Culture of Italy
Encyclopedia
From antiquity until the 16th century, Italy
was at the centre of Western culture
, fulcrum or origin of the Etruscan civilization
, Ancient Rome
, the Roman Catholic Church
, Humanism
and the Renaissance
.
Etruscan and Samnite
cultures flourished in Italy before the emergence of the Roman Empire, which conquered and incorporated them. Phoenicians and Greeks established settlements in Italy beginning several centuries before the birth of Jesus
, and the Greek settlements in particular developed into thriving classical civilizations. The Greek ruins in southern Italy are perhaps the most spectacular and best preserved anywhere. With Emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity in 312, Rome became the open and official seat of the Catholic Church, and Italy has had a profound effect on the development of Christianity and of Western concepts of faith and morality ever since.
The Medieval commune
s were Europe's first bourgeois societies; associations of townsmen that arose during the 11th century to overthrow the rule of the local bishop or feudal magnates. The communal experience of medieval Italy was somehow salient for the origins of modern democracy
.See also Robert D. Putnam, " Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital, " Journal of Democracy 6 (1995): 65-78. Web. 06 Nov. 2011.
Italy became also a seat of great formal learning in 1088 with the establishment of the University of Bologna
, the first university in Europe. Other Italian universities soon followed. For example, the Schola Medica Salernitana
, in southern Italy, was the first medical school of medieval Europe. These great centers of learning presaged the Renaissance, as did innovative works by Italy's great late-Gothic artists. The European Renaissance began in Italy and was fueled throughout Europe by Italian painting, sculpture, architecture, science, literature, and music. Italy continued its leading cultural role through the Baroque
period and into the Romantic period, when its dominance in painting and sculpture diminished and it reestablished a strong presence in music.
Italian artists have been quite influential in the 20th century, and some of the Italian exponents of Modernism
in the 1920s and 1930s continue to have a strong presence in the international contemporary art market. Following World War II, Italian neorealism
became an important force in motion pictures, and by the 1960s, Italy had established itself as one of a handful of great European film cultures. Today Italy is one of the international leaders in fashion and design. Both the internal and external facets of Western Civilization were born on the Italian Peninsula
, whether one looks at the history of the Christian faith, civil institutions
(such as the Senate
), philosophy, law, art, science, or social customs and culture.
Italy did not exist as a political state until its unification in 1861. Due to this comparatively late unification, and the historical autonomy of the regions that comprise the Italian peninsula, many traditions and customs that are now recognized as distinctly Italian can be identified by their regions of origin. Despite the political and social isolation of these regions, Italy's contributions to the cultural and historical heritage of Europe remain immense. Famous elements of Italian culture are its opera
and music, its iconic gastronomy and food, which are commonly regarded as amongst the most popular in the world, its cinema (with classic films such as La Dolce Vita
, Life is Beautiful
, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
etc.), its collections of priceless works of art and its fashion (Milan is regarded as one of the fashion capital
s of the world).
Italy is home to the greatest number of UNESCO
World Heritage Site
s (47) to date, and one estimate says that the country is home to half the world's great art treasures.
Architectural ruins from antiquity throughout Italy testify to the greatness of cultures past. The history of architecture
in Italy is one that begins with the ancient styles of the Etruscans and Greeks, progressing to classical Roman, then to the revival of the classical Roman era during the Renaissance and evolving into the Baroque era. During the period of the Italian Renaissance
it had been customary for students of architecture to travel to Rome to study the ancient ruins and buildings as an essential part of their education.
Old St. Peter's Church (begun about A.D. 330) was probably the first significant early Christian basilica, a style of church architecture that came to dominate the early Middle Ages. Old St. Peter's stood on the site of the present St. Peter's Basilica
in Rome. The first significant buildings in the medieval Romanesque style were churches built in Italy during the 800's. Several outstanding examples of the Byzantine architectural style of the Middle East also were built in Italy. The most famous Byzantine structure is the Basilica of St. Mark
in Venice.
The greatest flowering of Italian architecture took place during the Renaissance. Filippo Brunelleschi
made great contributions to architectural design with his dome for the Cathedral of Florence. Leon Battista Alberti was another early Renaissance architect whose theories and designs had an enormous influence on later architects.
Perhaps the greatest achievement of Italian Renaissance architecture was St. Peter's Basilica, originally designed by Donato Bramante
in the early 1500s. Andrea Palladio
influenced architects throughout western Europe with the villas and palaces he designed in the middle and late 1500s.
The Baroque period produced several outstanding Italian architects in the 1600s especially known for their churches. The most important architects included Gian Lorenzo Bernini
and Francesco Borromini
. Numerous modern Italian architects, such as Renzo Piano
, are famous worldwide.
, when the first experimental broadcasting began. However, this lasted for a very short time: when fascist Italy
entered World War II in 1940 all the transmission were interrupted, and were resumed in earnest only nine years after the end of the conflict, in 1954. There are two main national television networks responsible for most viewing: state-owned RAI
, funded by a yearly mandatory licence fee and Mediaset
, commercial network founded by former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. While many other networks are also present, both nationally and locally, these two together reach 80% of the TV ratings, as detailed further below.
As with all the other media of Italy, the Italian television industry is widely considered both inside and outside the country to be overtly politicized. The public broadcaster RAI
is, unlike the BBC
which is controlled by an independent trust
, under direct control of the government; the most important commercial stations in the country are, in turn, owned by the current prime minister. According to a December 2008 poll, only 24% of Italians trust television news programmes, compared unfavourably to the British rate of 38%, making Italy one of only three examined countries where online sources are considered more reliable than television ones for information. Also, along with Turkey
, Italy has one of the lowest levels of press freedom in Europe, even falling behind some ex-communist countries, such as Poland
and the Czech Republic
.
Italian theatre can be traced back into the Roman which was heavily influenced by the Greek tradition, and, as with many other literary genres, Roman dramatists tended to adapt and translate from the Greek. For example, Seneca's Phaedra
was based on that of Euripides
, and many of the comedies of Plautus
were direct translations of works by Menander
. During the 16th century and on into the 18th century Commedia dell'arte
was a form of improvisational theatre, although it is still performed today. Travelling teams of players would set up an outdoor stage and provide amusement in the form of juggling, acrobatics, and, more typically, humorous plays based on a repertoire of established characters with a rough storyline, called Canovaccio
.
The early Italian film industry became internationally known for its historical spectacles, most made from 1905 to 1914. Few major motion pictures were produced during the 1920s and 1930s, but a renaissance of Italian filmmaking developed in the 1940s. At that time, a new generation of directors emerged. They included Vittorio De Sica
, Roberto Rossellini
, and Luchino Visconti
. After the end of World War II in 1945, several of these directors became leaders in a movement called Neorealism
, which portrayed the daily life of ordinary people with almost documentary realism.
During the 1950s and 1960s, earthy comedies gained international success, due partly to the popularity of Italian movie stars Gina Lollobrigida
, Sophia Loren
, and Marcello Mastroianni
. At the same time, a new group of directors won praise. The most significant were Michelangelo Antonioni
and Federico Fellini
. Vittorio De Sica
, Roberto Rossellini
, Sergio Leone
, Pier Paolo Pasolini
and Luchino Visconti
also continued to film major works. During the late 1900s, the leading Italian directors included Roberto Benigni
, Marco Bellocchio, Bernardo Bertolucci
, and the brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani
.
, architectural design
, industrial design
and urban design
. The Italian style is known globally for its interior design, and has produced some well-known furniture designers, such as Gio Ponti
and Ettore Sottsass
, and Italian phrases such as Bel Disegno and Linea Italiana have entered the vocabulary of furniture design. Examples of classic pieces of Italian white goods and pieces of furniture include Zanussi
's washing machines and fridges, the "New Tone" sofas by Atrium, and the post-modern bookcase by Ettore Sottsass, inspired by Bob Dylan
's song Memphis Blues
.
The particular bookcase became a cultural and design icon of the 1980s. Today, Milan
and Turin
are the nation's leaders in architectural design and industrial design. The city of Milan hosts the FieraMilano, Europe's biggest design fair. Milan also hosts major design and architecture-related events and venues, such as the Fuori Salone and the Salone del Mobile, and has also been home to the designers Bruno Munari
, Lucio Fontana
, Enrico Castellani
and Piero Manzoni
.
, Fendi
, Gucci
, Versace
and Prada
have become household words.
The city of Milan
takes its place amongst the most important centers of fashion in the world. Accessory and jewelry labels, such as Bulgari
and Luxottica
are also internationally acclaimed, and Luxottica is the world's largest eyewear company.
Currently, Milan, (Italy's center of design) and Rome annually compete with other major international centres, such as Paris, New York, London and Tokyo. Also, the fashion magazine Vogue Italia
is considered the most prestigious fashion magazine in the world.
Italian literature began after the founding of Rome in 753 BC. Roman, or Latin literature
, was and still is highly influential in the world, with numerous writers, poets, philosophers, and historians, such as Pliny the Elder
, Pliny the Younger
, Virgil
, Horace
, Propertius, Ovid
and Livy
. The Romans were also famous for their oral tradition, poetry, drama and epigrams.
The basis of the modern Italian Literature in the Italian language was shaped by three great writers of the 1300s — Dante Alighieri
, Petrarch
, and Giovanni Boccaccio
. Their language and their works were imitated by Italian writers for hundreds of years. Dante's The Divine Comedy
is a masterpiece of world poetry. Boccaccio's Decameron is one of the most popular collections of short stories ever written. Petrarch's love poetry served as a model for centuries.
Italian Renaissance
authors produced a number of important works. Among the best known is The Prince
, a political science essay written by Niccolò Machiavelli
in 1513 and published in 1532. Italian drama developed in the 1600s, especially in the style called commedia dell'arte
. These comedies were based on the improvisation of certain characters and became very popular. An outstanding writer of the Baroque period was Metastasio
, and Carlo Goldoni
was the most prominent playwright of the 18th century.
The time of Italy's rebirth was heralded by the poets Vittorio Alfieri
, Ugo Foscolo
, and Giacomo Leopardi
. Alessandro Manzoni
was the principal Italian novelist of the 19th century, and Francesco de Sanctis
the greatest literary critic. Among the Italian literary figures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Giosuè Carducci
, Giovanni Verga
, Gabriele d'Annunzio
, Luigi Pirandello
, and Grazia Deledda
achieved international renown. Leading writers of the postwar era are Ignazio Silone
, Alberto Moravia
, Italo Calvino
, Umberto Eco
, Dario Fo
, and the poets Salvatore Quasimodo
and Eugenio Montale
.
From folk to classical, music has always played an important role in Italian culture. Having given birth to opera
, for example, Italy provides many of the very foundations of the classical music tradition. Some of the instruments that are often associated with classical music, including the piano
and violin
, were invented in Italy, and many of the existing classical music forms can trace their roots back to innovations of 16th and 17th century Italian music (such as the symphony
, concerto
, and sonata
).
Italian composers have played a major role in music since the Middle Ages. In the 1000s, Guido of Arezzo
, an Italian monk, developed a revolutionary system of notation
and method of sight-singing.
During the Renaissance
, Giovanni Palestrina composed masterpieces of choral music for use in church services. The first operas were composed in Florence in the 1590s. Opera emerged as an art form during the Baroque period. Claudio Monteverdi
was the first great composer of Baroque opera in the early 1600s. Important composers of the late 1600s and early 1700s included Alessandro Scarlatti
, his son Domenico
, and Antonio Vivaldi
. Alessandro became best known for his operas, Domenico for his keyboard compositions, and Vivaldi for his works for violin. During the 1800s and early 1900s, popular operas were composed by Giuseppe Verdi
, Giacomo Puccini
, Vincenzo Bellini
, Gaetano Donizetti
, and Gioacchino Rossini
.
Today, the entire infrastructure that supports music as a profession is extensive in Italy, including conservatories, opera houses, radio and television stations, recording studios, music festivals, and important centers of musicological
research. Musical life in Italy remains extremely active, but very Italian-centered and hardly international. The only main international Italian pop-singers include 1970s pop-diva Mina
, who sold 76 million records worldwide in her lifetime, and singer Laura Pausini
, who has sold 45 million albums.
La Scala
operahouse in Milan is also renowned as one of the best in the world. Famous Italian opera
singers include Enrico Caruso, Luciano Pavarotti
and Andrea Bocelli
, to name a few.
Italy has also seen the birth and development of several modern musical genres, including progressive rock
, experimental
, and electronic music
, most notably disco
(or Italo disco
). Italo disco
is a subgenre of disco music which is regarded as the first proper electronic dance genre, evolving in Italy in the 1970s and also from composer/producer Giorgio Moroder
's electronic-disco creations.
The still-standing aqueducts, bathhouses, and other public works of both ancient republic and empire testify to the engineering and architectural skills of the Romans. The rebirth of science during the Renaissance brought the daring speculations of Leonardo da Vinci
(including discoveries in anatomy, meteorology, geology and hydrology) advances in physics and astronomy by Galileo Galilei
, and the development of the barometer by Evangelista Torricelli
.
At the turn of the century, Guglielmo Marconi
carried out experiments in electricity and developed the wireless, but he was preceded by Count Alessandro Volta
, one of the pioneers of electricity, over 100 years earlier. By the end of the Second World War, Enrico Fermi
's work in nuclear physics led to the development of both the atomic bomb and peaceful atomic applications. On September 25, 2001, US Congress
passed a resolution that officially recognized the Florentine immigrant to the United States, Antonio Meucci
, as the inventor of the telephone.
A brief overview of some other notable figures includes the astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini
, who made many important discoveries about the Solar System
; the mathematicians Lagrange
, Fibonacci
, and Gerolamo Cardano
, whose Ars Magna
is generally recognized as the first modern treatment on mathematics, made fundamental advances to the field; Marcello Malpighi
, a doctor and founder of microscopic anatomy; the biologist Lazzaro Spallanzani
, who conducted important research in bodily functions, animal reproduction, and cellular theory; the physician, pathologist, scientist, and Nobel laureate Camillo Golgi
, whose many achievements include the discovery of the Golgi complex, and his role in paving the way to the acceptance of the Neuron doctrine
.
The Italians love of automobiles and speed has made Italy famous for its production of many of the world's most famous sports cars and the industry that flourishes there. Some of the world's most elite vehicles were developed in Italy: Lamborghini
, Ferrari
, Alfa Romeo
, and Maserati
are but a few of the well-known luxury cars that originated in Italy.
, Italy was the centre for art and architecture. There were many Italian artists during the Gothic and Medieval periods, and the arts flourished during the Italian Renaissance
. Later styles in Italy included Mannerism
, Baroque
and Macchiaioli
. Futurism
developed in Italy in the 20th century. Florence, Venice and Rome, in particular, are brimming with art treasures in museums, churches, and public buildings.
The Italian Renaissance produced many of the greatest painters and sculptors in art history. They were all influenced by the work of Giotto di Bondone
in the late 1200s. One of the most influential artists who ever lived, Giotto changed the course of Western art by painting in a new realistic style.
Florence
became the center of early Renaissance art. The great Florentine masters of painting included Masaccio
, Fra Angelico
, Andrea Mantegna
, Sandro Botticelli
, and Paolo Uccello
. The greatest artist of the 1400s was probably Leonardo da Vinci
. His portrait Mona Lisa
and his religious scene The Last Supper are among the most famous paintings in history.
Early Renaissance sculptors equaled the painters in achievement. The major sculptors included Donatello
, Antonio del Pollaiolo, and Andrea del Verrocchio
.
The later Renaissance was dominated by Raphael
and Michelangelo
. Raphael painted balanced, harmonious pictures that expressed a calm, noble way of life. Michelangelo achieved greatness both as a painter and sculptor. In Venice
, a number of artists were painting richly colored works during the 1500s. The most famous Venetian masters included Giorgione
, Titian
, and Tintoretto
.
Italian painters and sculptors dominated the Baroque period. Annibale Caracci and Caravaggio
were the most important early Baroque painters. Gian Lorenzo Bernini
was the greatest master of European sculpture of the Baroque period.
In the 1900s, many Italians played leading roles in the development of modern art. Umberto Boccioni
was a founder and the leading sculptor of the Futurism movement. Giorgio de Chirico
gained fame for his haunting paintings of empty city squares. Amedeo Modigliani
won renown with a series of portraits.
Italian cuisine
as a national cuisine known today has evolved through centuries of social and political changes, with its roots traced back to 4th century BC. Significant change occurred with discovery of the New World
which helped shape much of what is known as Italian cuisine today with the introduction of items such as potatoes, tomatoes, bell pepper and maize, which are all central parts of the cuisine but not introduced in scale until the 18th century.
Ingredients and dishes vary by region. There are many significant regional dishes that have become both national and regional. Many dishes that were once regional, however, have proliferated in different variations across the country in the present day. Cheese and wine are also a major part of the cuisine, playing different roles both regionally and nationally with their many variations and Denominazione di origine controllata
(regulated appellation) laws.
Italy's cuisine is widely regarded as amongst the most popular in the world, and is mainly made up of traditional dishes, meals and deserts, such as pasta
, spaghetti
, pizza
, focaccia
, bruschetta
, arancini
, granita
, lasagna
, risotto
, gnocchi
, polenta
, and zampone, to name a few. Basil, mozzarella, garlic, olive oil and tomatoes are examples of ingredients which are used frequently in Italian cuisine.
Also, Italy exports and produces the highest level of wine, exporting over 1,793 tonnes. Italy currently is responsible for producing approximately one-fifth of world wine production in 2005. Some parts of the country are home to some of the oldest wine-producing regions in the world. Etruscans and Greek
settlers produced wine in the country long before the Romans
started developing their own vineyards in the 2nd century BC. Roman grape-growing and winemaking was prolific and well-organized, pioneering large-scale production and storage techniques like barrel
-making
and bottling.
