Rome, the Renaissance and a late unification
Ancient Rome built an empire that ringed the Mediterranean and shaped European law, language and religion for two millennia. After its fall Italy fractured into city-states, papal lands and foreign dominions, but those same city-states, Florence, Venice, Rome, drove the Renaissance that remade Western art and thought. Political unity came only in 1861, when the Risorgimento welded the peninsula into a kingdom.
The young state turned to fascism under Benito Mussolini from 1922, joined Hitler in the Second World War, and emerged defeated and, after a 1946 referendum, a republic. Post-war Italy became an industrial power and a founder of the European project, though it has cycled through dozens of governments and struggles with a persistent gap between a rich north and a poorer south.
Adwa, Ethiopia and the boats
Italy's African empire began in humiliation. In 1896 the army of Emperor Menelik II destroyed an invading Italian force at Adwa in northern Ethiopia, the most complete defeat of a European power by an African army in the colonial age and a victory that made Ethiopia a symbol of freedom across the Black world. Italy held Eritrea, Somalia and, later, Libya, but the wound of Adwa festered.
In 1935 Mussolini took his revenge, invading Ethiopia with aircraft and mustard gas in defiance of the League of Nations, whose failure to stop him helped destroy that body's credibility. Emperor Haile Selassie's appeal to the League became one of the twentieth century's great speeches. Italian rule was short and savage and ended in 1941. Today the Mediterranean makes Italy Africa's nearest European neighbour: the island of Lampedusa, closer to Tunisia than to Sicily, is the landing point for tens of thousands of migrants, and Italian politics is now dominated by the question of how to stop them.
Culture, industry and a hard-right turn
Italy remains a design and manufacturing power, from Ferrari and Fiat to the fashion houses of Milan, and it holds more UNESCO World Heritage sites than any other country. Its birth rate is among the lowest in the world, and its population is ageing and shrinking even as migration reshapes it. In 2022 Giorgia Meloni became prime minister at the head of a party with post-fascist roots, promising to curb migration while, in office, quietly seeking African labour her economy needs.