lombardy and Tuscany (where the Medici dynasty had fizzled to an end in 1737). The results included fairer taxes; less Church influence in schools; more public education; and removal of the Inquisition, Jesuits, the death penalty, and instruments of torture. Outside the Austrian sphere of influence, Italy remained solidly conservative. Venice stagnated under the rule of a small entrenched élite, drawing nostalgic comfort from the city’s petrified beauty as painted in the vedute of Guardi and Canaletto. The papacy in Rome had lost prestige with the dissolution of the Jesuits and the crippling loss of revenue from the Hapsburg Church reforms. The south’s aristocracy resisted all significant social reforms proposed by the Spanish. Don Carlos, a descendant of Louis XIV who saw himself as a southern Sun King — with Caserta Palace as his Versailles — is best remembered for launching the excavations of Pompeii in 1748. On the northwestern Alpine frontier, a new state had appeared on the scene, destined to lead the movement to a united Italy. With Savoy split in the 16th century between France and Switzerland, its foothill region southeast of the Alps, Piedmont, had come into the Italian orbit. Sidestepping the stagnant economic burden of Spanish domination, the sparsely populated duchy expanded quickly. Turin was little more than a fortified village of 40,000 inhabitants in 1600, but it rose to 93,000 a century later. The pragmatic dukes of Piedmont liked French-style absolutist monarchy but tempered it with a parliament to bypass local fiefdoms. They copied Louis XIV’s centralized administration and tax-collection, and by the 18th century Turin was a sparkling royal capital built, quite unlike any other Italian city, in classical French manner. Napoleon Bonaparte, with his seductive ideas of Italian “independence,” was welcomed after driving out the Austrians and Spanish in 1797. But the French soon proved just as great a burden on Italian treasuries, used to support their war effort and the Bonaparte family. If Napoleon did not exactly “liberate” Italy, he did shake up the old conservatism from Lombardy to Naples by creating new universities and high schools, streamlining the bureaucracy, creating a new legal system with his Napoleonic Code, and generally awakening the forces of Italian nationalism. Caution was the watchword among Italian rulers restored to their lands after Napoleon’s defeat. Austria seized the occasion to add the Veneto to its Lombardy territories. The 1823 conclave of zelanti (zealot) cardinals elected arch-conservative Leo XII to help the papacy recover from its Napoleonic shock. On the lookout for any contagiously progressive movement, the Austrians helped Bourbon King Ferdinand of Naples crush an 1821 revolt for constitutional monarchy and foiled a similar uprising in Piedmont. The danger became clear in 1831 when insurrection spread through Bologna, Modena, and Parma to the Papal States of central Italy. But the Austrians defeated a rebel government of “united Italian provinces,” weakened by regional rivalries and conflicting personal ambitions. The Risorgimento, the “resurrection” of national identity, took two conflicting paths. Genoese-born Giuseppe Mazzini’s Giovine Italia (Young Italy) movement sought national unity by popular-based insurrection. He opposed Piedmontese patricians and intellectuals of the Moderates party, seeking reform through a pri­vilege-conscious confederation of Italian princes blessed by the papacy — with Piedmont providing the military muscle. The Moderates feared a new proletarian militancy among factory workers. Landowners bringing in cheap migrant day-labor faced mounting peasant resentment. Food riots broke out in Lombardy, revolts in Tuscany, and southern peasants demanded a share of common land. Composer Giuseppe Verdi was the Risorgimento’s towering artist. His operas’ romantic humanism inspired fellow patriots, who saw in the Nabucco Freedom Chorus a positive call to action. Outright rebellion erupted in Milan on 18 March 1848, a year of revolution all over Europe. Emissaries flew by balloon to nearby cities for reinforcements that freed Milan from the 14,000-strong Austrian garrison. The Venetians restored their republic, a Piedmontese army joined up with troops from Tuscany, the Papal States, and Naples, and a new democratic Roman Republic was proclaimed. But the hesitant Carlo Alberto of Piedmont gave the Austrians time to recover and Italian gains toppled like dominoes. National unity was again sabotaged by provincial rivalries. Conceding the need for more reform, the new king of Piedmont, Vittorio Emanuele II, became a constitutional monarch with a moderate-dominated parliament. His Prime Minister, Count Camillo Cavour, a hard-nosed political realist, won over moderate left-wing support for a program of free-trade capitalism and large-scale public works construction. Among the political exiles flocking to Piedmont was a veteran of the earlier revolts, Giuseppe Garibaldi. With their French allies, Piedmont defeated Austria at Magenta and Solferino to secure Lombardy in 1859. A year later, Cavour negotiated the handover of Emilia and Tuscany. But it was the adventure of Garibaldi’s Red Shirts that imposed the unification of the peninsula in 1860. With two steamers, antiquated artillery, and 94,000 lire in funds, Garibaldi set sail from Genoa with his “Expedition of the Thousand. ” The heroic Red Shirts seized Bourbon Sicily and crossed to the mainland. At Teano, outside Naples, they met up with Vittorio Emanuele, who was proclaimed King of Italy. National unity was completed with the annexation of