🇮🇹 Italy: History

Picture a country founded by twins suckled by a she-wolf, where one emperor wanted to make his horse a consul, where for a hundred years people painted, sculpted and built so well that it is still called a rebirth - and which nevertheless came into being as a state later than the United States.

Welcome to Italy. We shall set out from the time when Rome was a village on seven hills and go up to the present day. Without tedious lists of dates, but with everything worth having.

Chapter 1: A She-Wolf, Twins, and a Village on Hills

By legend, Rome was founded in 753 BC by the brothers Romulus and Remus, twins who had been thrown into the Tiber and were suckled by a she-wolf. When they came to found the city they quarrelled over exactly where, Romulus killed Remus and named the city after himself. Rome therefore begins with a fratricide, a thing the Romans themselves kept in mind.

Archaeology is soberer: in the eighth century BC there were shepherds' villages on the hills above a ford across the Tiber. But the Romans took the date 753 seriously and counted their years from it.

To the north lived the Etruscans, a people whose language we can read but still only partly understand. They knew how to work metal, build vaults and drain marshes - and they taught the Romans. To the south were Greek colonies; the Greeks founded so many cities there that the region was called Great Greece. Naples is one of them, and its name means simply New City.

In 509 BC the Romans drove out their last king and founded a republic. It was governed by the senate and by two consuls elected for one year, so that nobody could settle in permanently.

Chapter 2: The Republic, an Elephant in the Alps, and a Man Who Crossed a Stream

Rome grew by war. Its most dangerous opponent was Carthage in present-day Tunisia, and of the three Punic wars the most famous is the second, because in it the Carthaginian general Hannibal brought an army across the Alps, war elephants and all. It was done in frost and snow, he lost most of the animals and most of his men, but he came down into Italy from a direction nobody expected, and beat the Romans there for sixteen years. He never took Rome - he had nothing to besiege it with - and Rome won in the end by attacking Carthage at home.

The republic was undone by its own success. Generals had more money and more loyal soldiers than the senate. In 49 BC Gaius Julius Caesar crossed the little river Rubicon with his legion, the boundary beyond which an army was not allowed. He is supposed to have said "the die is cast", and unleashed a civil war which he won. In 44 BC about sixty conspirators stabbed him to death in the senate.

Caesar left two extra things behind: a calendar that, with one small correction, is still in use, and the month of July, which carries his name. His successor Augustus took August.

Chapter 3: The Empire, Concrete, and Roads Still Driven On

Under the empire Rome reached an area of five million square kilometres and about sixty million inhabitants - roughly a quarter of humanity at the time. Rome itself had over a million people, a figure it did not have again until the twentieth century.

The most durable Roman invention is neither the law nor the legion, but concrete. Roman concrete, mixed with volcanic ash from around Naples, sets under water and grows stronger with age - we now know that cracks in it heal, because imperfectly mixed lime reacts with water. The Pantheon in Rome has a dome of this concrete 43 metres across, and it is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world. It has stood without repair for nearly two thousand years.

They built roads so well that today's asphalt runs along some of them. Aqueducts brought over a million cubic metres of water a day into Rome. And because they had underfloor heating, sewers and baths, life in a Roman town was better than life in a European town of the sixteenth century.

The emperors varied. The best of them, Marcus Aurelius, wrote philosophical notes in his spare moments that are still read. The worst of them, Caligula, heaped honours on his favourite horse and, according to ancient authors, wanted to make it a consul. And one of them, Nero, is said to have played the lyre while Rome burned - historians deny it, but the story is immortal.

In 79 Vesuvius erupted and buried Pompeii and Herculaneum under several metres of ash. For the inhabitants it was a catastrophe; for archaeologists a gift: under the ash a whole city was preserved, complete with the graffiti on its walls, bread in an oven and a dog on a chain.

In 476 a Germanic commander deposed the last Western Roman emperor. He was a boy, and his name, as it happens, was Romulus.

Chapter 4: The Thousand Years When Italy Did Not Exist

After the fall of Rome, Italy fell apart for thirteen hundred years and was never one thing again - not until the nineteenth century.

In the north the city states prevailed, grown rich on trade. Venice built a republic on water and took control of trade with the East; its doge was elected and its yards could build a war galley in a single day. Genoa was its eternal rival. Florence grew rich on wool and banking and, together with other Italian trading cities, invented the things without which today's economy would not work: double-entry bookkeeping, the bill of exchange and cargo insurance.

In the south came Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Germans, French and Spaniards in turn. The kingdom of Naples was for centuries the largest state on the peninsula, and Naples one of the largest cities in Europe.

In the middle of all this stood the pope as the temporal ruler of his own state. The Papal State cut Italy across the middle and was one of the main reasons why unification took so long to achieve.

And then came the plague. Between 1347 and 1351 the Black Death killed a third of Europe. Genoese ships brought it from the Crimea. The rule that a ship from a suspect port must wait was introduced in 1377 by Ragusa, today's Dubrovnik - thirty days. Venice stretched it to forty, *quaranta giorni*, and that is where the word quarantine comes from.

