Introduction to Italy | Country Facts

Jutting into the Mediterranean midway between Gibraltar and Suez, Italy occupies a strategic position. Historically, its enviable location has been a major reason for its commercial, political, cultural, and religious importance. Following World War II, Italy participated in the collaborative and integrative experiments of the period, joining the United Nations, NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization), and the European Economic Community (later, the European Union). It also has friendly relations with Africa and the Middle East.

 

Italian politics has long been marked by a combination of instability and continuity. Coalition governments have formed and fallen with frequency, yet the same leaders return to power time and again. Roman Catholic-dominated coalitions prevailed in national politics throughout the Cold War. At the same time, Italy's unorthodox Communist Party (and its successors) was deeply involved in local government but was shut out of national government until the Cold War ended.

 

Understandably, most foreigners tend to think of Italy first of all in terms of its remarkable past. How could anyone overlook the enduring contributions made by the Roman Republic and Empire in government, law, language, and engineering? The Western Church modeled its administrative system after that of imperial Rome. Medieval Christendom looked to the papacy in Rome for guidance, just as in ancient times the outposts of empire had looked to the caesars. In the early Middle Ages, two Italian societies existed side by side—the feudalism of the Germanic invaders who ruled the countryside, and the society of the cities, which maintained the remnants of a Latin tradition under precarious conditions. Eventually, the Latin tradition triumphed, and the feudal institutions were able to maintain themselves only at the two extremities of the Italian peninsula—in the Kingdom of Naples in the south and in the partly French territory of Piedmont in the north.

 

The splendid urban culture of the Italian Renaissance, with its wonderful innovations in the fields of art and scholarship, rested on Italy's skill in developing commercial capitalism. The immense vitality and versatility of that age were illustrated by the appearance in one generation alone of such individuals as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Lorenzo de' Medici, Machiavelli, and Savonarola.

 

It is doubtless true that in comparison to its cultural contributions in ancient, medieval, and Renaissance times, Italy has played a secondary role since about 1500. Ironically, it was a native son, Christopher Columbus, who dealt a heavy blow to the prosperity of the Italian peninsula by his discovery of the New World, which hastened the shift of the major trade routes from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. The deadening impact of the Counter-Reformation and numerous invasions by Spain, France, and Austria also worked sharply to Italy's disadvantage.

 

Although Italy was relegated to the backwaters of European political and economic life from the late 16th through the 18th century, the Italici (Italic tribes) continued to be active in art and scholarship. Giovanni Bernini produced some of the world's finest baroque masterpieces, while Alessandro Scarlatti and Giovanni Battista Pergolesi developed new styles of music. Equally important were Galileo in science and Giordano Bruno and Giambattista Vico in philosophy. Cesare Beccaria was an outstanding advocate of humanitarian reforms in the 18th century.

 

It was not until the mid-19th century that Italy ceased to be, in the metaphor of the Austrian foreign minister Prince Metternich, a "geographical expression" and moved again into the front ranks of European states. The Risorgimento, the liberal nationalist movement that achieved the unification of Italy, was greatly stimulated by the French Revolution's concepts of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Skillful leadership was supplied by Giuseppe Mazzini, Giuseppe Garibaldi, and Camillo Benso di Cavour, though they disagreed as to the means of bringing about the consolidation of Italy and as to the nature of the political and administrative systems to be established.

 

After several abortive efforts, the Italians at last expelled Austria from its dominant position in the peninsula. The liberation was spearheaded by the northwestern kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont under the house of Savoy. Military assistance was provided by Napoleon III's France, while Britain and some other countries showed sympathy. Most of the Italian peasant masses watched from the sidelines with indifference. In 1861 the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in Turin by Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia-Piedmont and his premier, Cavour. Unification was completed in 1870, when an Italian army dispossessed Pope Pius IX of Rome and his temporal power; the capital of Italy was moved to Rome soon afterward, and administration became highly centralized.

 

The emergence of the new Italy, it is interesting to note, coincided almost exactly with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. To some extent, Italy shared in the revival of Mediterranean trade that resulted from the canal's construction. The Italian merchant marine moved into sixth place in tonnage in the world.