Famous and traditional Italian wine
s include Barolo
, Barbaresco
, Brunello di Montalcino
, Barbera
, Dolcetto
, Corvina
, Nero d'Avola
, Pinot Grigio and Moscato
, to name a few.
Italy is also famous for its gelato
, or traditional ice-cream often known as Italian ice cream abroad. There are gelaterias or ice-cream vendors and shops all around Italian cities, and it is a very popular dessert or snack, especially during the summer. Sicilian granita
s, or a frozen dessert of flavored crushed ice, more or less similar to a sorbet or a snow cone
, are popular desserts not only in Sicily or their native town of Catania, but all over Italy (even though the Northern and Central Italian equivalent, the gratta checca, commonly found in Rome or Milan is slightly different to the traditional granita Siciliana).
Italy also boasts an assortion of several different desserts. The Christmas cakes pandoro
and panettone
are popular in the North (pandoro is from Verona, whilst panettone is Milanese), however, they have also become popular desserts in other parts of Italy and abroad. The Colomba Pasquale
, or the Italian Easter cake is eaten all over the country on Easter day, and is a more traditional option to chocolate Easter egg
s. Tiramisu
is, on addition, a very popular and symbolic Italian dessert from Veneto which has become famous worldwide. Other Italian cakes and sweets include cannoli
, the cassata
Siciliana, fruit-shaped marzipan
s and the panna cotta
.
Coffee
, and more specifically espresso
, has become highly important to the cultural cuisine of Italy. Espresso is a highly drunk coffee-drink in Italy, and a good number of Italians drink it in the morning before going to work, or starting the day in general. Espresso is served in small cups and has a dark, almost black appearance, and a strong, sour taste. Cappucino is also a famous Italian coffee drink, which is usually sweeter and less dark than espresso, and can be served with foam or cream on top, in which chocolate powder and sugar is usually sprinkled. Cappucino is, today, not only common in Italian cafes, or caffes, but also in restaurants and bars abroad. Caffelatte coffee is a mixture of coffee and milk (latte = milk), and is usually drunk at breakfast time (unlike most other Italian coffee-types, children and adults drink it alike, since it is lighter and more milky than normal coffee). Caffè macchiato
is a stronger form of caffelatte, which, unlike caffelatte, which has an equal amount of coffee and milk, only contains a tiny portion of milk or whipped cream (latte macchiato
is the lighter version of caffè macchiato, which is often drunk by children as well, which instead, only has a small addition of coffee or espresso to give it a slight coffee-like taste). The Bicerin
is Turin's own coffee. It is a mix between cappucino and normal hot chocolate, and is made with equal amounts of drinking chocolate, coffee and a slight addition of milk and creamy foam.
Italy's public education is free and compulsory from 6–14 years of age. It has a five-year primary stage and an eight-year secondary stage
, divided into first-grade secondary school (middle school
) and second-grade secondary school (or high school
). Italy has both public and private education systems.
Primary school lasts five years. Until middle school, the normal educational curriculum is uniform for all: although one can attend a private or state-funded school, the subjects studied are the same, except in special schools for pupils with different care requirements.
Secondary education (Scuole medie) is further divided in two stages: Medie Inferiori, which correspond to the Middle School grades, and Medie Superiori, which correspond to the High School level. The lower tier of Scuole Medie corresponds to Middle School, lasts three years, and involves an exam at the end of the third year; Scuole Superiori usually last five years (even though Istituti Professionali might offer a diploma
after only three years). Every tier involves an exam at the end of the final year required to access the following tier.
The secondary school situation varies, since there are several types of schools differentiated by subjects and activities. The main types are the Liceo, the Istituto Tecnico and the Istituto Professionale. Any kind of secondary school that lasts 5 years grants access to the final exam, called Esame di Stato conclusivo del corso di studio di Istruzione Secondaria Superiore or Esame di Maturità. This exam takes place every year in June and July and grants access to any faculty at any University.
Italy hosts a broad variety of universities, colleges and academies. Milan's Bocconi University
, has been ranked among the top 20 best business schools in the world by The Wall Street Journal
international rankings, especially thanks to its Master of Business Administration
program, which in 2007 placed it no. 17 in the world in terms of graduate recruitment preference by major multinational companies. Also, Forbes
has ranked Bocconi no. 1 worldwide in the specific category Value for Money. In May 2008, Bocconi overtook several traditionally top global business schools in the Financial Times
executive education ranking, reaching no. 5 in Europe and no. 15 in the world. Other top universities and polytechnics include the Polytechnic University of Turin
and Politecnico di Milano.
In 2009 an Italian research ranked it as the best in Italy (over indicators such as scientific production, attraction of foreign students, and others), the Sapienza University of Rome and the University of Milan
whose research and teaching activities have developed over the years and have received important international recognitions. The University is the only Italian member of the League of European Research Universities
, a prestigious group of twenty research-intensive European Universities.
were the most influential people of pre-Roman Italy. Both the Etruscans in the north and the Greeks in the south had a major influence on the development of Rome.
Important poets of the Roman republic
and empire
were Lucretius
, Catullus
, Virgil
, Horace
and Ovid
. Also prominent in Latin literature were the orator and rhetorician Cicero
; the satirists Petronius
and Juvenal
; the prose writers Pliny the Elder
, his nephew Pliny the Younger
; and the historians Sallust
, Livy
and Suetonius
. Julius Caesar
, renowned as a historian and prose stylist, is even more famous as a military and political leader. The first of the Roman emperor
s was Octavian, better known by the honorific Augustus
. Noteworthy among later emperors are the tyrants Caligula
and Nero
, the philosopher and statesman Marcus Aurelius, and Constantine the Great, who was the first to accept Christianity
. No history of the Christian Church
during the medieval period would be complete without mention of such men of Italian birth as St. Benedict of Nursia
, Pope Gregory I
, St. Francis of Assisi
, and the philosopher and theologians St. Anselm of Canterbury
and St. Thomas Aquinas
.
In the 13th and 14th centuries there were the sculptors Nicola Pisano
and his son Giovanni
; the painters Cimabue
, Duccio
, and Giotto di Bondone
; and, later in the period, the sculptor Andrea Pisano
. Among the many great artists of the 15th century — the golden age of Florence and Venice — were the architects Filippo Brunelleschi
, Lorenzo Ghiberti
, and Leon Battista Alberti; the sculptors Donatello
, Luca della Robbia
, Desiderio da Settignano
, and Andrea del Verrocchio
; and the painters Fra Angelico
, Stefano di Giovanni
, Paolo Uccello
, Masaccio
, Filippo Lippi
, Piero della Francesca
, Giovanni Bellini
, Andrea Mantegna
, Antonio del Pollaiolo, Luca Signorelli
, Pietro Perugino
, Sandro Botticelli
, Domenico Ghirlandaio
, and Vittore Carpaccio
.
During the 16th century, the High Renaissance
, Rome shared with Florence the leading position in the world of the arts. Major masters included the architects Bramante and Andrea Palladio
; the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini
; the painter, designer, and inventor Leonardo da Vinci
; the painter, sculptor and architect Michelangelo Buonarroti; and the painters Titian
, Giorgione
, Raphael
, Andrea del Sarto
, and Antonio da Correggio
. Among the great painters of the late Renaissance were Tintoretto
and Paolo Veronese
. Giorgio Vasari
was a painter, architect, art historian, and critic.
Among the leading artists of the Baroque period were the sculptor and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini
and the painters Caravaggio
, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
, Canaletto
, Pietro Longhi
, and Francesco Guardi
. Leading figures in modern painting were Umberto Boccioni
, Amedeo Modigliani
, Giorgio de Chirico
, and Giorgio Morandi
. A noted contemporary architect was Pier Luigi Nervi
.
In philosophy, exploration, and statesmanship, Italy has produced many world-renowned figures: the traveler Marco Polo
; the statesman and patron of the arts Cosimo de' Medici
; the statesman, clergyman, and artistic patron Rodrigo Borgia, who became Pope Alexander VI
; the soldier, statesman, and artistic patron Lorenzo de' Medici
, the son of Cosimo; the explorer John Cabot
; the explorer Christopher Columbus
; the explorer Amerigo Vespucci
, after whom the Americas
are named; the admiral and statesman Andrea Doria
; Niccolò Machiavelli
, author of The Prince
and the outstanding political theorist of the Renaissance
; the statesman and clergyman Cesare Borgia
, the son of Rodrigo; the explorer Sebastian Cabot
, the son of John; Baldassare Castiglione
, author of The Book of the Courtier
; the historian Francesco Guicciardini
; the explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano; the philosopher Giordano Bruno
; the imperial field marshal and statesman Prince Eugene of Savoy
; the political philosopher Giambattista Vico
; the noted jurist Cesare Beccaria; Giuseppe Mazzini
, the leading spirit of the Risorgimento; Camillo Benso, conte di Cavour, its prime statesman; and Giuseppe Garibaldi
, its foremost soldier and man of action.
spoken by about 60 million people in Italy, and by a total of around 70 million in the world. In Switzerland, Italian is one of four official languages
. It is also the official language of San Marino
, as well as the primary language of Vatican City
. Standard Italian, adopted by the state after the unification of Italy, is based on Tuscan and is somewhat intermediate between the Italo-Dalmatian languages
of the South and the Gallo-Italic languages
of the North. Its development was also influenced by the other Italian dialects
and by the Germanic language of post-Roman invaders
. Italian is also spoken in parts of Slovenia
, Malta
, Monaco
, Luxembourg
, Croatia
and Corsica
. The language is also used in Eritrea
, Libya
and Somalia
, all ex-Italian colonies, and is also spoken in some emigrants' communities, especially in the United States
, Canada
, Argentina
, Brazil
and the United Kingdom
.
Italian derives diachronically from Latin and is one of the closest languages to Latin. Unlike most other Romance languages, Italian has retained the contrast between short and long consonants which existed in Latin. As in most Romance languages, stress
is distinctive. In particular, among the Romance languages, Italian is considered to be the closest to Latin in terms of vocabulary. Lexical similarity
is 89% with French
, 87% with Catalan
, 85% with Sardinian
, 82% with Spanish
, 78% with Rhaeto-Romance
and 77% with Romanian
.
and the Uffizi
Palace in Florence. National archaeological museums in Cagliari, Naples, and Palermo contain artifacts from the earliest history of Italy. Displays in the national galleries in Naples, Palermo, and Urbino include paintings by Italian masters.
All large Italian cities have public libraries. The largest libraries in the country are the national central libraries in Florence and Rome. In Italy, people visit libraries primarily for serious study. Local libraries have little in the way of popular books for general readers, and children's libraries are rare.
Italy set up its present form of government in 1946. That year, the people voted to change their nation from a monarchy ruled by a king to a republic headed by a president. King Umberto II
immediately left the throne. The voters elected a group of 556 members, called a Constituent Assembly
, to write a constitution
. The Constitution was approved in 1947 and became effective on Jan. 1, 1948. The Constitution established a governing system made up of a president, a cabinet called the Council of Ministers headed by a prime minister, and a Parliament made up of a Senate
and a Chamber of Deputies
.
The president of Italy is elected to a seven-year term by both houses of Parliament and a small number of regional representatives. The president must be at least 50 years old. He or she appoints the prime minister, who forms a government. The president has the power to dissolve Parliament and call new elections. The president is the commander of the Italian armed forces, and can declare war. The current President of the Italian Republic is Giorgio Napolitano
.
Italy has no vice president. If the president of Italy becomes ill, the president of the Italian Senate takes over the office. If the president dies, a presidential election is held.
The prime minister determines national policy and is the most important person in the Italian government. The prime minister is selected by the president — usually from the members of Parliament — and must be approved by Parliament. The prime minister has no fixed term of office and can be voted out of office by Parliament at any time. The current Italian Prime Minister is Silvio Berlusconi
.
Members of the Cabinet are chosen by the prime minister, and they are usually selected from the members of Parliament. They are then appointed by the president and must be approved by Parliament. The Italian prime minister and the cabinet are officially called the government.
Italy was a founding member of the European Community — now the European Union
. Italy was admitted to the United Nations
in 1955 and is a member and strong supporter of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
/World Trade Organization
, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe
, and the Council of Europe
. Its recent turns in the rotating Presidency of international organisations include the Conference for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the forerunner of the OSCE, in 1994; G8
; and the EU in 2001 and from July to December 2003.
has been separated from the state, it still plays a role in the nation's political affairs partly due to Holy See
's location in Vatican City
, within Rome
itself. Some 98% of Italians are Roman Catholic of which one-third are active members. Most baptisms, weddings, and funeral services are held in church.
An agreement called a concordat governs the relationship between Italy and the Roman Catholic Church. For instance, the agreement exempts priests and other members of religious orders from military service and gives tax exemptions to Catholic organizations.
Even though the main Christian denomination in Italy is Roman Catholicism, there are some minorities of Protestant
, Waldensian
, Eastern Orthodox
and other Christian churches. In the past two decades, Italy has received several waves of immigrants and as a result, some 825,000 Muslims
(1.4%) live in Italy, although other estimates indicate that there are up to one million Muslims as well as, 75,000 Hindus, 50,000 Buddhists, and a historical community of 30,000 Jewish members.
Rugby
union is very popular in Italy; clubs compete domestically in the Super 10, as well as the European Heineken Cup tournament. The national team competes in the Six Nations Championship
, and is a regular at the Rugby World Cup
.
Cycling
is also a well represented sport in Italy. Italians are second only to Belgium in winning the most World Cycling Championships. The Giro d'Italia
is a world famous long distance bicycle race held every May and constitutes one of the three Grand Tours along with the Tour de France
and the Vuelta a España
, each of which last approximately three weeks.
Scuderia Ferrari
is the oldest surviving team in Grand Prix racing, having competed since 1948, and statistically the most successful Formula One team in history with a record of 15 drivers' championships and 16 constructors' championships. Other very popular sports in Italy are basketball
, volleyball
, and boxing
.
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
was at the centre of Western culture
Western culture
Western culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization or European civilization, refers to cultures of European origin and is used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, religious beliefs, political systems, and specific artifacts and...
, fulcrum or origin of the Etruscan civilization
Etruscan civilization
Etruscan civilization is the modern English name given to a civilization of ancient Italy in the area corresponding roughly to Tuscany. The ancient Romans called its creators the Tusci or Etrusci...
, Ancient Rome
Ancient Rome
Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
, the Roman Catholic Church
Roman Catholic Church
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with over a billion members. Led by the Pope, it defines its mission as spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, administering the sacraments and exercising charity...
, Humanism
Humanism
Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....
and the Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
.
Etruscan and Samnite
Samnium
Samnium is a Latin exonym for a region of south or south and central Italy in Roman times. The name survives in Italian today, but today's territory comprising it is only a small portion of what it once was. The populations of Samnium were called Samnites by the Romans...
cultures flourished in Italy before the emergence of the Roman Empire, which conquered and incorporated them. Phoenicians and Greeks established settlements in Italy beginning several centuries before the birth of Jesus
Jesus
Jesus of Nazareth , commonly referred to as Jesus Christ or simply as Jesus or Christ, is the central figure of Christianity...
, and the Greek settlements in particular developed into thriving classical civilizations. The Greek ruins in southern Italy are perhaps the most spectacular and best preserved anywhere. With Emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity in 312, Rome became the open and official seat of the Catholic Church, and Italy has had a profound effect on the development of Christianity and of Western concepts of faith and morality ever since.
The Medieval commune
Medieval commune
Medieval communes in the European Middle Ages had sworn allegiances of mutual defense among the citizens of a town or city. They took many forms, and varied widely in organization and makeup. Communes are first recorded in the late 11th and early 12th centuries, thereafter becoming a widespread...
s were Europe's first bourgeois societies; associations of townsmen that arose during the 11th century to overthrow the rule of the local bishop or feudal magnates. The communal experience of medieval Italy was somehow salient for the origins of modern democracy
Democracy
Democracy is generally defined as a form of government in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. Ideally, this includes equal participation in the proposal, development and passage of legislation into law...
.See also Robert D. Putnam, " Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital, " Journal of Democracy 6 (1995): 65-78. Web. 06 Nov. 2011.
Italy became also a seat of great formal learning in 1088 with the establishment of the University of Bologna
University of Bologna
The Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna is the oldest continually operating university in the world, the word 'universitas' being first used by this institution at its foundation. The true date of its founding is uncertain, but believed by most accounts to have been 1088...
, the first university in Europe. Other Italian universities soon followed. For example, the Schola Medica Salernitana
Schola Medica Salernitana
The Schola Medica Salernitana was the first medieval medical school in the cosmopolitan coastal south Italian city of Salerno, which provided the most important source of medical knowledge in Western Europe at the time...
, in southern Italy, was the first medical school of medieval Europe. These great centers of learning presaged the Renaissance, as did innovative works by Italy's great late-Gothic artists. The European Renaissance began in Italy and was fueled throughout Europe by Italian painting, sculpture, architecture, science, literature, and music. Italy continued its leading cultural role through the Baroque
Baroque
The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...
period and into the Romantic period, when its dominance in painting and sculpture diminished and it reestablished a strong presence in music.
Italian artists have been quite influential in the 20th century, and some of the Italian exponents of Modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
in the 1920s and 1930s continue to have a strong presence in the international contemporary art market. Following World War II, Italian neorealism
Italian neorealism
Italian neorealism is a style of film characterized by stories set amongst the poor and working class, filmed on location, frequently using nonprofessional actors...
became an important force in motion pictures, and by the 1960s, Italy had established itself as one of a handful of great European film cultures. Today Italy is one of the international leaders in fashion and design. Both the internal and external facets of Western Civilization were born on the Italian Peninsula
Italian Peninsula
The Italian Peninsula or Apennine Peninsula is one of the three large peninsulas of Southern Europe , spanning from the Po Valley in the north to the central Mediterranean Sea in the south. The peninsula's shape gives it the nickname Lo Stivale...
