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Italy – About
History
The migrations of Indo-European peoples into Italy probably
began about 2000 B.C. and continued until 1000 B.C. From about the
9th century B.C. until it was overthrown by the Romans in the 3rd
century B.C. , the Etruscan civilization was dominant. By 264 B.C.
, all Italy south of Cisalpine Gaul was under the leadership of
Rome. For the next seven centuries, until the barbarian invasions
destroyed the western Roman Empire in the 4th and 5th centuries
A.D. , the history of Italy is largely the history of Rome. From
800 on, the Holy Roman Emperors, Roman Catholic popes, Normans, and
Saracens all vied for control over various segments of the Italian
peninsula. Numerous city-states, such as Venice and Genoa, whose
political and commercial rivalries were intense, and many small
principalities flourished in the late Middle Ages. Although Italy
remained politically fragmented for centuries, it became the
cultural center of the Western world from the 13th to the 16th
century.
In 1713, after the War of the Spanish Succession, Milan, Naples,
and Sardinia were handed over to the Hapsburgs of Austria, which
lost some of its Italian territories in 1735. After 1800, Italy was
unified by Napoléon, who crowned himself king of Italy in 1805; but
with the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Austria once again became the
dominant power in a disunited Italy. Austrian armies crushed
Italian uprisings in 1820-1821 and 1831. In the 1830s, Giuseppe
Mazzini, a brilliant liberal nationalist, organized the
Risorgimento (Resurrection), which laid the foundation for Italian
unity. Disappointed Italian patriots looked to the House of Savoy
for leadership. Count Camille di Cavour (1810-1861), prime minister
of Sardinia in 1852 and the architect of a united Italy, joined
England and France in the Crimean War (1853-1856), and in 1859
helped France in a war against Austria, thereby obtaining Lombardy.
By plebiscite in 1860, Modena, Parma, Tuscany, and the Romagna
voted to join Sardinia. In 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi conquered
Sicily and Naples and turned them over to Sardinia. Victor Emmanuel
II, king of Sardinia, was proclaimed king of Italy in 1861. The
annexation of Venetia in 1866 and of papal Rome in 1870 marked the
complete unification of peninsular Italy into one nation under a
constitutional monarchy.
Italy declared its neutrality upon the outbreak of World War I on
the grounds that Germany had embarked upon an offensive war. In
1915, Italy entered the war on the side of the Allies but obtained
less territory than it expected in the postwar settlement. Benito
("Il Duce") Mussolini, a former Socialist, organized discontented
Italians in 1919 into the Fascist Party to "rescue Italy from
Bolshevism." He led his Black Shirts in a march on Rome and, on
Oct. 28, 1922, became prime minister. He transformed Italy into a
dictatorship, embarking on an expansionist foreign policy with the
invasion and annexation of Ethiopia in 1935 and allying himself
with Adolf Hitler in the Rome-Berlin Axis in 1936. When the Allies
invaded Italy in 1943, Mussolini's dictatorship collapsed; he was
executed by partisans on April 28, 1945, at Dongo on Lake Como.
Following the armistice with the Allies (Sept. 3, 1943), Italy
joined the war against Germany as a cobelligerent. A June 1946
plebiscite rejected monarchy and a republic was proclaimed. The
peace treaty of Sept. 15, 1947, required Italian renunciation of
all claims in Ethiopia and Greece and the cession of the Dodecanese
islands to Greece and of five small Alpine areas to France. The
Trieste area west of the new Yugoslav territory was made a free
territory (until 1954, when the city and a 90-square-mile zone were
transferred to Italy and the rest to Yugoslavia).