Though "Italy" had been created by 1870, a much longer period was required to create "Italians." New, intense feelings of hostility between the economically backward south and the politically dominant north, along with the people's lingering sentimental attachments to their native regions, had to be overcome. Vast illiteracy, amounting to 73% of the population in 1871, had to be attacked. Medieval patterns of land tenure needed reform. Capital had to be amassed and skills developed for new industries, which tended to concentrate in the northwestern triangle bounded by Turin, Milan, and Genoa. Fragile parliamentary government required strengthening, and the suffrage needed to be democratized. The task of reconciling church and state was not to be achieved until the Lateran pacts of 1929. In 1985 the Lateran concordat was revised so as to separate church and state.

 

Unfortunately, many of Italy's leaders after unification neglected urgent domestic problems in favor of overly ambitious imperialistic goals. As a result, Italy contributed either directly or indirectly to several of the major conflicts of modern times.

 

A humiliating defeat in Ethiopia in 1896, though it precipitated serious disorders at home, left some Italian leaders more determined than ever to win a place in the African sun. Italy's victory over the Ottoman Empire in the 1911–1912 war in Tripoli was a milestone in the imperialistic rivalries over Turkish possessions that helped set the stage for World War I. 

The peculiar way in which Italy was maneuvered into World War I in 1915, the heavy casualties the Italians sustained in that conflict, and the frustrations they encountered at the Paris Peace Conference with respect to their ambitions in the Adriatic area were major factors in fatally weakening the liberal parliamentary system. Fearful of the threat of communism, Italy's political leaders yielded under intimidation from Benito Mussolini's "radicalism of the right" in 1922 and made him premier. Mussolini soon undercut the parliamentary system, and Italy became the first country in the world to experiment with a Fascist dictatorship.

 

For a time Mussolini's efforts to organize a "corporative state," one that would regiment both labor and capital under a totalitarian Fascist party, attracted considerable favor both at home and abroad, as did his achievement of a reconciliation between church and state. But Mussolini's brutal invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 accelerated another landslide of aggressive military actions that was to culminate four years later in World War II. Mussolini's ill-considered entry into that struggle on the side of Hitler's Germany in 1940 led not only to the overthrow of his own hollow dictatorship in 1943 but also contributed greatly to vast physical destruction throughout Italy. The house of Savoy, which had failed to stand in the way of the Fascist dictatorship and to resist entry into the war, was another casualty of the conflict.

 

Signing an armistice with the Allies in 1943, Italy did its best thereafter to fight alongside them as a "co-belligerent." In the German-held portion of the country, members of the Resistance helped to redeem their nation's honor, and, because of their efforts, shared in the liberation of the Po Valley in April 1945.

At the peace conference in 1947, as well as during the ensuing Cold War, Italy was often in the forefront of discussions by the powers. The problem of drawing a suitable boundary with Yugoslavia proved to be one of the thorniest disputes until a compromise on the contested port city of Trieste was reached in 1954.

In the first parliamentary election under the new Italian Republic, during the growing Cold War tensions of 1948, the strength of the Italian Communist Party drew world attention. The election produced a basic pattern that persisted for 45 years: a government coalition built around the Christian Democrats and an opposition centered on the Communists as the second largest party. The 1960s saw a reduction of tensions between Right and Left. In the 1970s the Italian Communists became leading advocates of Eurocommunism, a doctrine stressing democratic procedures and independence from Moscow, while small extremist groups of the Right and Left engaged in terrorist tactics. The Cold War political pattern unraveled after 1992, when investigators' revelations of extensive corruption resulted in the arrest of hundreds of political and business figures. The traditional political parties transformed themselves or collapsed, and regional and rightist parties took on new importance. The new party system, however, was still characterized by short-lived coalition governments. In the early 1990s prosecutors also made significant advances in their campaign against the Mafia.

 

In the postwar era, large-scale Marshall Plan aid from the United States, followed by Italian entry into the European Common Market in 1958, helped trigger the "economic miracle" that transformed the once impoverished nation into an important industrial power. In 1995 the government announced a long-term macroeconomic program directed toward achieving membership in the then-forthcoming (1999) Economic and Monetary Union (EMU)—with its pan-European currency, the euro. Membership criteria included stringent standards regarding inflation, government deficits, public debt, stability of exchange rates, interest rates, and independence of the central bank. Italy's failure to remain within the existing European exchange rate mechanism from 1993 to 1996 and its high level of public debt led to skepticism among many, but austerity budgets and the divestment of state enterprises produced significant results, and Italy was included among the 11 founding members.

 

In literature and the arts, Italy enjoyed a postwar renaissance that stood in sharp contrast to the stagnation that prevailed under Fascism. Italian cinema found particular prominence in the 1950s and 1960s.