, whether one looks at the history of the Christian faith, civil institutions
Civil society
Civil society is composed of the totality of many voluntary social relationships, civic and social organizations, and institutions that form the basis of a functioning society, as distinct from the force-backed structures of a state , the commercial institutions of the market, and private criminal...
(such as the Senate
Roman Senate
The Senate of the Roman Republic was a political institution in the ancient Roman Republic, however, it was not an elected body, but one whose members were appointed by the consuls, and later by the censors. After a magistrate served his term in office, it usually was followed with automatic...
), philosophy, law, art, science, or social customs and culture.
Italy did not exist as a political state until its unification in 1861. Due to this comparatively late unification, and the historical autonomy of the regions that comprise the Italian peninsula, many traditions and customs that are now recognized as distinctly Italian can be identified by their regions of origin. Despite the political and social isolation of these regions, Italy's contributions to the cultural and historical heritage of Europe remain immense. Famous elements of Italian culture are its opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
and music, its iconic gastronomy and food, which are commonly regarded as amongst the most popular in the world, its cinema (with classic films such as La Dolce Vita
La Dolce Vita
La Dolce Vita is a 1960 comedy-drama film written and directed by the critically acclaimed director Federico Fellini. The film is a story of a passive journalist's week in Rome, and his search for both happiness and love that will never come...
, Life is Beautiful
Life Is Beautiful
Life Is Beautiful is a 1997 Italian film which tells the story of a Jewish Italian, Guido Orefice , who must employ his fertile imagination to help his family during their internment in a Nazi concentration camp.At the 71st Academy Awards in 1999, Benigni won the Academy Award for Best Actor and...
, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a 1966 Italian epic spaghetti western film directed by Sergio Leone, starring Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach in the title roles. The screenplay was written by Age & Scarpelli, Luciano Vincenzoni and Leone, based on a story by Vincenzoni and Leone...
etc.), its collections of priceless works of art and its fashion (Milan is regarded as one of the fashion capital
Fashion capital
A Fashion City or Fashion Capital is a city where the fashion industry has a relevant and important position for the local economy. Production and exporting of fashion goods, as well as fashion events like fashion weeks, trade fairs and awards, boosts its economy and raises its annual revenue,...
s of the world).
Italy is home to the greatest number of UNESCO
UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...
World Heritage Site
World Heritage Site
A UNESCO World Heritage Site is a place that is listed by the UNESCO as of special cultural or physical significance...
s (47) to date, and one estimate says that the country is home to half the world's great art treasures.
Architecture
History of architecture
The history of architecture traces the changes in architecture through various traditions, regions, overarching stylistic trends, and dates.-Neolithic architecture:Neolithic architecture is the architecture of the Neolithic period...
in Italy is one that begins with the ancient styles of the Etruscans and Greeks, progressing to classical Roman, then to the revival of the classical Roman era during the Renaissance and evolving into the Baroque era. During the period of the Italian Renaissance
Italian Renaissance
The Italian Renaissance began the opening phase of the Renaissance, a period of great cultural change and achievement in Europe that spanned the period from the end of the 13th century to about 1600, marking the transition between Medieval and Early Modern Europe...
it had been customary for students of architecture to travel to Rome to study the ancient ruins and buildings as an essential part of their education.
Old St. Peter's Church (begun about A.D. 330) was probably the first significant early Christian basilica, a style of church architecture that came to dominate the early Middle Ages. Old St. Peter's stood on the site of the present St. Peter's Basilica
St. Peter's Basilica
The Papal Basilica of Saint Peter , officially known in Italian as ' and commonly known as Saint Peter's Basilica, is a Late Renaissance church located within the Vatican City. Saint Peter's Basilica has the largest interior of any Christian church in the world...
in Rome. The first significant buildings in the medieval Romanesque style were churches built in Italy during the 800's. Several outstanding examples of the Byzantine architectural style of the Middle East also were built in Italy. The most famous Byzantine structure is the Basilica of St. Mark
St Mark's Basilica
The Patriarchal Cathedral Basilica of Saint Mark is the cathedral church of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Venice, northern Italy. It is the most famous of the city's churches and one of the best known examples of Byzantine architecture...
in Venice.
The greatest flowering of Italian architecture took place during the Renaissance. Filippo Brunelleschi
Filippo Brunelleschi
Filippo Brunelleschi was one of the foremost architects and engineers of the Italian Renaissance. He is perhaps most famous for inventing linear perspective and designing the dome of the Florence Cathedral, but his accomplishments also included bronze artwork, architecture , mathematics,...
made great contributions to architectural design with his dome for the Cathedral of Florence. Leon Battista Alberti was another early Renaissance architect whose theories and designs had an enormous influence on later architects.
Perhaps the greatest achievement of Italian Renaissance architecture was St. Peter's Basilica, originally designed by Donato Bramante
Donato Bramante
Donato Bramante was an Italian architect, who introduced the Early Renaissance style to Milan and the High Renaissance style to Rome, where his most famous design was St...
in the early 1500s. Andrea Palladio
Andrea Palladio
Andrea Palladio was an architect active in the Republic of Venice. Palladio, influenced by Roman and Greek architecture, primarily by Vitruvius, is widely considered the most influential individual in the history of Western architecture...
influenced architects throughout western Europe with the villas and palaces he designed in the middle and late 1500s.
The Baroque period produced several outstanding Italian architects in the 1600s especially known for their churches. The most important architects included Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Gian Lorenzo Bernini was an Italian artist who worked principally in Rome. He was the leading sculptor of his age and also a prominent architect...
and Francesco Borromini
Francesco Borromini
Francesco Borromini, byname of Francesco Castelli was an architect from Ticino who, with his contemporaries, Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Pietro da Cortona, was a leading figure in the emergence of Roman Baroque architecture.A keen student of the architecture of Michelangelo and the ruins of...
. Numerous modern Italian architects, such as Renzo Piano
Renzo Piano
Renzo Piano is an Italian architect. He is the recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, AIA Gold Medal, Kyoto Prize and the Sonning Prize...
, are famous worldwide.
Broadcasting
The first form of televised media in Italy was introduced in 1939Timeline of the introduction of television in countries
This is a list of when the first publicly announced television broadcasts occurred in the mentioned countries. Non-public field tests and closed circuit demonstrations are not included....
, when the first experimental broadcasting began. However, this lasted for a very short time: when fascist Italy
Italian Fascism
Italian Fascism also known as Fascism with a capital "F" refers to the original fascist ideology in Italy. This ideology is associated with the National Fascist Party which under Benito Mussolini ruled the Kingdom of Italy from 1922 until 1943, the Republican Fascist Party which ruled the Italian...
entered World War II in 1940 all the transmission were interrupted, and were resumed in earnest only nine years after the end of the conflict, in 1954. There are two main national television networks responsible for most viewing: state-owned RAI
RAI
RAI — Radiotelevisione italiana S.p.A. known until 1954 as Radio Audizioni Italiane, is the Italian state owned public service broadcaster controlled by the Ministry of Economic Development. Rai is the biggest television company in Italy...
, funded by a yearly mandatory licence fee and Mediaset
Mediaset
Mediaset S.p.A., known as Gruppo Mediaset in Italian, is an Italian-based media company which is the largest commercial broadcaster in the country...
, commercial network founded by former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. While many other networks are also present, both nationally and locally, these two together reach 80% of the TV ratings, as detailed further below.
As with all the other media of Italy, the Italian television industry is widely considered both inside and outside the country to be overtly politicized. The public broadcaster RAI
RAI
RAI — Radiotelevisione italiana S.p.A. known until 1954 as Radio Audizioni Italiane, is the Italian state owned public service broadcaster controlled by the Ministry of Economic Development. Rai is the biggest television company in Italy...
is, unlike the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
which is controlled by an independent trust
BBC Trust
The BBC Trust is the governing body of the British Broadcasting Corporation. It is operationally independent of BBC management and external bodies, and aims to act in the best interests of licence fee payers....
, under direct control of the government; the most important commercial stations in the country are, in turn, owned by the current prime minister. According to a December 2008 poll, only 24% of Italians trust television news programmes, compared unfavourably to the British rate of 38%, making Italy one of only three examined countries where online sources are considered more reliable than television ones for information. Also, along with Turkey
Turkey
Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...
, Italy has one of the lowest levels of press freedom in Europe, even falling behind some ex-communist countries, such as Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
and the Czech Republic
Czech Republic
The Czech Republic is a landlocked country in Central Europe. The country is bordered by Poland to the northeast, Slovakia to the east, Austria to the south, and Germany to the west and northwest....
.
Cinema and theatre
Phaedra (Seneca)
Phaedra, sometimes known as Hippolytus, is a play by Seneca the Younger, telling the story of Phaedra and her taboo love for her stepson Hippolytus...
was based on that of Euripides
Euripides
Euripides was one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him but according to the Suda it was ninety-two at most...
, and many of the comedies of Plautus
Plautus
Titus Maccius Plautus , commonly known as "Plautus", was a Roman playwright of the Old Latin period. His comedies are the earliest surviving intact works in Latin literature. He wrote Palliata comoedia, the genre devised by the innovator of Latin literature, Livius Andronicus...
were direct translations of works by Menander
Menander
Menander , Greek dramatist, the best-known representative of Athenian New Comedy, was the son of well-to-do parents; his father Diopeithes is identified by some with the Athenian general and governor of the Thracian Chersonese known from the speech of Demosthenes De Chersoneso...
. During the 16th century and on into the 18th century Commedia dell'arte
Commedia dell'arte
Commedia dell'arte is a form of theatre characterized by masked "types" which began in Italy in the 16th century, and was responsible for the advent of the actress and improvised performances based on sketches or scenarios. The closest translation of the name is "comedy of craft"; it is shortened...
was a form of improvisational theatre, although it is still performed today. Travelling teams of players would set up an outdoor stage and provide amusement in the form of juggling, acrobatics, and, more typically, humorous plays based on a repertoire of established characters with a rough storyline, called Canovaccio
Canovaccio
A canovaccio is a vague plot outline used by commedia dell'arte players. It consisted only of a list of acts and scenes; the details were left to the improvisation of the actors. Actors in the commedia dell'Arte thus had to be endowed with an inventive mind since the success of the play depended...
.
The early Italian film industry became internationally known for its historical spectacles, most made from 1905 to 1914. Few major motion pictures were produced during the 1920s and 1930s, but a renaissance of Italian filmmaking developed in the 1940s. At that time, a new generation of directors emerged. They included Vittorio De Sica
Vittorio de Sica
Vittorio De Sica was an Italian director and actor, a leading figure in the neorealist movement....
, Roberto Rossellini
Roberto Rossellini
Roberto Rossellini was an Italian film director and screenwriter. Rossellini was one of the directors of the Italian neorealist cinema, contributing films such as Roma città aperta to the movement.-Early life:Born in Rome, Roberto Rossellini lived on the Via Ludovisi, where Benito Mussolini had...
, and Luchino Visconti
Luchino Visconti
Luchino Visconti di Modrone, Count of Lonate Pozzolo was an Italian theatre, opera and cinema director, as well as a screenwriter. He is best known for his films The Leopard and Death in Venice .-Life:...
. After the end of World War II in 1945, several of these directors became leaders in a movement called Neorealism
Italian neorealism
Italian neorealism is a style of film characterized by stories set amongst the poor and working class, filmed on location, frequently using nonprofessional actors...
, which portrayed the daily life of ordinary people with almost documentary realism.
During the 1950s and 1960s, earthy comedies gained international success, due partly to the popularity of Italian movie stars Gina Lollobrigida
Gina Lollobrigida
Gina Lollobrigida is an Italian actress, photojournalist and sculptress. She was one of the most popular European actresses of the 1950s and early 1960s. She was also an iconic sex symbol of the 1950s. Today, she remains an active supporter of Italian and Italian American causes, particularly the...
, Sophia Loren
Sophia Loren
Sophia Loren, OMRI is an Italian actress.In 1962, Loren won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in Two Women, along with 21 awards, becoming the first actress to win an Academy Award for a non-English-speaking performance...
, and Marcello Mastroianni
Marcello Mastroianni
Marcello Vincenzo Domenico Mastroianni, Knight Grand Cross was an Italian film actor. His honours included British Film Academy Awards, Best Actor awards at the Cannes Film Festival and two Golden Globe Awards.- Personal life :...
. At the same time, a new group of directors won praise. The most significant were Michelangelo Antonioni
Michelangelo Antonioni
Michelangelo Antonioni, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI was an Italian modernist film director, screenwriter, editor and short story writer.- Personal life :...
and Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI , was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. Known for a distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images, he is considered one of the most influential and widely revered filmmakers of the 20th century...
. Vittorio De Sica
Vittorio de Sica
Vittorio De Sica was an Italian director and actor, a leading figure in the neorealist movement....
, Roberto Rossellini
Roberto Rossellini
Roberto Rossellini was an Italian film director and screenwriter. Rossellini was one of the directors of the Italian neorealist cinema, contributing films such as Roma città aperta to the movement.-Early life:Born in Rome, Roberto Rossellini lived on the Via Ludovisi, where Benito Mussolini had...
, Sergio Leone
Sergio Leone
Sergio Leone was an Italian film director, producer and screenwriter most associated with the "Spaghetti Western" genre.Leone's film-making style includes juxtaposing extreme close-up shots with lengthy long shots...
, Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pier Paolo Pasolini was an Italian film director, poet, writer, and intellectual. Pasolini distinguished himself as a poet, journalist, philosopher, linguist, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, newspaper and magazine columnist, actor, painter and political figure...
and Luchino Visconti
Luchino Visconti
Luchino Visconti di Modrone, Count of Lonate Pozzolo was an Italian theatre, opera and cinema director, as well as a screenwriter. He is best known for his films The Leopard and Death in Venice .-Life:...
also continued to film major works. During the late 1900s, the leading Italian directors included Roberto Benigni
Roberto Benigni
Roberto Remigio Benigni, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI is an Italian actor, comedian, screenwriter and director of film, theatre and television.- Early years :...
, Marco Bellocchio, Bernardo Bertolucci
Bernardo Bertolucci
Bernardo Bertolucci is an Italian film director and screenwriter, whose films include The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, 1900, The Last Emperor and The Dreamers...
, and the brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani
Paolo and Vittorio Taviani
Paolo and Vittorio Taviani are noted Italian film directors and screenwriters...
.
Design
Italy is prominent in the field of design, notably interior designInterior design
Interior design describes a group of various yet related projects that involve turning an interior space into an effective setting for the range of human activities are to take place there. An interior designer is someone who conducts such projects...
, architectural design
Architectural Design
Architectural Design, also known as AD, is a UK-based architectural journal first launched in 1930.In its early days it was more concerned with the British scene, but gradually became more international. It also moved away from presenting mostly news towards theme-based issues...
, industrial design
Industrial design
Industrial design is the use of a combination of applied art and applied science to improve the aesthetics, ergonomics, and usability of a product, but it may also be used to improve the product's marketability and production...
and urban design
Urban design
Urban design concerns the arrangement, appearance and functionality of towns and cities, and in particular the shaping and uses of urban public space. It has traditionally been regarded as a disciplinary subset of urban planning, landscape architecture, or architecture and in more recent times has...
. The Italian style is known globally for its interior design, and has produced some well-known furniture designers, such as Gio Ponti
Giò Ponti
Gio Ponti was one of the most important Italian architects, industrial designers, furniture designers, artists, and publishers of the twentieth century.-Early life:...
and Ettore Sottsass
Ettore Sottsass
Ettore Sottsass was an Italian architect and designer of the late 20th century. His body of designs included furniture, jewellery, glass, lighting and office machine design.-Early career:...
, and Italian phrases such as Bel Disegno and Linea Italiana have entered the vocabulary of furniture design. Examples of classic pieces of Italian white goods and pieces of furniture include Zanussi
Zanussi
Zanussi is an Italian producer of home appliances that in 1984 was bought by Electrolux. Zanussi is a leading brand for domestic kitchen appliances in Europe. Products have been exported from Italy since 1946.-History:...
's washing machines and fridges, the "New Tone" sofas by Atrium, and the post-modern bookcase by Ettore Sottsass, inspired by Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...
's song Memphis Blues
Memphis blues
The Memphis blues is a style of blues music that was created in the 1920s and 1930s by Memphis-area musicians like Frank Stokes, Sleepy John Estes, Furry Lewis and Memphis Minnie...
.
The particular bookcase became a cultural and design icon of the 1980s. Today, Milan
Milan
Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...
and Turin
Turin
Turin is a city and major business and cultural centre in northern Italy, capital of the Piedmont region, located mainly on the left bank of the Po River and surrounded by the Alpine arch. The population of the city proper is 909,193 while the population of the urban area is estimated by Eurostat...
are the nation's leaders in architectural design and industrial design. The city of Milan hosts the FieraMilano, Europe's biggest design fair. Milan also hosts major design and architecture-related events and venues, such as the Fuori Salone and the Salone del Mobile, and has also been home to the designers Bruno Munari
Bruno Munari
Bruno Munari was an Italian artist and designer, who contributed fundamentals to many fields of visual arts and non visual arts with his research on games, didactic method and creativity.-Biography:Bruno Munari was born in Milan but spent his...
, Lucio Fontana
Lucio Fontana
Lucio Fontana was an Italian painter, sculptor and theorist of Argentine birth. He was mostly known as the founder of Spatialism and his ties to Arte Povera.-Early life:...
