Italian History in Brief

Joseph Walker's Italy Revealed staff is known for its historical and cultural expertise of Italy. On any Italy Revealed program, you will learn much about the country and its amazing past while having a great time.

A Brief History of Italy

By 500 B.C., a number of groups shared Italy. Small Greek colonies dotted the southern coasts and the island of Sicily. Gauls, ancestors of today's modern French, roamed the mountainous north and the plains of the Po River. The Etruscans, a group originally hailing from somewhere in western Turkey, settled in central Italy, establishing a number of city-states, including what is now modern-day Orvieto. Little is known about the Etruscans except that they thrived for a time, creating a civilization that would pass down a fondness for bold architecture (stone arches, paved streets, aqueducts, sewers) to its successor, Rome.

According to legend, Rome was founded on April 21, 753 B.C. by Romulus and Remus, twin brothers who claimed to be sons of the war god Mars, and to have been raised as infants by a she-wolf. Romulus saw himself as a descendant of the defeated army of Troy, and wanted Rome to inherit the mantle of that ancient city, if not surpass it. As the story goes, Remus laughed at the notion, so Romulus killed him out of anger and declared himself the first king of Rome. While the mythology may be of interest, the evidence actually shows Rome to have been settled by people not unlike the Etruscans.

Rome went through seven kings until 509 B.C. when the last king, who was indeed an Etruscan, was overthrown and the Roman Republic was formed. Rome then came to be ruled by two elected officials (known as consuls), a Senate made up of wealthy aristocrats (known as patricians), and a lower assembly that represented the common people (plebeians) who had very limited power. This format of government worked well at first, but as Rome expanded beyond a mere city-state to take over territory in Italy and overseas, the system of government came under severe strain. By the 1st century B.C., Rome was in crisis. Spartacus, a Thracian slave, led the common people in a revolt against the rule of the aristocratic patricians. Rome was able to put down the rebellion, but at great cost, as the Republic dissolved into a series of military of dictatorships that ended with the assassination of its greatest dictator, Julius Caesar.

In 29 B.C., after a long power struggle, Julius Caesar's nephew, Octavius, seized power and declared himself the semi-divine Emperor Augustus. Thusly, the Roman Empire was born. For the next two hundred years, Rome thrived and was for the most part at peace (the so-called Pax Romana), ruling over a vast territory stretching from Britain and the Atlantic coast of Europe in the north and west to North Africa and the Middle East in the south and east.

This Pax Romana, a time of un-paralleled peace and prosperity, ended in 180 A.D. with the death of Marcus Aurelius, Rome's last great emperor and philosopher-leader. A combination of economic problems, barbarian invasions, domestic instability, and territorial rebellions, combined with a lack of strong leadership, resulted in the slow and gradual decline of Rome and her Empire. In 380 A.D., after three hundred years of persecution, Christianity became the one and only official religion. By the end of the 4th century A.D., the Roman Empire split into two, divided between East and West. The East, based out of the newly-built capital of Constantinople, in what is now Turkey, thrived, eventually becoming the long-lasting Byzantine Empire that only fell in the 15th century. Rome on the other hand, the capital of the West, continued to decline.

In 410 A.D., Rome itself was sacked by barbarian hordes, leading to the Western Empire’s final demise in A.D. 476. The Eastern Empire invaded in the 6th century, but failed to restore order and had to withdraw again leaving the empire permanently defunct in the West. For the next thousand years, Italy once again became a patchwork of city-states, with Rome, home to the Catholic Church, being the most powerful element and a source of stability, as rival powers, from the Germanic Lombards to the Arabs, vied for power and domination. This long period of stagnation was known as the Dark Ages, as little learning occurred outside of monasteries, and the glories of the ancient Greco-Roman civilization were a distant memory.

Prosperity did not return to Italy again until the 14th Century, when city-states such as Amalfi, Florence, Milan, Pisa, Genoa, and Venice became centers of trade. The influx of wealth and increased trade contacts with foreign lands, transformed Italy into Europe's premier center of culture. Funded by wealthy patrons, figures such as Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Dante, Machiavelli, and Galileo, among others, revolutionized the fields of art, literature, politics, and science. Italian explorers, such as Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus, introduced Italy and Europe to the rest of the world and opened up fantastic new trade possibilities.

Italy remained a center of power until the 16th Century, when trade routes shifted away from the Mediterranean, and the Protestant Reformation resulted in the Catholic Church, which was based in Rome, losing influence over much of Northern Europe. Weakened, the various Italian city-states became vulnerable to conquest by Spain, France, and Austria. Italy remained a patchwork of principalities controlled through proxy by various European powers until the 19th Century, when the French leader Napoleon supported the unification of Italy as a way of creating a buffer state against his many enemies. With the backing of France, Italian nationalists Giuseppe Garibaldi and Camillo Cavour led a popular movement and eventual war that took over much of Italy, ending only in 1870 with the fall of Rome and the complete unification of Italy

Plagued by internal political divisions and with an economy devastated by war, the new Kingdom of Italy had many troubles from the beginning. In 1919, frustrated that Italy had received few gains despite having been a victor in the First World War, a politician named Benito Mussolini launched a movement that called for the restoration of Italy as a great power. In 1922, impatient with electoral politics, Mussolini led his supporters, known as Fascists, on a march on Rome to seize power directly through a coup. Frightened, the Italian king did not put up a fight and allowed Mussolini to become supreme ruler of Italy.

Mussolini spent the next twenty years consolidating power and building up the Italian economy, but he never gave up on the idea of restoring Italy as a great power. Calling himself "Il Duce" (meaning Duke, or Leader), Mussolini dreamed of leading a new Roman Empire. In the 1930s, he indulged his dreams of conquest by invading Ethiopia and Albania. When the Second World War broke out, Italy remained neutral at first. However, once it appeared, after the shocking fall of France, that Germany would win, Mussolini eagerly joined Hitler. Hitler was a Fascist adherent and longtime ally. His support prompted "II Duce" to rush off and invade Greece, the Balkans, and North Africa. Overextended and unprepared for such a large-scale war effort, Italy quickly found that it could not maintain a positive military position and needed to ask Germany for help. Before long, Mussolini saw himself losing control of North Africa, the Mediterranean, and eventually his own country to the Allied cause. Fleeing Rome, Mussolini tried to set up a puppet state with the help of the Germans in Northern Italy, but failed. Abandoned by a disgusted Hitler, Il Duce and his mistress were captured and executed by Italian partisans in Milan.

After the Second World War, Italy abolished the monarchy and declared itself a republic. With the strong support of the United States, Italy rebuilt its economy through loans from the Marshall Plan, joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and became a strong supporter of what is now the European Union. Today, Italy is now one of the most prosperous and democratic nations in Europe.

To learn more about Italian History and Culture, take advantage of an Italy Revealed program where we delve into the past in a way that is as fun as it is revealing.