History of Italy

The European country of Italy has been inhabited by humans since at least 850,000 years ago. Since classical antiquity, ancient Etruscans, various Italic peoples (such as the Latins, Samnites, and Umbri), Celts, Magna Graecia colonists, and other ancient peoples have inhabited the Italian Peninsula.

Italy was the birthplace and centre of the ancient Roman civilisation. Rome was founded as a kingdom in 753 BC and became a republic in 509 BC. The Roman Republic then unified Italy forming a confederation of the Italic peoples and rose to dominate Western Europe, Northern Africa, and the Near East. After the assassination of Julius Caesar, the Roman Empire dominated Western Europe and the Mediterranean for centuries, contributing to the development of Western culture, philosophy, science and art. With the fall of Rome in AD 476, Italy was fragmented into numerous city-states and regional polities, a situation that would remain until the complete unification of the country in 1871.

Quotes

• Italy is, after France and perhaps in the same degree, the land in which love of country has the deepest roots in the hearts of its inhabitants. The fact is that perhaps nowhere else has nature been so prodigal with its enchantments and seductions. Therefore, although Italy has been, since the fall of the Caesars, the object of European covetousness, the eternal battlefield of powerful neighbors, and the theatre of the fiercest and most prolonged civil wars, her children have always refused to leave her. Save for some commercial colonies hastily thrown upon the shores of Asia by Genoa and Venice, history has not, in fact, recorded in Italy any important outward movement of population.
  • Alfred Legoyt (1861) cited in: Richard N. Juliani (June 2005). Building Little Italy. Penn State Press. pp. 184–. ISBN 978-0-271-02864-4.