, Enrico Castellani
Enrico Castellani
Enrico Castellani is Italian artist of the Modern Art era . Castellani is known for his "paintings of light". He studied at the Ecole Nationale Superieure in Belgium, then settled in Milan. Castellani collaborated with artists such as Getulio Alviani, Piero Manzoni, and others. He was awarded the...
and Piero Manzoni
Piero Manzoni
Piero Manzoni was an Italian artist best known for his ironic conceptual art. Influenced by the work of Yves Klein, his own work anticipated, and directly influenced, the work of a generation of younger Italian artists brought together by the critic Germano Celant in the first Arte Povera...
.
Fashion
Today, Italy is one of the world centers of modern high fashion clothing. Fashion houses such as Armani, BenettonBenetton Group
Benetton Group S.p.A. is a global luxury fashion brand, based in Treviso, Italy. The name comes from the Benetton family who founded the company in 1965. Benetton Group is listed in Milan....
, Fendi
Fendi
Fendi is an Italian high fashion house best known for its "baguette" handbags. It was launched in 1925 as a fur and leather shop in Rome, but today is a multinational luxury goods brand owned by LVMH...
, Gucci
Gucci
The House of Gucci, better known simply as Gucci , is an Italian fashion and leather goods label, part of the Gucci Group, which is owned by French company PPR...
, Versace
Versace
Gianni Versace S.p.A. , usually referred to as Versace, is an Italian fashion label founded by Gianni Versace in 1978.The first Versace boutique was opened in Milan's Via della Spiga in 1978, and its popularity was immediate. Today, Versace is one of the world's leading international fashion houses...
and Prada
Prada
Prada S.p.A. is an Italian fashion label specializing in luxury goods for men and women , founded by Mario Prada.-Foundations:...
have become household words.
The city of Milan
Milan
Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...
takes its place amongst the most important centers of fashion in the world. Accessory and jewelry labels, such as Bulgari
Bulgari
Bulgari is an Italian jeweler and luxury goods retailer which has been owned by the French firm LVMH since October 2011. The trademark is usually written "BVLGARI" in the classical Latin alphabet , and is derived from the surname of the company's Greek founder, Sotirio Voulgaris...
and Luxottica
Luxottica
Luxottica Group S.p.A. is the world's largest eyewear company. Its best known brands include Ray-Ban, Persol and Oakley, Inc.. It also makes sunglasses and prescription frames for a multitude of designer brands such as Chanel and Prada, whose designs and trademarks are used under license...
are also internationally acclaimed, and Luxottica is the world's largest eyewear company.
Currently, Milan, (Italy's center of design) and Rome annually compete with other major international centres, such as Paris, New York, London and Tokyo. Also, the fashion magazine Vogue Italia
Vogue Italia
Vogue Italia is the Italian edition of Vogue magazine. Owned by Condé Nast International, it is the least commercial of all editions of Vogue magazine and has been called the top fashion magazine in the world....
is considered the most prestigious fashion magazine in the world.
Literature
Latin literature
Latin literature includes the essays, histories, poems, plays, and other writings of the ancient Romans. In many ways, it seems to be a continuation of Greek literature, using many of the same forms...
, was and still is highly influential in the world, with numerous writers, poets, philosophers, and historians, such as Pliny the Elder
Pliny the Elder
Gaius Plinius Secundus , better known as Pliny the Elder, was a Roman author, naturalist, and natural philosopher, as well as naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, and personal friend of the emperor Vespasian...
, Pliny the Younger
Pliny the Younger
Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, born Gaius Caecilius or Gaius Caecilius Cilo , better known as Pliny the Younger, was a lawyer, author, and magistrate of Ancient Rome. Pliny's uncle, Pliny the Elder, helped raise and educate him...
, Virgil
Virgil
Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English , was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid...
, Horace
Horace
Quintus Horatius Flaccus , known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus.-Life:...
, Propertius, Ovid
Ovid
Publius Ovidius Naso , known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who is best known as the author of the three major collections of erotic poetry: Heroides, Amores, and Ars Amatoria...
and Livy
Livy
Titus Livius — known as Livy in English — was a Roman historian who wrote a monumental history of Rome and the Roman people. Ab Urbe Condita Libri, "Chapters from the Foundation of the City," covering the period from the earliest legends of Rome well before the traditional foundation in 753 BC...
. The Romans were also famous for their oral tradition, poetry, drama and epigrams.
The basis of the modern Italian Literature in the Italian language was shaped by three great writers of the 1300s — Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri
Durante degli Alighieri, mononymously referred to as Dante , was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem La commedia, later named La divina commedia ...
, Petrarch
Petrarch
Francesco Petrarca , known in English as Petrarch, was an Italian scholar, poet and one of the earliest humanists. Petrarch is often called the "Father of Humanism"...
, and Giovanni Boccaccio
Giovanni Boccaccio
Giovanni Boccaccio was an Italian author and poet, a friend, student, and correspondent of Petrarch, an important Renaissance humanist and the author of a number of notable works including the Decameron, On Famous Women, and his poetry in the Italian vernacular...
. Their language and their works were imitated by Italian writers for hundreds of years. Dante's The Divine Comedy
The Divine Comedy
The Divine Comedy is an epic poem written by Dante Alighieri between 1308 and his death in 1321. It is widely considered the preeminent work of Italian literature, and is seen as one of the greatest works of world literature...
is a masterpiece of world poetry. Boccaccio's Decameron is one of the most popular collections of short stories ever written. Petrarch's love poetry served as a model for centuries.
Italian Renaissance
Italian Renaissance
The Italian Renaissance began the opening phase of the Renaissance, a period of great cultural change and achievement in Europe that spanned the period from the end of the 13th century to about 1600, marking the transition between Medieval and Early Modern Europe...
authors produced a number of important works. Among the best known is The Prince
The Prince
The Prince is a political treatise by the Italian diplomat, historian and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli. From correspondence a version appears to have been distributed in 1513, using a Latin title, De Principatibus . But the printed version was not published until 1532, five years after...
, a political science essay written by Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was an Italian historian, philosopher, humanist, and writer based in Florence during the Renaissance. He is one of the main founders of modern political science. He was a diplomat, political philosopher, playwright, and a civil servant of the Florentine Republic...
in 1513 and published in 1532. Italian drama developed in the 1600s, especially in the style called commedia dell'arte
Commedia dell'arte
Commedia dell'arte is a form of theatre characterized by masked "types" which began in Italy in the 16th century, and was responsible for the advent of the actress and improvised performances based on sketches or scenarios. The closest translation of the name is "comedy of craft"; it is shortened...
. These comedies were based on the improvisation of certain characters and became very popular. An outstanding writer of the Baroque period was Metastasio
Metastasio
Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi, better known by his pseudonym of Metastasio, was an Italian poet and librettist, considered the most important writer of opera seria libretti.-Early life:...
, and Carlo Goldoni
Carlo Goldoni
Carlo Osvaldo Goldoni was an Italian playwright and librettist from the Republic of Venice. His works include some of Italy's most famous and best-loved plays. Audiences have admired the plays of Goldoni for their ingenious mix of wit and honesty...
was the most prominent playwright of the 18th century.
The time of Italy's rebirth was heralded by the poets Vittorio Alfieri
Vittorio Alfieri
Count Vittorio Alfieri was an Italian dramatist, considered the "founder of Italian tragedy."-Early life:Alfieri was born at Asti in Piedmont....
, Ugo Foscolo
Ugo Foscolo
Ugo Foscolo , born Niccolò Foscolo, was an Italian writer, revolutionary and poet.-Biography:Foscolo was born on the Ionian island of Zakynthos...
, and Giacomo Leopardi
Giacomo Leopardi
Giacomo Taldegardo Francesco di Sales Saverio Pietro Leopardi was an Italian poet, essayist, philosopher, and philologist...
. Alessandro Manzoni
Alessandro Manzoni
Alessandro Francesco Tommaso Manzoni was an Italian poet and novelist.He is famous for the novel The Betrothed , generally ranked among the masterpieces of world literature...
was the principal Italian novelist of the 19th century, and Francesco de Sanctis
Francesco de Sanctis
Francesco de Sanctis was an Italian literary critic, considered the most important scholar of Italian language and literature in the 19th century....
the greatest literary critic. Among the Italian literary figures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Giosuè Carducci
Giosuè Carducci
Giosuè Alessandro Michele Carducci was an Italian poet and teacher. He was very influential and was regarded as the official national poet of modern Italy. In 1906 he became the first Italian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.-Biography:...
, Giovanni Verga
Giovanni Verga
Giovanni Carmelo Verga was an Italian realist writer, best known for his depictions of life in Sicily, and especially for the short story "Cavalleria Rusticana" and the novel I Malavoglia .-Life and career:The first son of Giovanni Battista Catalano Verga and Caterina Di Mauro,...
, Gabriele d'Annunzio
Gabriele D'Annunzio
Gabriele D'Annunzio or d'Annunzio was an Italian poet, journalist, novelist, and dramatist...
, Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello was an Italian dramatist, novelist, and short story writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934, for his "bold and brilliant renovation of the drama and the stage." Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written...
, and Grazia Deledda
Grazia Deledda
Grazia Deledda was an Italian writer whose works won her the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1926.-Biography:...
achieved international renown. Leading writers of the postwar era are Ignazio Silone
Ignazio Silone
Ignazio Silone was the pseudonym of Secondino Tranquilli, an Italian author and politician.-Early life and career:...
, Alberto Moravia
Alberto Moravia
Alberto Moravia, born Alberto Pincherle was an Italian novelist and journalist. His novels explored matters of modern sexuality, social alienation, and existentialism....
, Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy , the Cosmicomics collection of short stories , and the novels Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler .Lionised in Britain and the United States,...
, Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco Knight Grand Cross is an Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist, best known for his novel The Name of the Rose , an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory...
, Dario Fo
Dario Fo
Dario Fo is an Italian satirist, playwright, theater director, actor and composer. His dramatic work employs comedic methods of the ancient Italian commedia dell'arte, a theatrical style popular with the working classes. He currently owns and operates a theatre company with his wife, actress...
, and the poets Salvatore Quasimodo
Salvatore Quasimodo
Salvatore Quasimodo was an Italian author and poet. In 1959 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature "for his lyrical poetry, which with classical fire expresses the tragic experience of life in our own times". Along with Giuseppe Ungaretti and Eugenio Montale, he is one of the foremost Italian poets...
and Eugenio Montale
Eugenio Montale
Eugenio Montale was an Italian poet, prose writer, editor and translator, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975.- Early years :...
.
Music
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
, for example, Italy provides many of the very foundations of the classical music tradition. Some of the instruments that are often associated with classical music, including the piano
Piano
The piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It is one of the most popular instruments in the world. Widely used in classical and jazz music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal...
and violin
Violin
The violin is a string instrument, usually with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is the smallest, highest-pitched member of the violin family of string instruments, which includes the viola and cello....
, were invented in Italy, and many of the existing classical music forms can trace their roots back to innovations of 16th and 17th century Italian music (such as the symphony
Symphony
A symphony is an extended musical composition in Western classical music, scored almost always for orchestra. A symphony usually contains at least one movement or episode composed according to the sonata principle...
, concerto
Concerto
A concerto is a musical work usually composed in three parts or movements, in which one solo instrument is accompanied by an orchestra.The etymology is uncertain, but the word seems to have originated from the conjunction of the two Latin words...
, and sonata
Sonata
Sonata , in music, literally means a piece played as opposed to a cantata , a piece sung. The term, being vague, naturally evolved through the history of music, designating a variety of forms prior to the Classical era...
).
Italian composers have played a major role in music since the Middle Ages. In the 1000s, Guido of Arezzo
Guido of Arezzo
Guido of Arezzo or Guido Aretinus or Guido da Arezzo or Guido Monaco or Guido d'Arezzo was a music theorist of the Medieval era...
, an Italian monk, developed a revolutionary system of notation
Musical notation
Music notation or musical notation is any system that represents aurally perceived music, through the use of written symbols.-History:...
and method of sight-singing.
During the Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
, Giovanni Palestrina composed masterpieces of choral music for use in church services. The first operas were composed in Florence in the 1590s. Opera emerged as an art form during the Baroque period. Claudio Monteverdi
Claudio Monteverdi
Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi – 29 November 1643) was an Italian composer, gambist, and singer.Monteverdi's work, often regarded as revolutionary, marked the transition from the Renaissance style of music to that of the Baroque period. He developed two individual styles of composition – the...
was the first great composer of Baroque opera in the early 1600s. Important composers of the late 1600s and early 1700s included Alessandro Scarlatti
Alessandro Scarlatti
Alessandro Scarlatti was an Italian Baroque composer especially famous for his operas and chamber cantatas. He is considered the founder of the Neapolitan school of opera. He was the father of two other composers, Domenico Scarlatti and Pietro Filippo Scarlatti.-Life:Scarlatti was born in...
, his son Domenico
Domenico Scarlatti
Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti was an Italian composer who spent much of his life in the service of the Portuguese and Spanish royal families. He is classified as a Baroque composer chronologically, although his music was influential in the development of the Classical style...
, and Antonio Vivaldi
Antonio Vivaldi
Antonio Lucio Vivaldi , nicknamed because of his red hair, was an Italian Baroque composer, priest, and virtuoso violinist, born in Venice. Vivaldi is recognized as one of the greatest Baroque composers, and his influence during his lifetime was widespread over Europe...
. Alessandro became best known for his operas, Domenico for his keyboard compositions, and Vivaldi for his works for violin. During the 1800s and early 1900s, popular operas were composed by Giuseppe Verdi
Giuseppe Verdi
Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was an Italian Romantic composer, mainly of opera. He was one of the most influential composers of the 19th century...
, Giacomo Puccini
Giacomo Puccini
Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini was an Italian composer whose operas, including La bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, and Turandot, are among the most frequently performed in the standard repertoire...
, Vincenzo Bellini
Vincenzo Bellini
Vincenzo Salvatore Carmelo Francesco Bellini was an Italian opera composer. His greatest works are I Capuleti ed i Montecchi , La sonnambula , Norma , Beatrice di Tenda , and I puritani...
, Gaetano Donizetti
Gaetano Donizetti
Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti was an Italian composer from Bergamo, Lombardy. His best-known works are the operas L'elisir d'amore , Lucia di Lammermoor , and Don Pasquale , all in Italian, and the French operas La favorite and La fille du régiment...
, and Gioacchino Rossini
Gioacchino Rossini
Gioachino Antonio Rossini was an Italian composer who wrote 39 operas as well as sacred music, chamber music, songs, and some instrumental and piano pieces...
.
Today, the entire infrastructure that supports music as a profession is extensive in Italy, including conservatories, opera houses, radio and television stations, recording studios, music festivals, and important centers of musicological
Musicology
Musicology is the scholarly study of music. The word is used in narrow, broad and intermediate senses. In the narrow sense, musicology is confined to the music history of Western culture...
research. Musical life in Italy remains extremely active, but very Italian-centered and hardly international. The only main international Italian pop-singers include 1970s pop-diva Mina
Mina (singer)
Anna Maria Quaini, Grand Officer , known as Mina, is an Italian pop singer. She was a staple of Italian television variety shows and a dominant figure in Italian pop music from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s known for her three-octave vocal range, the agility of her soprano voice, and her image as an...
, who sold 76 million records worldwide in her lifetime, and singer Laura Pausini
Laura Pausini
Laura Pausini, is a Grammy Award-winning Italian soul singer-songwriter. She debuted in 1993, winning the newcomer artists' section of the 43rd Sanremo Music Festival with the song "La solitudine", which became an Italian standard and an international hit, reaching the top spot on the Italian...
, who has sold 45 million albums.
La Scala
La Scala
La Scala , is a world renowned opera house in Milan, Italy. The theatre was inaugurated on 3 August 1778 and was originally known as the New Royal-Ducal Theatre at La Scala...
operahouse in Milan is also renowned as one of the best in the world. Famous Italian opera
Italian opera
Italian opera is both the art of opera in Italy and opera in the Italian language. Opera was born in Italy around the year 1600 and Italian opera has continued to play a dominant role in the history of the form until the present day. Many famous operas in Italian were written by foreign composers,...
singers include Enrico Caruso, Luciano Pavarotti
Luciano Pavarotti
right|thumb|Luciano Pavarotti performing at the opening of the Constantine Palace in [[Strelna]], 31 May 2003. The concert was part of the celebrations for the 300th anniversary of [[St...
and Andrea Bocelli
Andrea Bocelli
Andrea Bocelli, is an Italian tenor, multi-instrumentalist and classical crossover artist. Born with poor eyesight, he became blind at the age of twelve following a soccer accident....
, to name a few.
Italy has also seen the birth and development of several modern musical genres, including progressive rock
Progressive rock
Progressive rock is a subgenre of rock music that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s as part of a "mostly British attempt to elevate rock music to new levels of artistic credibility." John Covach, in Contemporary Music Review, says that many thought it would not just "succeed the pop of...
, experimental
Experimental music
Experimental music refers, in the English-language literature, to a compositional tradition which arose in the mid-20th century, applied particularly in North America to music composed in such a way that its outcome is unforeseeable. Its most famous and influential exponent was John Cage...
, and electronic music
Electronic music
Electronic music is music that employs electronic musical instruments and electronic music technology in its production. In general a distinction can be made between sound produced using electromechanical means and that produced using electronic technology. Examples of electromechanical sound...
, most notably disco
Disco
Disco is a genre of dance music. Disco acts charted high during the mid-1970s, and the genre's popularity peaked during the late 1970s. It had its roots in clubs that catered to African American, gay, psychedelic, and other communities in New York City and Philadelphia during the late 1960s and...