the Veneto in 1866 and Rome, the new capital, in 1871. The Modern Era Despite its extraordinarily fragmented history, unified Italy took its place among modern nations as an unexceptional centralized state, careful to protect the interests of its industrial and financial establishment and granting reforms to the working classes only under the pressure of their united action. From working as migrant laborers in France and Germany, Italian factory and farm workers brought back expert knowledge of union organization and strikes. But in keeping with the Italians’ traditional local attachments, their first unions were camere del lavoro, regionally based chambers of labor linking workers to their town or commune rather than their individual trade. Both the politically left and the right wanted Italy to join the European race for colonies — their eyes fixed on Ethiopia and Libya. Conservatives supported expansion for reasons of national prestige. Socialists talked of Italy’s “civilizing mission” in the Mediterranean, seeking to divert the flow of emigrants (heading increasingly to the Americas) to experimental collectiv e land management in new African colonies in Tripoli and Cyrenaica. At home, in addition to traditional textiles, industry was expanding fast in metallurgy, chemicals, and machinery. The national love affair with cars had begun — from seven produced in 1900 and 70 in 1907, there were 9,200 rolling out of the factories by 1914, most of them from Fiat, which was founded in 1899. With wily Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti manoeuvering the forces of capital and labor, Italy began its 20th century in a blithe state of calm and prosperity known as Italietta. Vacations were spent by the sea or in the mountains; people listened to soothing operas like Puccini’s La Bohème and Madame Butterfly; the first silent-movies of The Last Days of Pompeii and Quo Vadis were made; one could partake in intellectual conversations in open air cafés at the hour of the passeggiata. They were less amusing when hailing World War I as the “world’s hygiene. ” Previously committed to a Triple Alliance with Austria and Germany, Italy remained neutral in 1914. The following year, acting with what Prime Minister Antonio Salandra acknowledged to be “sacro egoismo,” Italy signed a secret treaty to enter the war on the side of Britain, France, and Russia in exchange for the post-war annexation of Austrian-held Trento, South Tyrol (now Alto Adige), and Trieste. The people were at first cool to the war, despite the jingoism of flashy aristocratic aesthete and author Gabriele D’Annunzio and his friend, an ex-socialist newspaperman named Benito Mussolini. The Italian Army was the least well prepared of the combatants, lacking artillery, machine guns, trucks, and properly trained officers, but the infantry showed remarkable courage in the trenches. After the disaster at Caporetto, the planned Austro-German 1917 advance across the Veneto plain was held until the Italian counterattack of October–November 1918 permitted a triumphant entry into Trento and Trieste. For most Italians, particularly the peasant, worker, and petit bourgeois, war in uniform was their first real experience of Italian nationality. Enthusiastic war-supporters like D’Annunzio, who captured the popular imagination by flying over Vienna to drop propaganda leaflets, were acclaimed as patriots, while democrats and pacifist republicans were dismissed as defeatists. Parliament, which was denied knowledge of the secret war treaty until the Peace Conference of 1919, was exposed as impotent. The political left was in disarray. The Socialists won the elections but split over support for the Russian Revolution, leading to the formation in 1921 of the Italian Communist Party. In an atmosphere of economic crisis — stagnant productivity, bank closures, and rising unemployment — conservatives wanted somebody tougher, more dynamic than eternally compromising old-style politicians. As the black-shirted Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (Italian combat groups) beat up Slavs in Trieste and union workers in Bologna, Mussolini filled the bill. Threatened by the Fascists’ March on Rome in 1922, King Vittorio Emanuele III invited Mussolini, il Duce, to form a government. The now all-too-familiar process of totalitarianism set in: Opposition leaders were assassinated; their parties, free unions, and free press all abolished. The Vatican was upset when the fascist youth movement dissolved the Catholic Boy Scouts. The Lateran Treaty of 1929 had created a separate Vatican state and perpetuated Catholicism as Italy’s national religion with guaranteed religious education in the schools. Italian fascism remained more of a style than a coherent ideology, typified by the raised-arm salute replacing the “weakling” handshake, bombastic architecture, and Mussolini’s arrogant harangues from the Palazzo Venezia’s “heroic balcony” in Rome. The Duce’s motto of “Better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep” contrasted with the one he gave the country: “Believe, obey, fight. ” Neither lions nor sheep, most Italians survived with lip-service and good humor, while communists re-allied with socialists in the anti-fascist underground, whose partisans linked up with the Allies during World War II. In 1936, Mussolini diverted attention from the worsening economic climate at home with an invasion of Ethiopia and proclamation of the Italian Empire. Italian war planes joined Hitler’s Luftwaffe on General Franco’s side in the Spanish Civil War (5,000 Italian communists and socialists fought on the Republican