Italy

From the legend of Rome to a modern republic forged in the Risorgimento.

Italy's history reaches from the Italic peoples, Etruscans and Greek colonists of the early peninsula, through the world-shaping Roman Republic and Empire, into a fragmented medieval and Renaissance era of papacy, communes, maritime republics and brilliant city-states. After centuries of foreign domination, the 19th-century Risorgimento welded these pieces into one state: the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed on 17 March 1861, Rome was taken in 1870, and after the trauma of Fascism and the Second World War, Italians voted in 1946 to become a republic.