(or Italo disco
Italo disco
Italo disco encompasses much of the dance music output in Europe during the 1980s. It is one of the world's first forms of mostly electronic dance music and evolved during the late 1970s and early 1980s in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and other parts of Europe...
). Italo disco
Italo disco
Italo disco encompasses much of the dance music output in Europe during the 1980s. It is one of the world's first forms of mostly electronic dance music and evolved during the late 1970s and early 1980s in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and other parts of Europe...
is a subgenre of disco music which is regarded as the first proper electronic dance genre, evolving in Italy in the 1970s and also from composer/producer Giorgio Moroder
Giorgio Moroder
Hansjörg "Giorgio" Moroder is an Italian record producer, songwriter and performer based in Los Angeles. When in Munich in the 1970s, he started his own record label called Oasis Records, which several years later became a subdivision of Casablanca Records...
's electronic-disco creations.
Science
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance...
(including discoveries in anatomy, meteorology, geology and hydrology) advances in physics and astronomy by Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei , was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations and support for Copernicanism...
, and the development of the barometer by Evangelista Torricelli
Evangelista Torricelli
Evangelista Torricelli was an Italian physicist and mathematician, best known for his invention of the barometer.-Biography:Evangelista Torricelli was born in Faenza, part of the Papal States...
.
At the turn of the century, Guglielmo Marconi
Guglielmo Marconi
Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor, known as the father of long distance radio transmission and for his development of Marconi's law and a radio telegraph system. Marconi is often credited as the inventor of radio, and indeed he shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand...
carried out experiments in electricity and developed the wireless, but he was preceded by Count Alessandro Volta
Alessandro Volta
Count Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Gerolamo Umberto Volta was a Lombard physicist known especially for the invention of the battery in 1800.-Early life and works:...
, one of the pioneers of electricity, over 100 years earlier. By the end of the Second World War, Enrico Fermi
Enrico Fermi
Enrico Fermi was an Italian-born, naturalized American physicist particularly known for his work on the development of the first nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile-1, and for his contributions to the development of quantum theory, nuclear and particle physics, and statistical mechanics...
's work in nuclear physics led to the development of both the atomic bomb and peaceful atomic applications. On September 25, 2001, US Congress
United States House of Representatives
The United States House of Representatives is one of the two Houses of the United States Congress, the bicameral legislature which also includes the Senate.The composition and powers of the House are established in Article One of the Constitution...
passed a resolution that officially recognized the Florentine immigrant to the United States, Antonio Meucci
Antonio Meucci
Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci was an Italian inventor, a compatriot of revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi. He was best known for developing a voice communication apparatus which several sources credit as the first telephone....
, as the inventor of the telephone.
A brief overview of some other notable figures includes the astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini
Giovanni Domenico Cassini
This article is about the Italian-born astronomer. For his French-born great-grandson, see Jean-Dominique Cassini.Giovanni Domenico Cassini was an Italian/French mathematician, astronomer, engineer, and astrologer...
, who made many important discoveries about the Solar System
Solar System
The Solar System consists of the Sun and the astronomical objects gravitationally bound in orbit around it, all of which formed from the collapse of a giant molecular cloud approximately 4.6 billion years ago. The vast majority of the system's mass is in the Sun...
; the mathematicians Lagrange
Joseph Louis Lagrange
Joseph-Louis Lagrange , born Giuseppe Lodovico Lagrangia, was a mathematician and astronomer, who was born in Turin, Piedmont, lived part of his life in Prussia and part in France, making significant contributions to all fields of analysis, to number theory, and to classical and celestial mechanics...
, Fibonacci
Fibonacci
Leonardo Pisano Bigollo also known as Leonardo of Pisa, Leonardo Pisano, Leonardo Bonacci, Leonardo Fibonacci, or, most commonly, simply Fibonacci, was an Italian mathematician, considered by some "the most talented western mathematician of the Middle Ages."Fibonacci is best known to the modern...
, and Gerolamo Cardano
Gerolamo Cardano
Gerolamo Cardano was an Italian Renaissance mathematician, physician, astrologer and gambler...
, whose Ars Magna
Ars Magna (Gerolamo Cardano)
The Ars Magna is an important book on Algebra written by Gerolamo Cardano. It was first published in 1545 under the title Artis Magnæ, Sive de Regulis Algebraicis Liber Unus . There was a second edition in Cardano's lifetime, published in 1570...
is generally recognized as the first modern treatment on mathematics, made fundamental advances to the field; Marcello Malpighi
Marcello Malpighi
Marcello Malpighi was an Italian doctor, who gave his name to several physiological features, like the Malpighian tubule system.-Early years:...
, a doctor and founder of microscopic anatomy; the biologist Lazzaro Spallanzani
Lazzaro Spallanzani
Lazzaro Spallanzani was an Italian Catholic priest, biologist and physiologist who made important contributions to the experimental study of bodily functions, animal reproduction, and essentially discovered echolocation...
, who conducted important research in bodily functions, animal reproduction, and cellular theory; the physician, pathologist, scientist, and Nobel laureate Camillo Golgi
Camillo Golgi
Camillo Golgi was an Italian physician, pathologist, scientist, and Nobel laureate.-Biography:Camillo Golgi was born in the village of Corteno, Lombardy, then part of the Austrian Empire. The village is now named Corteno Golgi in his honour. His father was a physician and district medical officer...
, whose many achievements include the discovery of the Golgi complex, and his role in paving the way to the acceptance of the Neuron doctrine
Neuron doctrine
The neuron doctrine is a descriptive term for the fundamental concept that the nervous system is made up of discrete individual cells, a discovery due to decisive neuro-anatomical work of Santiago Ramon y Cajal and later presented, among others, by H. Waldeyer-Hartz...
.
The Italians love of automobiles and speed has made Italy famous for its production of many of the world's most famous sports cars and the industry that flourishes there. Some of the world's most elite vehicles were developed in Italy: Lamborghini
Lamborghini
Automobili Lamborghini S.p.A., commonly referred to as Lamborghini , is an Italian car manufacturer. The company was founded by manufacturing magnate Ferruccio Lamborghini in 1963, with the objective of producing a refined grand touring car to compete with established offerings from marques like...
, Ferrari
Ferrari
Ferrari S.p.A. is an Italian sports car manufacturer based in Maranello, Italy. Founded by Enzo Ferrari in 1929, as Scuderia Ferrari, the company sponsored drivers and manufactured race cars before moving into production of street-legal vehicles as Ferrari S.p.A. in 1947...
, Alfa Romeo
Alfa Romeo
Alfa Romeo Automobiles S.p.A. is an Italian manufacturer of cars. Founded as A.L.F.A. on June 24, 1910, in Milan, the company has been involved in car racing since 1911, and has a reputation for building expensive sports cars...
, and Maserati
Maserati
Maserati is an Italian luxury car manufacturer established on December 1, 1914, in Bologna. The company's headquarters is now in Modena, and its emblem is a trident. It has been owned by the Italian car giant Fiat S.p.A. since 1993...
are but a few of the well-known luxury cars that originated in Italy.
Visual art
The history and development of art in western culture is grounded in hundreds of years of Italian history. No land has made a greater contribution to the visual arts. In Ancient RomeAncient Rome
Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
, Italy was the centre for art and architecture. There were many Italian artists during the Gothic and Medieval periods, and the arts flourished during the Italian Renaissance
Italian Renaissance
The Italian Renaissance began the opening phase of the Renaissance, a period of great cultural change and achievement in Europe that spanned the period from the end of the 13th century to about 1600, marking the transition between Medieval and Early Modern Europe...
. Later styles in Italy included Mannerism
Mannerism
Mannerism is a period of European art that emerged from the later years of the Italian High Renaissance around 1520. It lasted until about 1580 in Italy, when a more Baroque style began to replace it, but Northern Mannerism continued into the early 17th century throughout much of Europe...
, Baroque
Baroque
The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...
and Macchiaioli
Macchiaioli
The Macchiaioli were a group of Italian painters active in Tuscany in the second half of the nineteenth century, who, breaking with the antiquated conventions taught by the Italian academies of art, did much of their painting outdoors in order to capture natural light, shade, and colour...
. Futurism
Futurism
Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century.Futurism or futurist may refer to:* Afrofuturism, an African-American and African diaspora subculture* Cubo-Futurism* Ego-Futurism...
developed in Italy in the 20th century. Florence, Venice and Rome, in particular, are brimming with art treasures in museums, churches, and public buildings.
The Italian Renaissance produced many of the greatest painters and sculptors in art history. They were all influenced by the work of Giotto di Bondone
Giotto di Bondone
Giotto di Bondone , better known simply as Giotto, was an Italian painter and architect from Florence in the late Middle Ages...
in the late 1200s. One of the most influential artists who ever lived, Giotto changed the course of Western art by painting in a new realistic style.
Florence
Florence
Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....
became the center of early Renaissance art. The great Florentine masters of painting included Masaccio
Masaccio
Masaccio , born Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Simone, was the first great painter of the Quattrocento period of the Italian Renaissance. According to Vasari, Masaccio was the best painter of his generation because of his skill at recreating lifelike figures and movements as well as a convincing sense...
, Fra Angelico
Fra Angelico
Fra Angelico , born Guido di Pietro, was an Early Italian Renaissance painter described by Vasari in his Lives of the Artists as having "a rare and perfect talent"...
, Andrea Mantegna
Andrea Mantegna
Andrea Mantegna was an Italian painter, a student of Roman archeology, and son in law of Jacopo Bellini. Like other artists of the time, Mantegna experimented with perspective, e.g., by lowering the horizon in order to create a sense of greater monumentality...
, Sandro Botticelli
Sandro Botticelli
Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, better known as Sandro Botticelli was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance...
, and Paolo Uccello
Paolo Uccello
Paolo Uccello , born Paolo di Dono, was an Italian painter and a mathematician who was notable for his pioneering work on visual perspective in art. Giorgio Vasari in his book Lives of the Artists wrote that Uccello was obsessed by his interest in perspective and would stay up all night in his...
. The greatest artist of the 1400s was probably Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance...
. His portrait Mona Lisa
Mona Lisa
Mona Lisa is a portrait by the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci. It is a painting in oil on a poplar panel, completed circa 1503–1519...
and his religious scene The Last Supper are among the most famous paintings in history.
Early Renaissance sculptors equaled the painters in achievement. The major sculptors included Donatello
Donatello
Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi , also known as Donatello, was an early Renaissance Italian artist and sculptor from Florence...
, Antonio del Pollaiolo, and Andrea del Verrocchio
Andrea del Verrocchio
Andrea del Verrocchio , born Andrea di Michele di Francesco de' Cioni, was an Italian sculptor, goldsmith and painter who worked at the court of Lorenzo de' Medici in Florence in the early renaissance. Few paintings are attributed to him with certainty, but a number of important painters were...
.
The later Renaissance was dominated by Raphael
Raphael
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino , better known simply as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur...
and Michelangelo
Michelangelo
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni , commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art...
. Raphael painted balanced, harmonious pictures that expressed a calm, noble way of life. Michelangelo achieved greatness both as a painter and sculptor. In Venice
Venice
Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...
, a number of artists were painting richly colored works during the 1500s. The most famous Venetian masters included Giorgione
Giorgione
Giorgione was a Venetian painter of the High Renaissance in Venice, whose career was cut off by his death at a little over thirty. Giorgione is known for the elusive poetic quality of his work, though only about six surviving paintings are acknowledged for certain to be his work...
, Titian
Titian
Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1488/1490 – 27 August 1576 better known as Titian was an Italian painter, the most important member of the 16th-century Venetian school. He was born in Pieve di Cadore, near...
, and Tintoretto
Tintoretto
Tintoretto , real name Jacopo Comin, was a Venetian painter and a notable exponent of the Renaissance school. For his phenomenal energy in painting he was termed Il Furioso...
.
Italian painters and sculptors dominated the Baroque period. Annibale Caracci and Caravaggio
Caravaggio
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was an Italian artist active in Rome, Naples, Malta, and Sicily between 1593 and 1610. His paintings, which combine a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, had a formative influence on the Baroque...
were the most important early Baroque painters. Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Gian Lorenzo Bernini was an Italian artist who worked principally in Rome. He was the leading sculptor of his age and also a prominent architect...
was the greatest master of European sculpture of the Baroque period.
In the 1900s, many Italians played leading roles in the development of modern art. Umberto Boccioni
Umberto Boccioni
Umberto Boccioni was an Italian painter and sculptor. Like other Futurists, his work centered on the portrayal of movement , speed, and technology. He was born in Reggio Calabria, Italy.-Biography:...
was a founder and the leading sculptor of the Futurism movement. Giorgio de Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico was a pre-Surrealist and then Surrealist Italian painter born in Volos, Greece, to a Genovese mother and a Sicilian father. He founded the scuola metafisica art movement...
gained fame for his haunting paintings of empty city squares. Amedeo Modigliani
Amedeo Modigliani
Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. Primarily a figurative artist, he became known for paintings and sculptures in a modern style characterized by mask-like faces and elongation of form...
won renown with a series of portraits.
Cuisine
Italian cuisine
Italian cuisine has developed through centuries of social and political changes, with roots as far back as the 4th century BCE. Italian cuisine in itself takes heavy influences, including Etruscan, ancient Greek, ancient Roman, Byzantine, Jewish and Arab cuisines...
as a national cuisine known today has evolved through centuries of social and political changes, with its roots traced back to 4th century BC. Significant change occurred with discovery of the New World
New World
The New World is one of the names used for the Western Hemisphere, specifically America and sometimes Oceania . The term originated in the late 15th century, when America had been recently discovered by European explorers, expanding the geographical horizon of the people of the European middle...
which helped shape much of what is known as Italian cuisine today with the introduction of items such as potatoes, tomatoes, bell pepper and maize, which are all central parts of the cuisine but not introduced in scale until the 18th century.
Ingredients and dishes vary by region. There are many significant regional dishes that have become both national and regional. Many dishes that were once regional, however, have proliferated in different variations across the country in the present day. Cheese and wine are also a major part of the cuisine, playing different roles both regionally and nationally with their many variations and Denominazione di origine controllata
Denominazione di Origine Controllata
Denominazione di origine controllata is a quality assurance label for food products, especially wines and various formaggi . It is modelled after the French AOC...
(regulated appellation) laws.
Italy's cuisine is widely regarded as amongst the most popular in the world, and is mainly made up of traditional dishes, meals and deserts, such as pasta
Pasta
Pasta is a staple food of traditional Italian cuisine, now of worldwide renown. It takes the form of unleavened dough, made in Italy, mostly of durum wheat , water and sometimes eggs. Pasta comes in a variety of different shapes that serve for both decoration and to act as a carrier for the...
, spaghetti
Spaghetti
Spaghetti is a long, thin, cylindrical pasta of Italian origin. Spaghetti is made of semolina or flour and water. Italian dried spaghetti is made from durum wheat semolina, but outside of Italy it may be made with other kinds of flour...
, pizza
Pizza
Pizza is an oven-baked, flat, disc-shaped bread typically topped with a tomato sauce, cheese and various toppings.Originating in Italy, from the Neapolitan cuisine, the dish has become popular in many parts of the world. An establishment that makes and sells pizzas is called a "pizzeria"...
, focaccia
Focaccia
Focaccia is a flat oven-baked Italian bread, which may be topped with herbs or other ingredients. It is related to pizza, but not considered to be the same....
, bruschetta
Bruschetta
Bruschetta is an antipasto from Italy whose origin dates to at least the 15th century. It consists of roasted bread rubbed with garlic and topped with extra-virgin olive oil, salt and pepper...
, arancini
Arancini
Arancini or arancine are fried rice balls coated with breadcrumbs, said to have originated in Sicily in the 10th century. Arancine are usually filled with ragù , tomato sauce, mozzarella, and/or peas....
, granita
Granita
Granita is a semi-frozen dessert made from sugar, water and various flavorings. Originally from Sicily, although available all over Italy , it is related to sorbet and italian ice. However, in most of Sicily, it has a coarser, more crystalline texture...
, lasagna
Lasagna
Lasagna is a wide and flat type of pasta and possibly one of the oldest shapes. As with most other pasta shapes, the word is generally used in its plural form lasagne in Italy and the U.K. Traditionally, the dough was prepared in Southern Italy with semolina and water and in the northern regions,...
, risotto
Risotto
Risotto is a class of Italian dishes of rice cooked in broth to a creamy consistency. The broth may be meat-, fish-, or vegetable-based; many kinds include Parmesan cheese, butter, and onion...
, gnocchi
Gnocchi
Gnocchi are various thick, soft dumplings. They may be made from semolina, ordinary wheat flour, flour and egg, flour, egg, and cheese, potato, bread crumbs, or similar ingredients. The smaller forms are called gnocchetti....
, polenta
Polenta
Polenta is a dish made from boiled cornmeal. The word "polenta" is borrowed from Italian.-Description:Polenta is made with ground yellow or white cornmeal , which can be ground coarsely or finely depending on the region and the texture desired.As it is known today, polenta derives from earlier...
, and zampone, to name a few. Basil, mozzarella, garlic, olive oil and tomatoes are examples of ingredients which are used frequently in Italian cuisine.