side). Following the Germans’ lead in 1938, racist legislation was introduced against the country’s 57,000 Jews. The next year, Italy invaded Albania and, after France’s collapse in June 1940, plunged with Germany into World War II. Its poorly equipped armies were defeated by the British in the African desert and by the mountain snows in the Balkans. The Allies landed in Sicily in June 1943, and liberated Rome one year later. Mussolini, toppled soon after the Allied landings and reinstated briefly as a German puppet in the north, was caught fleeing in German uniform to the Swiss border. He was executed in April 1945. The sordid hardships of post-war Italy — unemployment, the black market, and prostitution — have been made graphically familiar through the brilliant neo-realist cinema of Rossellini, de Sica, and Fellini. Today, the remarkable economic recovery has silenced the old condescension about Italy’s technological and managerial talents. In the European Union, Italy has more than held its own in heavy industry, agribusiness, and the new electronics industry. A specifically Italian ingredient has come from highly productive clandestine — and as a result, untaxable — manufacturing and other activities parallel to the open market. Italians didn’t take easily to national government. They had existed through most of their history without it and Mussolini had spoiled their appetite. Now, fatigued by his excesses, they rejected the militant left for a little dolce vita with the less adventurous but less disturbing Christian Democrats. Their perpetually changing coalitions hardly constituted real national government, but the people seemed to function quite well regardless. In the 1980s, a pragmatic socialist coalition government with the Christian Democrats brought a few years of unusual stability. Corruption and tax-evasion continued, but police clamped down on the political terrorism of the Red Brigades and neo-Fascists and the age-old criminality of the Mafia. Sadly enough, as Italy put on its best face for the nationwide celebration of Jubilee 2000, a series of corruption scandals (tangenti) revealed the dirty and deep-rooted hold of politicians and business tycoons alike that began in the early to mid 1990s. Much of the dust is only now settling, as the Italians get on with their daily lives. They’re administering the changes of the new century while continuing to preserve their unparalleled past, much of which got a long overdue dusting off. Billions of lire were spent on Rome alone for the record-breaking numbers of pilgrims and tourists who flocked to the country, one of the world’s greatest tourist destinations during the year 2000. HISTORICAL LANDMARKS •Early Settlements •9th circa b.c.First signs of pre-Roman Etruscans •8th circa b.c.Greeks colonize Sicily and other southern regions •Roman Era •753 b.c.Rome founded •510Establishment of Roman Republic •264–241Rome defeats Carthage (now Tunisia) in First Punic War •44Julius Caesar, dictator for life, assassinated on 15 March •27Nephew and heir of Julius Caesar, Octavius (Caesar Augustus), founds the Roman Empire and embarks on 200 years of peace and prosperity •a.d. 54–68 Christian persecutions in Rome under Nero •79Vesuvius volcano buries Pompeii •306–337Emperor Constantine converts to Christianity, making it state religion. Capital transferred to Byzantium (Constantinople). •410Visigoths sack Rome •476 The Fall of the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages begin •600s Lombards invade Milan and much of Italy; Venice founded on lagoon •800Pope crowns Frankish King Charlemagne emperor •827–1060Arabs invade and settle in Sicily •1000–1100 Normans conquer south; First Crusade •Middle Ages •1182–1226St. Francis of Assisi •1198–1250Frederick II of Hohenstaufen’s court in Palermo •1271–1295Marco Polo in Far East •1305Giotto paints Padua Chapel •1309–1377Papacy exiled to Avignon, France from Rome •1312Dante writes Inferno •1347Cola di Rienzo rules Rome •1378–1381Maritime Republics Venice and Genoa fight for supremacy •Renaissance •1434Cosimo I begins Medici rule in Florence •1442Spanish rule Naples and Sicily, the “Two Sicilies” •1494–1559Spanish and French fight over •Naples and Milan •1497Leonardo’s Last Supper, height of High Renaissance •1498Savonarola burned in Florence •1508–1512Michelangelo paints Sistine Chapel ceiling •1527Sack of Rome by imperial troops •Counter-Reformation and Enlightenment •1545–1563Council of Trent •1633Trial of Galileo •1748Excavations of Pompeii begin •1778La Scala theatre opens in Milan •1796–1814Napoleon invades north then much of Italy •Risorgimento •1815–1832Austrians crush insurrection; national political movement (Risorgimento) begins •1831Mazzini founds la Giovine Italia to combat Austria •1848–1849Abortive countrywide revolts •1859Franco-Piedmontese alliance takes Lombardy •1860Garibaldi’s Expedition of 1,000 to Sicily/Naples •1861Kingdom of Italy created; interim capitals of Turin and Florence •1871Rome named capital of unified Italy •Modern Era •1915Italy joins British/French/Russians in World War I •1919Trento, South Tyrol (Alto Adige), and •Trieste acquired from Austria •1921Italian Communist Party founded. •1922Mussolini begins Fascist regime with March on Rome, declaring himself Prime Minister then Duce •1929Lateran Treaty establishes separate Vatican state •1936Mussolini annexes Abyssinia (Ethiopia), bombs •Republican Spain •1940Italy joins Nazi Germany in World War II •1943–1944Allies liberate Sicily, then Rome; Mussolini arrested •1945Execution of Mussolini and his mistress •1946Abdication of Victor Emanuel III; proclamation of the Republic