Chapter 5: The Renaissance, or a Hundred Years in Which Everything Changed

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries something happened in the Italian cities that has no parallel: within a single human lifetime, painting, sculpture, architecture, science and political thought all moved.

In Florence, Filippo Brunelleschi built the dome of the cathedral, which for a hundred years people had said could not be built. He had no scaffolding that would span it, so he devised a double shell that carried itself, and a geared crane to go with it. It is still the largest brick dome in the world.

Leonardo da Vinci painted, dissected, designed flying machines and wrote his notes in mirror writing. He finished only a handful of paintings in his life, because something else always caught his attention. Michelangelo carved David out of a block of marble that two sculptors before him had rejected as spoilt, and spent four years painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel - not lying on his back, as the story goes, but standing on scaffolding with his head thrown back. Galileo Galilei pointed a telescope at Jupiter, saw its moons, and thereby proved that not everything orbits the Earth. The Inquisition sentenced him for it to house arrest, in which he spent the rest of his life.

The Renaissance was paid for by the Medici, a Florentine banking family who bought influence with patronage. Four popes and two queens of France came out of it.

And Niccolò Machiavelli wrote a little book about how rule actually works, not how it ought to. A style of politics is still named after him - the one he described - and about which it is still argued whether he was recommending it or merely reporting it.

Chapter 6: The Risorgimento, or How to Make One State Out of Thirteen

At the beginning of the nineteenth century Italy was "merely a geographical expression", as the Austrian chancellor Metternich put it, sneering. Austria controlled the north, the pope the middle, the Bourbons the south.

Unification, which is called the Risorgimento or resurgence, had three men. Giuseppe Mazzini was the idealist, who wrote about a united Italy and organised conspiracies. Camillo Cavour, prime minister of the kingdom of Sardinia, was the cold diplomat who managed to win France over against Austria. And Giuseppe Garibaldi was the soldier who in 1860 sailed from Genoa with a thousand volunteers in red shirts, landed in Sicily, defeated a Bourbon army many times larger, and took the whole south in a few months.

When, after taking Naples, Garibaldi held power over half of Italy, he simply handed it to the king and went off to his island to grow vegetables. Historians still cannot pass over that moment without a remark.

The kingdom of Italy came into being in 1861. Rome joined it only in 1870, when France withdrew the garrison protecting the pope. The pope then shut himself in the Vatican and for nearly sixty years refused to recognise the Italian state; it was settled only in 1929.

After unification the politician Massimo d'Azeglio said a sentence that is still quoted: "We have made Italy, now we must make Italians." Fewer than a tenth of the inhabitants then spoke standard Italian; the rest spoke dialects that often could not understand one another.

Chapter 7: The Twentieth Century, Fascism and Fresh Starts

In 1922 Benito Mussolini took power and Italy became the first fascist country in Europe. He ruled for twenty years, took the country into the Second World War at Germany's side, and ended in 1945 hanging upside down in a square in Milan. His regime left architecture behind as well - the EUR district in Rome is entirely of that period.

The war in Italy was long and hard and the front divided the country. The strong partisan movement, the *resistenza*, is still part of the national identity. In 1946 Italians narrowly voted in a referendum for a republic rather than a monarchy, and the royal family had to leave.

Then came the *miracolo economico*, the economic miracle of the fifties and sixties. An agricultural country became an industrial one: Fiat, Olivetti, Pirelli. Italy gave the world design - the Vespa, Ferrari, the espresso machine. And film: Fellini, Vittorio De Sica, later Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns and the music of Ennio Morricone.

The seventies and eighties are remembered less fondly - the *anni di piombo*, the years of lead and terrorism - and the nineties brought the Clean Hands investigation, which uncovered corruption so extensive that it swept away the entire party system.

Chapter 8: The Italy Under Your Feet

Italy has sixty million inhabitants and more UNESCO World Heritage sites than any other country in the world - over sixty. Two separate states lie inside its borders: the Vatican and San Marino, which is the oldest republic still functioning in the world, reputedly since the year 301.

From here come the bank, double-entry bookkeeping, quarantine, the piano, the battery, Marconi's pioneering wireless radio, opera, musical notation as you know it, spectacles, the telescope as an astronomical instrument, and the thermometer. And pizza - the Neapolitan margherita is said to have been named in 1889 after Queen Margherita, and its colours, red, white and green, are the colours of the flag.

No other mainland European country has as many active volcanoes as Italy: Vesuvius above Naples, Etna in Sicily, and Stromboli, which erupts so regularly that sailors called it the lighthouse of the Mediterranean. And Naples lies between two of them - the second, the Campi Flegrei, is not a mountain but an enormous depression, which volcanologists consider more dangerous than Vesuvius, because the magma beneath it lies under the whole inhabited area.

Look around. Here even the most ordinary square is usually older than most European states.