Also, Italy exports and produces the highest level of wine, exporting over 1,793 tonnes. Italy currently is responsible for producing approximately one-fifth of world wine production in 2005. Some parts of the country are home to some of the oldest wine-producing regions in the world. Etruscans and Greek
Greeks
The Greeks, also known as the Hellenes , are a nation and ethnic group native to Greece, Cyprus and neighboring regions. They also form a significant diaspora, with Greek communities established around the world....
settlers produced wine in the country long before the Romans
Roman Republic
The Roman Republic was the period of the ancient Roman civilization where the government operated as a republic. It began with the overthrow of the Roman monarchy, traditionally dated around 508 BC, and its replacement by a government headed by two consuls, elected annually by the citizens and...
started developing their own vineyards in the 2nd century BC. Roman grape-growing and winemaking was prolific and well-organized, pioneering large-scale production and storage techniques like barrel
Barrel
A barrel or cask is a hollow cylindrical container, traditionally made of vertical wooden staves and bound by wooden or metal hoops. Traditionally, the barrel was a standard size of measure referring to a set capacity or weight of a given commodity. A small barrel is called a keg.For example, a...
-making
Cooper (profession)
Traditionally, a cooper is someone who makes wooden staved vessels of a conical form, of greater length than breadth, bound together with hoops and possessing flat ends or heads...
and bottling.
Italian wine
Italian wine is wine produced in Italy, a country which is home to some of the oldest wine-producing regions in the world. Italy is the world's largest wine producer, responsible for approximately one-fifth of world wine production in 2005. Italian wine is exported largely around the world and has...
s include Barolo
Barolo
Barolo is a red Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita wine produced in the northern Italian region of Piedmont. It is made from the Nebbiolo grape and is often described as one of Italy's greatest wines...
, Barbaresco
Barbaresco
Barbaresco is an Italian wine made with the Nebbiolo grape. Barbaresco is produced in the Piedmont region in an area of the Langhe immediately to the east of Alba and specifically in the comunes of Barbaresco, Treiso and Neive plus that area of the frazione San Rocco Senodelvio which was once part...
, Brunello di Montalcino
Brunello di Montalcino
Brunello di Montalcino is a red Italian wine produced in the vineyards surrounding the town of Montalcino located about 120 km south of Florence in the Tuscany wine region. Brunello, roughly translated as "small dark one" in the local dialect, is the unofficial name of the clone of Sangiovese...
, Barbera
Barbera
Barbera is a red Italian wine grape variety that, as of 2000, was the third most-planted red grape variety in Italy . It produces good yields and is known for deep color, low tannins and high levels of acid...
, Dolcetto
Dolcetto
Dolcetto is a black wine grape variety widely grown in the Piedmont region of northwest Italy. The Italian word dolcetto means "little sweet one", but it is not certain that the name originally carried any reference to the grape’s sugar levels: it is possible that it derives from the name of the...
, Corvina
Corvina
Corvina is an Italian wine grape variety that is sometimes also referred to as Corvina Veronese or Cruina or it is mainly known in Europe as"Cassabria". It is mainly grown in the Veneto region of northeast Italy. Corvina is used with several other grapes to create the light red regional wines...
, Nero d'Avola
Nero d'Avola
Nero d'Avola is "the most important red wine grape in Sicily" and is one of Italy's most important indigenous varieties. It is named after Avola in the far south of Sicily and its wines are compared to New World Shirazes, with sweet tannins and plum or peppery flavours...
, Pinot Grigio and Moscato
Muscat (grape and wine)
The Muscat variety of grapes of the species Vitis vinifera is widely grown for wine, raisins and table grapes. Their color ranges from white to near black. Muscat almost always has a pronounced sweet floral aroma. Muscat grapes are grown around the world...
, to name a few.
Italy is also famous for its gelato
Gelato
Gelato is the italian word for ice cream and sorbet. Italians use the word gelato to mean a sweet treat that is served frozen. Indeed, gelato, just like ice cream, is made with Milk, cream, various sugars, flavoring including fresh fruit and nut purees....
, or traditional ice-cream often known as Italian ice cream abroad. There are gelaterias or ice-cream vendors and shops all around Italian cities, and it is a very popular dessert or snack, especially during the summer. Sicilian granita
Granita
Granita is a semi-frozen dessert made from sugar, water and various flavorings. Originally from Sicily, although available all over Italy , it is related to sorbet and italian ice. However, in most of Sicily, it has a coarser, more crystalline texture...
s, or a frozen dessert of flavored crushed ice, more or less similar to a sorbet or a snow cone
Snow cone
Snow cones or snow balls are a variation of the shaved ice dessert commonly served throughout North America in paper cones or styrofoam cups...
, are popular desserts not only in Sicily or their native town of Catania, but all over Italy (even though the Northern and Central Italian equivalent, the gratta checca, commonly found in Rome or Milan is slightly different to the traditional granita Siciliana).
Italy also boasts an assortion of several different desserts. The Christmas cakes pandoro
Pandoro
Pandoro is a traditional Italian sweet yeast bread, most popular around Christmas and New Year. Typically a Veronese product, pandoro is traditionally shaped like a frustum with an 8 pointed-star section....
and panettone
Panettone
thumb|200px|right|A non-traditionally shaped panettone loaf.Panettone is a type of sweet bread loaf originally from Milan , usually prepared and enjoyed for Christmas and New Year in Italy, Malta, Brazil, Germany and Switzerland, and is one of the symbols of the city of Milan. Maltese nationals are...
are popular in the North (pandoro is from Verona, whilst panettone is Milanese), however, they have also become popular desserts in other parts of Italy and abroad. The Colomba Pasquale
Colomba Pasquale
Colomba Pasquale or Colomba di Pasqua is an Easter counterpart of the two well-known Italian Christmas desserts, panettone and pandoro....
, or the Italian Easter cake is eaten all over the country on Easter day, and is a more traditional option to chocolate Easter egg
Easter egg
Easter eggs are special eggs that are often given to celebrate Easter or springtime.The oldest tradition is to use dyed or painted chicken eggs, but a modern custom is to substitute chocolate eggs, or plastic eggs filled with confectionery such as jelly beans...
s. Tiramisu
Tiramisu
Tiramisu, , , literally "pick me up", is an Italian cake and dessert.It is made of ladyfingers dipped in coffee, layered with a whipped mixture of egg yolks and mascarpone, and flavored with liquor and cocoa...
is, on addition, a very popular and symbolic Italian dessert from Veneto which has become famous worldwide. Other Italian cakes and sweets include cannoli
Cannoli
Cannoli are Sicilian pastry desserts. The singular is cannolo , meaning "little tube", with the etymology stemming from the Latin "canna", or reed. Cannoli originated in Sicily and are an essential part of Sicilian cuisine...
, the cassata
Cassata
Cassata or Cassata siciliana is a traditional sweet from the area of Palermo, Sicily, Italy. Cassata may also refer to a Neapolitan ice cream containing candied or dried fruit and nuts....
Siciliana, fruit-shaped marzipan
Marzipan
Marzipan is a confection consisting primarily of sugar and almond meal. Persipan is a similar, yet less expensive product, in which the almonds are replaced by apricot or peach kernels...
s and the panna cotta
Panna cotta
Panna cotta is an Italian dessert made by simmering together cream, milk and sugar, mixing this with gelatin, and letting it cool until set. It is generally from the Northern Italian region of Piemonte, although it is eaten all over Italy, where it is served with wild berries, caramel, chocolate...
.
Coffee
Coffee is a brewed beverage with a dark,init brooo acidic flavor prepared from the roasted seeds of the coffee plant, colloquially called coffee beans. The beans are found in coffee cherries, which grow on trees cultivated in over 70 countries, primarily in equatorial Latin America, Southeast Asia,...
, and more specifically espresso
Espresso
Espresso is a concentrated beverage brewed by forcing a small amount of nearly boiling water under pressure through finely ground coffee. Espresso is widely known throughout the world....
, has become highly important to the cultural cuisine of Italy. Espresso is a highly drunk coffee-drink in Italy, and a good number of Italians drink it in the morning before going to work, or starting the day in general. Espresso is served in small cups and has a dark, almost black appearance, and a strong, sour taste. Cappucino is also a famous Italian coffee drink, which is usually sweeter and less dark than espresso, and can be served with foam or cream on top, in which chocolate powder and sugar is usually sprinkled. Cappucino is, today, not only common in Italian cafes, or caffes, but also in restaurants and bars abroad. Caffelatte coffee is a mixture of coffee and milk (latte = milk), and is usually drunk at breakfast time (unlike most other Italian coffee-types, children and adults drink it alike, since it is lighter and more milky than normal coffee). Caffè macchiato
Caffè macchiato
Caffè macchiato , sometimes called espresso macchiato, is a coffee drink, made out of espresso with a small amount of milk.'Macchiato' simply means 'marked' or 'stained', and in the case of caffè macchiato, this means literally 'espresso stained/marked with milk'. Traditionally it is made with one...
is a stronger form of caffelatte, which, unlike caffelatte, which has an equal amount of coffee and milk, only contains a tiny portion of milk or whipped cream (latte macchiato
Latte macchiato
Latte Macchiato is a coffee beverage, which literally means stained milk. This refers to the method of preparation, wherein the steamed "pure" white milk gets "stained" by the addition of espresso.- Related drinks :...
is the lighter version of caffè macchiato, which is often drunk by children as well, which instead, only has a small addition of coffee or espresso to give it a slight coffee-like taste). The Bicerin
Bicerin
Bicerin is a traditional hot drink native to Turin, Italy, made of espresso, drinking chocolate and whole milk served layered in a small rounded glass. The word bicerin is Piedmontese for “small glass”. The beverage has been known since the 18th-century and was famously praised by Alexandre Dumas...
is Turin's own coffee. It is a mix between cappucino and normal hot chocolate, and is made with equal amounts of drinking chocolate, coffee and a slight addition of milk and creamy foam.
Education
Secondary school
Secondary school is a term used to describe an educational institution where the final stage of schooling, known as secondary education and usually compulsory up to a specified age, takes place...
, divided into first-grade secondary school (middle school
Middle school
Middle School and Junior High School are levels of schooling between elementary and high schools. Most school systems use one term or the other, not both. The terms are not interchangeable...
) and second-grade secondary school (or high school
High school
High school is a term used in parts of the English speaking world to describe institutions which provide all or part of secondary education. The term is often incorporated into the name of such institutions....
). Italy has both public and private education systems.
Primary school lasts five years. Until middle school, the normal educational curriculum is uniform for all: although one can attend a private or state-funded school, the subjects studied are the same, except in special schools for pupils with different care requirements.
Secondary education (Scuole medie) is further divided in two stages: Medie Inferiori, which correspond to the Middle School grades, and Medie Superiori, which correspond to the High School level. The lower tier of Scuole Medie corresponds to Middle School, lasts three years, and involves an exam at the end of the third year; Scuole Superiori usually last five years (even though Istituti Professionali might offer a diploma
Diploma
A diploma is a certificate or deed issued by an educational institution, such as a university, that testifies that the recipient has successfully completed a particular course of study or confers an academic degree. In countries such as the United Kingdom and Australia, the word diploma refers to...
after only three years). Every tier involves an exam at the end of the final year required to access the following tier.
The secondary school situation varies, since there are several types of schools differentiated by subjects and activities. The main types are the Liceo, the Istituto Tecnico and the Istituto Professionale. Any kind of secondary school that lasts 5 years grants access to the final exam, called Esame di Stato conclusivo del corso di studio di Istruzione Secondaria Superiore or Esame di Maturità. This exam takes place every year in June and July and grants access to any faculty at any University.
Italy hosts a broad variety of universities, colleges and academies. Milan's Bocconi University
Bocconi University
Bocconi University is a private university located in central Milan, beside Parco Ravizza. Bocconi provides undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate education, in addition to a range of double degree programs, in the fields of economics, management, finance and law. According to many university...
, has been ranked among the top 20 best business schools in the world by The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the Journal....
international rankings, especially thanks to its Master of Business Administration
Master of Business Administration
The Master of Business Administration is a :master's degree in business administration, which attracts people from a wide range of academic disciplines. The MBA designation originated in the United States, emerging from the late 19th century as the country industrialized and companies sought out...
program, which in 2007 placed it no. 17 in the world in terms of graduate recruitment preference by major multinational companies. Also, Forbes
Forbes
Forbes is an American publishing and media company. Its flagship publication, the Forbes magazine, is published biweekly. Its primary competitors in the national business magazine category are Fortune, which is also published biweekly, and Business Week...
has ranked Bocconi no. 1 worldwide in the specific category Value for Money. In May 2008, Bocconi overtook several traditionally top global business schools in the Financial Times
Financial Times
The Financial Times is an international business newspaper. It is a morning daily newspaper published in London and printed in 24 cities around the world. Its primary rival is the Wall Street Journal, published in New York City....
executive education ranking, reaching no. 5 in Europe and no. 15 in the world. Other top universities and polytechnics include the Polytechnic University of Turin
Polytechnic University of Turin
The Polytechnic University of Turin is an engineering university based in Turin, northern Italy. Established in 1859, Politecnico di Torino is Italy’s oldest Technical University. In 2011 it was ranked as the best engineering university in Italy in the Academic Ranking of World Universities.It is...
and Politecnico di Milano.
In 2009 an Italian research ranked it as the best in Italy (over indicators such as scientific production, attraction of foreign students, and others), the Sapienza University of Rome and the University of Milan
University of Milan
The University of Milan is a higher education institution in Milan, Italy. It is one of the largest universities in Europe, with about 62,801 students, a teaching and research staff of 2,455 and a non-teaching staff of 2,200....
whose research and teaching activities have developed over the years and have received important international recognitions. The University is the only Italian member of the League of European Research Universities
League of European Research Universities
The League of European Research Universities is a consortium of Europe's most prominent and renowned research universities.-History and Overview:...
, a prestigious group of twenty research-intensive European Universities.
Italian people
Italy is a wellspring of Western civilization and has been a world crossroads for over 2,000 years. As the founders of the first civilization of western Europe, the EtruscansEtruscan civilization
Etruscan civilization is the modern English name given to a civilization of ancient Italy in the area corresponding roughly to Tuscany. The ancient Romans called its creators the Tusci or Etrusci...
were the most influential people of pre-Roman Italy. Both the Etruscans in the north and the Greeks in the south had a major influence on the development of Rome.
Important poets of the Roman republic
Roman Republic
The Roman Republic was the period of the ancient Roman civilization where the government operated as a republic. It began with the overthrow of the Roman monarchy, traditionally dated around 508 BC, and its replacement by a government headed by two consuls, elected annually by the citizens and...
and empire
Roman Empire
The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean....
were Lucretius
Lucretius
Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet and philosopher. His only known work is an epic philosophical poem laying out the beliefs of Epicureanism, De rerum natura, translated into English as On the Nature of Things or "On the Nature of the Universe".Virtually no details have come down concerning...
, Catullus
Catullus
Gaius Valerius Catullus was a Latin poet of the Republican period. His surviving works are still read widely, and continue to influence poetry and other forms of art.-Biography:...
, Virgil
Virgil
Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English , was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid...
, Horace
Horace
Quintus Horatius Flaccus , known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus.-Life:...
and Ovid
Ovid
Publius Ovidius Naso , known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who is best known as the author of the three major collections of erotic poetry: Heroides, Amores, and Ars Amatoria...
. Also prominent in Latin literature were the orator and rhetorician Cicero
Cicero
Marcus Tullius Cicero , was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Roman constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists.He introduced the Romans to the chief...
; the satirists Petronius
Petronius
Gaius Petronius Arbiter was a Roman courtier during the reign of Nero. He is generally believed to be the author of the Satyricon, a satirical novel believed to have been written during the Neronian age.-Life:...
and Juvenal
Juvenal
The Satires are a collection of satirical poems by the Latin author Juvenal written in the late 1st and early 2nd centuries AD.Juvenal is credited with sixteen known poems divided among five books; all are in the Roman genre of satire, which, at its most basic in the time of the author, comprised a...
; the prose writers Pliny the Elder
Pliny the Elder
Gaius Plinius Secundus , better known as Pliny the Elder, was a Roman author, naturalist, and natural philosopher, as well as naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, and personal friend of the emperor Vespasian...
, his nephew Pliny the Younger
Pliny the Younger
Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, born Gaius Caecilius or Gaius Caecilius Cilo , better known as Pliny the Younger, was a lawyer, author, and magistrate of Ancient Rome. Pliny's uncle, Pliny the Elder, helped raise and educate him...
; and the historians Sallust
Sallust
Gaius Sallustius Crispus, generally known simply as Sallust , a Roman historian, belonged to a well-known plebeian family, and was born at Amiternum in the country of the Sabines...
, Livy
Livy
Titus Livius — known as Livy in English — was a Roman historian who wrote a monumental history of Rome and the Roman people. Ab Urbe Condita Libri, "Chapters from the Foundation of the City," covering the period from the earliest legends of Rome well before the traditional foundation in 753 BC...
and Suetonius
Suetonius
Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, commonly known as Suetonius , was a Roman historian belonging to the equestrian order in the early Imperial era....
. Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar
Gaius Julius Caesar was a Roman general and statesman and a distinguished writer of Latin prose. He played a critical role in the gradual transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire....
, renowned as a historian and prose stylist, is even more famous as a military and political leader. The first of the Roman emperor
Roman Emperor
The Roman emperor was the ruler of the Roman State during the imperial period . The Romans had no single term for the office although at any given time, a given title was associated with the emperor...
s was Octavian, better known by the honorific Augustus
Augustus
Augustus ;23 September 63 BC – 19 August AD 14) is considered the first emperor of the Roman Empire, which he ruled alone from 27 BC until his death in 14 AD.The dates of his rule are contemporary dates; Augustus lived under two calendars, the Roman Republican until 45 BC, and the Julian...
. Noteworthy among later emperors are the tyrants Caligula
Caligula
Caligula , also known as Gaius, was Roman Emperor from 37 AD to 41 AD. Caligula was a member of the house of rulers conventionally known as the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Caligula's father Germanicus, the nephew and adopted son of Emperor Tiberius, was a very successful general and one of Rome's most...
and Nero
Nero
Nero , was Roman Emperor from 54 to 68, and the last in the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Nero was adopted by his great-uncle Claudius to become his heir and successor, and succeeded to the throne in 54 following Claudius' death....
, the philosopher and statesman Marcus Aurelius, and Constantine the Great, who was the first to accept Christianity
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
. No history of the Christian Church
Christian Church
The Christian Church is the assembly or association of followers of Jesus Christ. The Greek term ἐκκλησία that in its appearances in the New Testament is usually translated as "church" basically means "assembly"...
during the medieval period would be complete without mention of such men of Italian birth as St. Benedict of Nursia
Benedict of Nursia
Saint Benedict of Nursia is a Christian saint, honored by the Roman Catholic Church as the patron saint of Europe and students.Benedict founded twelve communities for monks at Subiaco, about to the east of Rome, before moving to Monte Cassino in the mountains of southern Italy. There is no...
, Pope Gregory I
Pope Gregory I
Pope Gregory I , better known in English as Gregory the Great, was pope from 3 September 590 until his death...
, St. Francis of Assisi
Francis of Assisi
Saint Francis of Assisi was an Italian Catholic friar and preacher. He founded the men's Franciscan Order, the women’s Order of St. Clare, and the lay Third Order of Saint Francis. St...
, and the philosopher and theologians St. Anselm of Canterbury
Anselm of Canterbury
Anselm of Canterbury , also called of Aosta for his birthplace, and of Bec for his home monastery, was a Benedictine monk, a philosopher, and a prelate of the church who held the office of Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109...
and St. Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas, O.P. , also Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, was an Italian Dominican priest of the Catholic Church, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism, known as Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis, or Doctor Universalis...
.
Nicola Pisano
Nicola Pisano was an Italian sculptor whose work is noted for its classical Roman sculptural style. Pisano is sometimes considered to be the founder of modern sculpture.- Early life :His birth date or origins are uncertain...
and his son Giovanni
Giovanni Pisano
Giovanni Pisano was an Italian sculptor, painter and architect. Son of the famous sculptor Nicola Pisano, he received his training in the workshop of his father....
; the painters Cimabue
Cimabue
Cimabue , also known as Bencivieni di Pepo or in modern Italian, Benvenuto di Giuseppe, was an Italian painter and creator of mosaics from Florence....
, Duccio
Duccio
Duccio di Buoninsegna was one of the most influential Italian artists of his time. Born in Siena, Tuscany, he worked mostly with pigment and egg tempera and like most of his contemporaries painted religious subjects...
, and Giotto di Bondone
Giotto di Bondone
Giotto di Bondone , better known simply as Giotto, was an Italian painter and architect from Florence in the late Middle Ages...
; and, later in the period, the sculptor Andrea Pisano
Andrea Pisano
Andrea Pisano , also known as Andrea da Pontedera, was an Italian sculptor and architect.-Biography:Andrea Pisano was born at Pontedera, where he also died....
. Among the many great artists of the 15th century — the golden age of Florence and Venice — were the architects Filippo Brunelleschi
Filippo Brunelleschi
Filippo Brunelleschi was one of the foremost architects and engineers of the Italian Renaissance. He is perhaps most famous for inventing linear perspective and designing the dome of the Florence Cathedral, but his accomplishments also included bronze artwork, architecture , mathematics,...
, Lorenzo Ghiberti
Lorenzo Ghiberti
Lorenzo Ghiberti , born Lorenzo di Bartolo, was an Italian artist of the early Renaissance best known for works in sculpture and metalworking.-Early life:...
, and Leon Battista Alberti; the sculptors Donatello
Donatello
Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi , also known as Donatello, was an early Renaissance Italian artist and sculptor from Florence...
, Luca della Robbia
Luca della Robbia
Luca della Robbia was an Italian sculptor from Florence, noted for his terra-cotta roundels.Luca Della Robbia developed a pottery glaze that made his creations more durable in the outdoors and thus suitable for use on the exterior of buildings. His work is noted for its charm rather than the drama...
, Desiderio da Settignano
Desiderio da Settignano
Desiderio da Settignano, real name Desiderio de Bartolomeo di Francesco detto Ferro was an Italian sculptor active during the Renaissance.-Biography:...
, and Andrea del Verrocchio
Andrea del Verrocchio
Andrea del Verrocchio , born Andrea di Michele di Francesco de' Cioni, was an Italian sculptor, goldsmith and painter who worked at the court of Lorenzo de' Medici in Florence in the early renaissance. Few paintings are attributed to him with certainty, but a number of important painters were...
; and the painters Fra Angelico
Fra Angelico
Fra Angelico , born Guido di Pietro, was an Early Italian Renaissance painter described by Vasari in his Lives of the Artists as having "a rare and perfect talent"...
, Stefano di Giovanni
Stefano di Giovanni
Stefano di Giovanni di Consolo, known as il Sassetta was an Italian painter.He was born in Siena, although there is also an hypothesis that he was born in Cortona. The first historical record of him was anyway in Siena in 1423. Sassetta was the apprentice of Paolo di Giovanni Fei or Benedetto di...
, Paolo Uccello
Paolo Uccello
Paolo Uccello , born Paolo di Dono, was an Italian painter and a mathematician who was notable for his pioneering work on visual perspective in art. Giorgio Vasari in his book Lives of the Artists wrote that Uccello was obsessed by his interest in perspective and would stay up all night in his...
, Masaccio
Masaccio
Masaccio , born Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Simone, was the first great painter of the Quattrocento period of the Italian Renaissance. According to Vasari, Masaccio was the best painter of his generation because of his skill at recreating lifelike figures and movements as well as a convincing sense...
, Filippo Lippi
Filippo Lippi
Fra' Filippo Lippi , also called Lippo Lippi, was an Italian painter of the Italian Quattrocento .-Biography and works:...
, Piero della Francesca
Piero della Francesca
Piero della Francesca was a painter of the Early Renaissance. As testified by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Artists, to contemporaries he was also known as a mathematician and geometer. Nowadays Piero della Francesca is chiefly appreciated for his art. His painting was characterized by its...
, Giovanni Bellini
Giovanni Bellini
Giovanni Bellini was an Italian Renaissance painter, probably the best known of the Bellini family of Venetian painters. His father was Jacopo Bellini, his brother was Gentile Bellini, and his brother-in-law was Andrea Mantegna. He is considered to have revolutionized Venetian painting, moving it...
, Andrea Mantegna
Andrea Mantegna
Andrea Mantegna was an Italian painter, a student of Roman archeology, and son in law of Jacopo Bellini. Like other artists of the time, Mantegna experimented with perspective, e.g., by lowering the horizon in order to create a sense of greater monumentality...
, Antonio del Pollaiolo, Luca Signorelli
Luca Signorelli
Luca Signorelli was an Italian Renaissance painter who was noted in particular for his ability as a draughtsman and his use of foreshortening...
, Pietro Perugino
Pietro Perugino
Pietro Perugino , born Pietro Vannucci, was an Italian Renaissance painter of the Umbrian school, who developed some of the qualities that found classic expression in the High Renaissance...
, Sandro Botticelli
Sandro Botticelli
Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, better known as Sandro Botticelli was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance...
, Domenico Ghirlandaio
Domenico Ghirlandaio
Domenico Ghirlandaio was an Italian Renaissance painter from Florence. Among his many apprentices was Michelangelo.-Early years:Ghirlandaio's full name is given as Domenico di Tommaso di Currado di Doffo Bigordi...
, and Vittore Carpaccio
Vittore Carpaccio
Vittore Carpaccio was an Italian painter of the Venetian school, who studied under Gentile Bellini. He is best known for a cycle of nine paintings, The Legend of Saint Ursula. His style was somewhat conservative, showing little influence from the Humanist trends that transformed Italian...
.
During the 16th century, the High Renaissance
High Renaissance
The expression High Renaissance, in art history, is a periodizing convention used to denote the apogee of the visual arts in the Italian Renaissance...
, Rome shared with Florence the leading position in the world of the arts. Major masters included the architects Bramante and Andrea Palladio
Andrea Palladio
Andrea Palladio was an architect active in the Republic of Venice. Palladio, influenced by Roman and Greek architecture, primarily by Vitruvius, is widely considered the most influential individual in the history of Western architecture...
; the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini
Benvenuto Cellini
Benvenuto Cellini was an Italian goldsmith, sculptor, painter, soldier and musician, who also wrote a famous autobiography. He was one of the most important artists of Mannerism.-Youth:...
; the painter, designer, and inventor Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance...
; the painter, sculptor and architect Michelangelo Buonarroti; and the painters Titian
Titian
Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1488/1490 – 27 August 1576 better known as Titian was an Italian painter, the most important member of the 16th-century Venetian school. He was born in Pieve di Cadore, near...
, Giorgione
Giorgione
Giorgione was a Venetian painter of the High Renaissance in Venice, whose career was cut off by his death at a little over thirty. Giorgione is known for the elusive poetic quality of his work, though only about six surviving paintings are acknowledged for certain to be his work...
, Raphael
Raphael
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino , better known simply as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur...
, Andrea del Sarto
Andrea del Sarto
Andrea del Sarto was an Italian painter from Florence, whose career flourished during the High Renaissance and early Mannerism. Though highly regarded during his lifetime as an artist senza errori , his renown was eclipsed after his death by that of his contemporaries, Leonardo da Vinci,...
, and Antonio da Correggio
Antonio da Correggio
Antonio Allegri da Correggio , usually known as Correggio, was the foremost painter of the Parma school of the Italian Renaissance, who was responsible for some of the most vigorous and sensuous works of the 16th century...
. Among the great painters of the late Renaissance were Tintoretto
Tintoretto
Tintoretto , real name Jacopo Comin, was a Venetian painter and a notable exponent of the Renaissance school. For his phenomenal energy in painting he was termed Il Furioso...
and Paolo Veronese
Paolo Veronese
Paolo Veronese was an Italian painter of the Renaissance in Venice, famous for paintings such as The Wedding at Cana and The Feast in the House of Levi...
. Giorgio Vasari
Giorgio Vasari
Giorgio Vasari was an Italian painter, writer, historian, and architect, who is famous today for his biographies of Italian artists, considered the ideological foundation of art-historical writing.-Biography:...
was a painter, architect, art historian, and critic.
Among the leading artists of the Baroque period were the sculptor and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Gian Lorenzo Bernini was an Italian artist who worked principally in Rome. He was the leading sculptor of his age and also a prominent architect...
and the painters Caravaggio
Caravaggio
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was an Italian artist active in Rome, Naples, Malta, and Sicily between 1593 and 1610. His paintings, which combine a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, had a formative influence on the Baroque...
, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo , also known as Gianbattista or Giambattista Tiepolo, was an Italian painter and printmaker from the Republic of Venice...
, Canaletto
Canaletto
Giovanni Antonio Canal better known as Canaletto , was a Venetian painter famous for his landscapes, or vedute, of Venice. He was also an important printmaker in etching.- Early career :...
, Pietro Longhi
Pietro Longhi
Pietro Longhi was a Venetian painter of contemporary scenes of life.-Biography:Pietro Longhi was born in Venice in the parish of Saint Maria, first child of the silversmith Alessandro Falca and his wife, Antonia. He adopted the Longhi last name when he began to paint...
, and Francesco Guardi
Francesco Guardi
Francesco Lazzaro Guardi was a Venetian painter of veduta, a member of the Venetian School. He is considered to be among the last practitioners, along with his brothers, of the classic Venetian school of painting....
. Leading figures in modern painting were Umberto Boccioni
Umberto Boccioni
Umberto Boccioni was an Italian painter and sculptor. Like other Futurists, his work centered on the portrayal of movement , speed, and technology. He was born in Reggio Calabria, Italy.-Biography:...
, Amedeo Modigliani
Amedeo Modigliani
Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. Primarily a figurative artist, he became known for paintings and sculptures in a modern style characterized by mask-like faces and elongation of form...
, Giorgio de Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico was a pre-Surrealist and then Surrealist Italian painter born in Volos, Greece, to a Genovese mother and a Sicilian father. He founded the scuola metafisica art movement...
, and Giorgio Morandi
Giorgio Morandi
Giorgio Morandi was an Italian painter and printmaker who specialized in still life. His paintings are noted for their tonal subtlety in depicting apparently simple subjects, which were limited mainly to vases, bottles, bowls, flowers, and landscapes.-Biography:Giorgio Morandi was born in Bologna...
. A noted contemporary architect was Pier Luigi Nervi
Pier Luigi Nervi
Pier Luigi Nervi was an Italian engineer. He studied at the University of Bologna and qualified in 1913. Dr. Nervi taught as a professor of engineering at Rome University from 1946-61...
.
In philosophy, exploration, and statesmanship, Italy has produced many world-renowned figures: the traveler Marco Polo
Marco Polo
Marco Polo was a Venetian merchant traveler from the Venetian Republic whose travels are recorded in Il Milione, a book which did much to introduce Europeans to Central Asia and China. He learned about trading whilst his father and uncle, Niccolò and Maffeo, travelled through Asia and apparently...
; the statesman and patron of the arts Cosimo de' Medici
Cosimo de' Medici
Còsimo di Giovanni degli Mèdici was the first of the Medici political dynasty, de facto rulers of Florence during much of the Italian Renaissance; also known as "Cosimo 'the Elder'" and "Cosimo Pater Patriae" .-Biography:Born in Florence, Cosimo inherited both his wealth and his expertise in...
; the statesman, clergyman, and artistic patron Rodrigo Borgia, who became Pope Alexander VI
Pope Alexander VI
Pope Alexander VI , born Roderic Llançol i Borja was Pope from 1492 until his death on 18 August 1503. He is one of the most controversial of the Renaissance popes, and his Italianized surname—Borgia—became a byword for the debased standards of the Papacy of that era, most notoriously the Banquet...
; the soldier, statesman, and artistic patron Lorenzo de' Medici
Lorenzo de' Medici
Lorenzo de' Medici was an Italian statesman and de facto ruler of the Florentine Republic during the Italian Renaissance. Known as Lorenzo the Magnificent by contemporary Florentines, he was a diplomat, politician and patron of scholars, artists and poets...
, the son of Cosimo; the explorer John Cabot
John Cabot
John Cabot was an Italian navigator and explorer whose 1497 discovery of parts of North America is commonly held to have been the first European encounter with the continent of North America since the Norse Vikings in the eleventh century...
; the explorer Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus was an explorer, colonizer, and navigator, born in the Republic of Genoa, in northwestern Italy. Under the auspices of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, he completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean that led to general European awareness of the American continents in the...
; the explorer Amerigo Vespucci
Amerigo Vespucci
Amerigo Vespucci was an Italian explorer, financier, navigator and cartographer. The Americas are generally believed to have derived their name from the feminized Latin version of his first name.-Expeditions:...
, after whom the Americas
Americas
The Americas, or America , are lands in the Western hemisphere, also known as the New World. In English, the plural form the Americas is often used to refer to the landmasses of North America and South America with their associated islands and regions, while the singular form America is primarily...
are named; the admiral and statesman Andrea Doria
Andrea Doria
Andrea Doria was an Italian condottiere and admiral from Genoa.-Early life:Doria was born at Oneglia from the ancient Genoese family, the Doria di Oneglia branch of the old Doria, de Oria or de Auria family. His parents were related: Ceva Doria, co-lord of Oneglia, and Caracosa Doria, of the...
; Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was an Italian historian, philosopher, humanist, and writer based in Florence during the Renaissance. He is one of the main founders of modern political science. He was a diplomat, political philosopher, playwright, and a civil servant of the Florentine Republic...
, author of The Prince
The Prince
The Prince is a political treatise by the Italian diplomat, historian and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli. From correspondence a version appears to have been distributed in 1513, using a Latin title, De Principatibus . But the printed version was not published until 1532, five years after...
and the outstanding political theorist of the Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
; the statesman and clergyman Cesare Borgia
Cesare Borgia
Cesare Borgia , Duke of Valentinois, was an Italian condottiero, nobleman, politician, and cardinal. He was the son of Pope Alexander VI and his long-term mistress Vannozza dei Cattanei. He was the brother of Lucrezia Borgia; Giovanni Borgia , Duke of Gandia; and Gioffre Borgia , Prince of Squillace...
, the son of Rodrigo; the explorer Sebastian Cabot
Sebastian Cabot (explorer)
Sebastian Cabot was an explorer, born in the Venetian Republic.-Origins:...
, the son of John; Baldassare Castiglione
Baldassare Castiglione
Baldassare Castiglione, count of was an Italian courtier, diplomat, soldier and a prominent Renaissance author.-Biography:Castiglione was born into an illustrious Lombard family at Casatico, near Mantua, where his family had constructed an impressive palazzo...
, author of The Book of the Courtier
The Book of the Courtier
The Book of the Courtier is a courtesy book. It was written by Baldassare Castiglione over the course of many years, beginning in 1508, and published in 1528 by the Aldine Press just before his death...
; the historian Francesco Guicciardini
Francesco Guicciardini
Francesco Guicciardini was an Italian historian and statesman. A friend and critic of Niccolò Machiavelli, he is considered one of the major political writers of the Italian Renaissance...
; the explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano; the philosopher Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno , born Filippo Bruno, was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer. His cosmological theories went beyond the Copernican model in proposing that the Sun was essentially a star, and moreover, that the universe contained an infinite number of inhabited...
; the imperial field marshal and statesman Prince Eugene of Savoy
Prince Eugene of Savoy
Prince Eugene of Savoy , was one of the most successful military commanders in modern European history, rising to the highest offices of state at the Imperial court in Vienna. Born in Paris to aristocratic Italian parents, Eugene grew up around the French court of King Louis XIV...
; the political philosopher Giambattista Vico
Giambattista Vico
Giovanni Battista ' Vico or Vigo was an Italian political philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist....
; the noted jurist Cesare Beccaria; Giuseppe Mazzini
Giuseppe Mazzini
Giuseppe Mazzini , nicknamed Soul of Italy, was an Italian politician, journalist and activist for the unification of Italy. His efforts helped bring about the independent and unified Italy in place of the several separate states, many dominated by foreign powers, that existed until the 19th century...
, the leading spirit of the Risorgimento; Camillo Benso, conte di Cavour, its prime statesman; and Giuseppe Garibaldi
Giuseppe Garibaldi
Giuseppe Garibaldi was an Italian military and political figure. In his twenties, he joined the Carbonari Italian patriot revolutionaries, and fled Italy after a failed insurrection. Garibaldi took part in the War of the Farrapos and the Uruguayan Civil War leading the Italian Legion, and...
, its foremost soldier and man of action.
Language
Italian is a Romance languageRomance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
spoken by about 60 million people in Italy, and by a total of around 70 million in the world. In Switzerland, Italian is one of four official languages
Linguistic geography of Switzerland
The four national languages of Switzerland are German, French, Italian, and Romansh. Only three of these languages, however, maintain equal status as official languages at the national level within the Federal Administration of the Swiss Confederation: German, French, and Italian.Native speakers...
. It is also the official language of San Marino
San Marino
San Marino, officially the Republic of San Marino , is a state situated on the Italian Peninsula on the eastern side of the Apennine Mountains. It is an enclave surrounded by Italy. Its size is just over with an estimated population of over 30,000. Its capital is the City of San Marino...
, as well as the primary language of Vatican City
Vatican City
Vatican City , or Vatican City State, in Italian officially Stato della Città del Vaticano , which translates literally as State of the City of the Vatican, is a landlocked sovereign city-state whose territory consists of a walled enclave within the city of Rome, Italy. It has an area of...
. Standard Italian, adopted by the state after the unification of Italy, is based on Tuscan and is somewhat intermediate between the Italo-Dalmatian languages
Italo-Dalmatian languages
The Italo-Dalmatian languages are a group of Romance languages of Italy , Corsica, and, formerly, the Dalmatian Coast of Croatia...
of the South and the Gallo-Italic languages
Gallo-Italic languages
The Gallo-Italic or Gallo-Italian is a linguistic set of Romance languages. In accordance with a source such as Ethnologue is a subset of the Gallo-Romance languages, which also include French and Occitan, among others; in accordance with the major Italian linguists and dialectologists The...
of the North. Its development was also influenced by the other Italian dialects
Italian dialects
Dialects of Italian are regional varieties of the Italian language, more commonly and more accurately referred to as Regional Italian. The dialects have features, most notably phonological and lexical, percolating from the underlying substrate languages...
and by the Germanic language of post-Roman invaders
Migration Period
The Migration Period, also called the Barbarian Invasions , was a period of intensified human migration in Europe that occurred from c. 400 to 800 CE. This period marked the transition from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages...
. Italian is also spoken in parts of Slovenia
Slovenia
Slovenia , officially the Republic of Slovenia , is a country in Central and Southeastern Europe touching the Alps and bordering the Mediterranean. Slovenia borders Italy to the west, Croatia to the south and east, Hungary to the northeast, and Austria to the north, and also has a small portion of...
, Malta
Malta
Malta , officially known as the Republic of Malta , is a Southern European country consisting of an archipelago situated in the centre of the Mediterranean, south of Sicily, east of Tunisia and north of Libya, with Gibraltar to the west and Alexandria to the east.Malta covers just over in...
, Monaco
Monaco
Monaco , officially the Principality of Monaco , is a sovereign city state on the French Riviera. It is bordered on three sides by its neighbour, France, and its centre is about from Italy. Its area is with a population of 35,986 as of 2011 and is the most densely populated country in the...
, Luxembourg
Luxembourg
Luxembourg , officially the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg , is a landlocked country in western Europe, bordered by Belgium, France, and Germany. It has two principal regions: the Oesling in the North as part of the Ardennes massif, and the Gutland in the south...
, Croatia
Croatia
Croatia , officially the Republic of Croatia , is a unitary democratic parliamentary republic in Europe at the crossroads of the Mitteleuropa, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean. Its capital and largest city is Zagreb. The country is divided into 20 counties and the city of Zagreb. Croatia covers ...
and Corsica
Corsica
Corsica is an island in the Mediterranean Sea. It is located west of Italy, southeast of the French mainland, and north of the island of Sardinia....
. The language is also used in Eritrea
Eritrea
Eritrea , officially the State of Eritrea, is a country in the Horn of Africa. Eritrea derives it's name from the Greek word Erethria, meaning 'red land'. The capital is Asmara. It is bordered by Sudan in the west, Ethiopia in the south, and Djibouti in the southeast...
, Libya
Libya
Libya is an African country in the Maghreb region of North Africa bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Egypt to the east, Sudan to the southeast, Chad and Niger to the south, and Algeria and Tunisia to the west....
and Somalia
Somalia
Somalia , officially the Somali Republic and formerly known as the Somali Democratic Republic under Socialist rule, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. Since the outbreak of the Somali Civil War in 1991 there has been no central government control over most of the country's territory...
, all ex-Italian colonies, and is also spoken in some emigrants' communities, especially in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
, Argentina
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...
, Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
and the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
.
Italian derives diachronically from Latin and is one of the closest languages to Latin. Unlike most other Romance languages, Italian has retained the contrast between short and long consonants which existed in Latin. As in most Romance languages, stress
Stress (linguistics)
In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense.The stress placed...
is distinctive. In particular, among the Romance languages, Italian is considered to be the closest to Latin in terms of vocabulary. Lexical similarity
Lexical similarity
In linguistics, lexical similarity is a measure of the degree to which the word sets of two given languages are similar. A lexical similarity of 1 would mean a total overlap between vocabularies, whereas 0 means there are no common words....
is 89% with French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, 87% with Catalan
Catalan language
Catalan is a Romance language, the national and only official language of Andorra and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Valencian Community, where it is known as Valencian , as well as in the city of Alghero, on the Italian island...
, 85% with Sardinian
Sardinian language
Sardinian is a Romance language spoken and written on most of the island of Sardinia . It is considered the most conservative of the Romance languages in terms of phonology and is noted for its Paleosardinian substratum....
, 82% with Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, 78% with Rhaeto-Romance
Rhaeto-Romance languages
Rhaeto-Romance languages are a Romance language sub-family which includes multiple languages spoken in north and north-eastern Italy, and Switzerland...
and 77% with Romanian
Romanian language
Romanian Romanian Romanian (or Daco-Romanian; obsolete spellings Rumanian, Roumanian; self-designation: română, limba română ("the Romanian language") or românește (lit. "in Romanian") is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova...
.
Museums and libraries
Italy is one of the world's greatest centers of architecture, art, and books. Many of its art museums rank among the most famous in the world. Several of Italy's museums are the former palaces of kings or the houses of royal families. These museums include the Palazzo PittiPalazzo Pitti
The Palazzo Pitti , in English sometimes called the Pitti Palace, is a vast mainly Renaissance palace in Florence, Italy. It is situated on the south side of the River Arno, a short distance from the Ponte Vecchio...
and the Uffizi
Uffizi
The Uffizi Gallery , is a museum in Florence, Italy. It is one of the oldest and most famous art museums of the Western world.-History:...
Palace in Florence. National archaeological museums in Cagliari, Naples, and Palermo contain artifacts from the earliest history of Italy. Displays in the national galleries in Naples, Palermo, and Urbino include paintings by Italian masters.
All large Italian cities have public libraries. The largest libraries in the country are the national central libraries in Florence and Rome. In Italy, people visit libraries primarily for serious study. Local libraries have little in the way of popular books for general readers, and children's libraries are rare.
Politics
Umberto II of Italy
Umberto II, occasionally anglicized as Humbert II was the last King of Italy for slightly over a month, from 9 May 1946 to 12 June 1946. He was nicknamed the King of May -Biography:...
immediately left the throne. The voters elected a group of 556 members, called a Constituent Assembly
Constituent Assembly of Italy
The Italian Constituent Assembly was a parliamentary chamber which existed in Italy from 25 June 1946 until 31 January 1948...
, to write a constitution
Constitution of Italy
The Constitution of the Italian Republic was enacted by the Constituent Assembly on 22 December 1947, with 453 votes in favour and 62 against. The text, which has since been amended 13 times, was promulgated in the extraordinary edition of Gazzetta Ufficiale No. 298 on 27 December 1947...
. The Constitution was approved in 1947 and became effective on Jan. 1, 1948. The Constitution established a governing system made up of a president, a cabinet called the Council of Ministers headed by a prime minister, and a Parliament made up of a Senate
Italian Senate
The Senate of the Republic is the upper house of the Italian Parliament. It was established in its current form on 8 May 1948, but previously existed during the Kingdom of Italy as Senato del Regno , itself a continuation of the Senato Subalpino of Sardinia-Piedmont established on 8 May 1848...
and a Chamber of Deputies
Italian Chamber of Deputies
The Italian Chamber of Deputies is the lower house of the Parliament of Italy. It has 630 seats, a plurality of which is controlled presently by liberal-conservative party People of Freedom. Twelve deputies represent Italian citizens outside of Italy. Deputies meet in the Palazzo Montecitorio. A...
.
The president of Italy is elected to a seven-year term by both houses of Parliament and a small number of regional representatives. The president must be at least 50 years old. He or she appoints the prime minister, who forms a government. The president has the power to dissolve Parliament and call new elections. The president is the commander of the Italian armed forces, and can declare war. The current President of the Italian Republic is Giorgio Napolitano
Giorgio Napolitano
Giorgio Napolitano is an Italian politician who has been the 11th President of Italy since 2006. A long-time member of the Italian Communist Party and later the Democrats of the Left, he served as President of the Chamber of Deputies from 1992 to 1994 and as Minister of the Interior from 1996 to...
.
Italy has no vice president. If the president of Italy becomes ill, the president of the Italian Senate takes over the office. If the president dies, a presidential election is held.
The prime minister determines national policy and is the most important person in the Italian government. The prime minister is selected by the president — usually from the members of Parliament — and must be approved by Parliament. The prime minister has no fixed term of office and can be voted out of office by Parliament at any time. The current Italian Prime Minister is Silvio Berlusconi
Silvio Berlusconi
Silvio Berlusconi , also known as Il Cavaliere – from knighthood to the Order of Merit for Labour which he received in 1977 – is an Italian politician and businessman who served three terms as Prime Minister of Italy, from 1994 to 1995, 2001 to 2006, and 2008 to 2011. Berlusconi is also the...
.
Members of the Cabinet are chosen by the prime minister, and they are usually selected from the members of Parliament. They are then appointed by the president and must be approved by Parliament. The Italian prime minister and the cabinet are officially called the government.
Italy was a founding member of the European Community — now the European Union
European Union
The European Union is an economic and political union of 27 independent member states which are located primarily in Europe. The EU traces its origins from the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community , formed by six countries in 1958...
. Italy was admitted to the United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...
in 1955 and is a member and strong supporter of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is an international economic organisation of 34 countries founded in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and world trade...
, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was negotiated during the UN Conference on Trade and Employment and was the outcome of the failure of negotiating governments to create the International Trade Organization . GATT was signed in 1947 and lasted until 1993, when it was replaced by the World...
/World Trade Organization
World Trade Organization
The World Trade Organization is an organization that intends to supervise and liberalize international trade. The organization officially commenced on January 1, 1995 under the Marrakech Agreement, replacing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade , which commenced in 1948...
, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe
Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe
The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe is the world's largest security-oriented intergovernmental organization. Its mandate includes issues such as arms control, human rights, freedom of the press and fair elections...
, and the Council of Europe
Council of Europe
The Council of Europe is an international organisation promoting co-operation between all countries of Europe in the areas of legal standards, human rights, democratic development, the rule of law and cultural co-operation...
. Its recent turns in the rotating Presidency of international organisations include the Conference for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the forerunner of the OSCE, in 1994; G8
G8
The Group of Eight is a forum, created by France in 1975, for the governments of seven major economies: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In 1997, the group added Russia, thus becoming the G8...
; and the EU in 2001 and from July to December 2003.
Religion
Roman Catholicism is by far the largest religion in the country. Although the Roman Catholic ChurchRoman Catholic Church
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with over a billion members. Led by the Pope, it defines its mission as spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, administering the sacraments and exercising charity...
has been separated from the state, it still plays a role in the nation's political affairs partly due to Holy See
Holy See
The Holy See is the episcopal jurisdiction of the Catholic Church in Rome, in which its Bishop is commonly known as the Pope. It is the preeminent episcopal see of the Catholic Church, forming the central government of the Church. As such, diplomatically, and in other spheres the Holy See acts and...
's location in Vatican City
Vatican City
Vatican City , or Vatican City State, in Italian officially Stato della Città del Vaticano , which translates literally as State of the City of the Vatican, is a landlocked sovereign city-state whose territory consists of a walled enclave within the city of Rome, Italy. It has an area of...
, within Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
itself. Some 98% of Italians are Roman Catholic of which one-third are active members. Most baptisms, weddings, and funeral services are held in church.
An agreement called a concordat governs the relationship between Italy and the Roman Catholic Church. For instance, the agreement exempts priests and other members of religious orders from military service and gives tax exemptions to Catholic organizations.
Even though the main Christian denomination in Italy is Roman Catholicism, there are some minorities of Protestant
Protestantism
Protestantism is one of the three major groupings within Christianity. It is a movement that began in Germany in the early 16th century as a reaction against medieval Roman Catholic doctrines and practices, especially in regards to salvation, justification, and ecclesiology.The doctrines of the...
, Waldensian
Waldensians
Waldensians, Waldenses or Vaudois are names for a Christian movement of the later Middle Ages, descendants of which still exist in various regions, primarily in North-Western Italy. There is considerable uncertainty about the earlier history of the Waldenses because of a lack of extant source...
, Eastern Orthodox
Eastern Orthodox Church
The Orthodox Church, officially called the Orthodox Catholic Church and commonly referred to as the Eastern Orthodox Church, is the second largest Christian denomination in the world, with an estimated 300 million adherents mainly in the countries of Belarus, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Georgia, Greece,...
and other Christian churches. In the past two decades, Italy has received several waves of immigrants and as a result, some 825,000 Muslims
Islam
Islam . The most common are and . : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...
(1.4%) live in Italy, although other estimates indicate that there are up to one million Muslims as well as, 75,000 Hindus, 50,000 Buddhists, and a historical community of 30,000 Jewish members.
Sports
Football is a popular spectator and participation sport. The Italian national team is among the very best in the world and has won the World Cup on four different occasions: 1934, 1938, 1982, and 2006. Only Brazil has a better record. Major Italian clubs frequently compete at a high level of European competitions.Rugby football
Rugby football is a style of football named after Rugby School in the United Kingdom. It is seen most prominently in two current sports, rugby league and rugby union.-History:...
union is very popular in Italy; clubs compete domestically in the Super 10, as well as the European Heineken Cup tournament. The national team competes in the Six Nations Championship
Six Nations Championship
The Six Nations Championship is an annual international rugby union competition involving six European sides: England, France, Ireland, Italy, Scotland and Wales....
, and is a regular at the Rugby World Cup
Rugby World Cup
The Rugby World Cup is an international rugby union competition organised by the International Rugby Board and held every four years since 1987....
.
Cycling
Cycling
Cycling, also called bicycling or biking, is the use of bicycles for transport, recreation, or for sport. Persons engaged in cycling are cyclists or bicyclists...
is also a well represented sport in Italy. Italians are second only to Belgium in winning the most World Cycling Championships. The Giro d'Italia
Giro d'Italia
The Giro d'Italia , also simply known as The Giro, is a long distance road bicycle racing stage race for professional cyclists held over three weeks in May/early June in and around Italy. The Giro is one of the three Grand Tours , and is part of the UCI World Ranking calendar...
is a world famous long distance bicycle race held every May and constitutes one of the three Grand Tours along with the Tour de France
Tour de France
The Tour de France is an annual bicycle race held in France and nearby countries. First staged in 1903, the race covers more than and lasts three weeks. As the best known and most prestigious of cycling's three "Grand Tours", the Tour de France attracts riders and teams from around the world. The...
and the Vuelta a España
Vuelta a España
The Vuelta a España is a three-week road bicycle racing stage race that is one of the three "Grand Tours" of Europe and part of the UCI World Ranking calendar. The race lasts three weeks and attracts cyclists from around the world. The race is broken into day-long segments, called stages...
, each of which last approximately three weeks.
Scuderia Ferrari
Scuderia Ferrari
Scuderia Ferrari is the racing team division of the Ferrari automobile marque. The team currently only races in Formula One but has competed in numerous classes of motorsport since its formation in 1929, including sportscar racing....
is the oldest surviving team in Grand Prix racing, having competed since 1948, and statistically the most successful Formula One team in history with a record of 15 drivers' championships and 16 constructors' championships. Other very popular sports in Italy are basketball
Basketball
Basketball is a team sport in which two teams of five players try to score points by throwing or "shooting" a ball through the top of a basketball hoop while following a set of rules...
, volleyball
Volleyball
Volleyball is a team sport in which two teams of six players are separated by a net. Each team tries to score points by grounding a ball on the other team's court under organized rules.The complete rules are extensive...
, and boxing
Boxing
Boxing, also called pugilism, is a combat sport in which two people fight each other using their fists. Boxing is supervised by a referee over a series of between one to three minute intervals called rounds...
.