Other large cities: Milan,
1,180,700; Naples, 991,700; Turin, 856,000; Palermo, 651,500; Genoa,
602,500; Bologna, 369,300; Florence, 351,600; Bari, 311,900; Catania,
305,900; Venice, 265,700
Monetary
unit: Euro (formerly lira)
Languages: Italian (official); German-, French-, and
Slovene-speaking minorities
Ethnicity/race: Italian (includes small clusters of German-,
French-, and Slovene-Italians in the north and Albanian- and
Greek-Italians in the south)
Religions: Roman Catholic approx. 90%, Protestant, Jewish,
Islamic
Literacy rate: 99% (2003
est.)
Economic summary:GDP/PPP
(2007 est.): $1.8 trillion; per capita $31,000. Real growth rate:
1.9%. Inflation: 1.7%. Unemployment: 6.7%. Arable
land: 26%. Agriculture: fruits, vegetables, grapes,
potatoes, sugar beets, soybeans, grain, olives; beef, dairy products;
fish. Labor force: 24.86 million; services 63%, industry 32%,
agriculture 5% (2001). Industries: tourism, machinery, iron and
steel, chemicals, food processing, textiles, motor vehicles, clothing,
footwear, ceramics. Natural resources: coal, mercury, zinc,
potash, marble, barite, asbestos, pumice, fluorospar, feldspar, pyrite
(sulfur), natural gas and crude oil reserves, fish, arable land.
Exports: $474.8 billion f.o.b. (2007 est.): engineering
products, textiles and clothing, production machinery, motor vehicles,
transport equipment, chemicals; food, beverages and tobacco; minerals,
and nonferrous metals. Imports: $483.6 billion f.o.b. (2007
est.): engineering products, chemicals, transport equipment, energy
products, minerals and nonferrous metals, textiles and clothing; food,
beverages, and tobacco. Major trading partners: Germany,
France, U.S., Spain, UK, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium, China
(2006).
Communications: Telephones:
main lines in use: 25.049 million (2005); mobile cellular: 71.5
million (2005). Radio broadcast stations: AM about 100, FM
about 4,600, shortwave 9 (1998). Television broadcast stations:
358 (plus 4,728 repeaters) (1995). . Internet hosts: 4.117
million (2007). Internet users: 28.855 million (2006).
Transportation: Railways: total: 19,460 km
(2006). Highways: total: 484,688 km; paved: 479,688 km
(including 6,621 km of expressways); unpaved: 0 km (2004).
Waterways: 2,400 km; note: used for commercial traffic; of
limited overall value compared to road and rail (2004). Ports and
harbors: Augusta, Genoa, Livorno, Melilli Oil Terminal, Ravenna,
Taranto, Trieste, Venice. Airports: 132 (2007).
International disputes: Italy's long
coastline and developed economy entices tens of thousands of illegal
immigrants from southeastern Europe and northern Africa.
Italy, slightly larger than Arizona, is a long peninsula shaped like a
boot, surrounded on the west by the Tyrrhenian Sea and on the east by the
Adriatic. It is bounded by France, Switzerland, Austria, and Slovenia to
the north. The Apennine Mountains form the peninsula's backbone; the Alps
form its northern boundary. The largest of its many northern lakes is
Garda (143 sq mi; 370 sq km); the Po, its principal river, flows from the
Alps on Italy's western border and crosses the Lombard plain to the
Adriatic Sea. Several islands form part of Italy; the largest are Sicily
(9,926 sq mi; 25,708 sq km) and Sardinia (9,301 sq mi; 24,090 sq km).
Government
Republic.
History
The migrations of Indo-European peoples into Italy probably began about
2000 B.C. and continued down to 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
dominated the area. 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).
Italy became an integral member of NATO and the European Economic
Community (later the EU) as it successfully rebuilt its postwar economy. A
prolonged outbreak of terrorist activities by the left-wing Red Brigades
threatened domestic stability in the 1970s, but by the early 1980s the
terrorist groups had been suppressed. “Revolving door” governments,
political instability, scandal, and corruption characterized Italian
politics in the 1980s and 1990s.
Italy adopted the euro as its currency in Jan. 1999. Treasury Secretary
Carlo Ciampi, who is credited with the economic reforms that permitted
Italy to enter the European Monetary Union, was elected president in May
1999. Italy joined its NATO partners in the Kosovo crisis. Aviano Air Base
in northern Italy was a crucial base for launching air strikes into Kosovo
and Yugoslavia.
In June 2001, Silvio Berlusconi, a conservative billionaire, was sworn
in as prime minister. He pledged to reduce unemployment, cut taxes, revamp
the educational system, and reform the bureaucracy. His critics were
alarmed by the apparent conflict of interest of a prime minister who also
owned 90% of Italy's media. He was accused of Mafia connections and was
under indictment for tax fraud and bribery. Found guilty in three out of
four of his trials, he was acquitted in all of them on appeal. Several
other cases are pending.
In Nov. 2002, Giulio Andreotti, who served as Italy's prime minister
numerous times between 1972 and 1992, was sentenced to 24 years for
ordering the Mafia to murder a journalist in 1979. At 84, however, he was
deemed too old for prison.
At the end of 2003, Italian food giant Parmalat was accused of a
massive accounting fraud scheme—$5 billion the company claimed was in fact
nonexistent.
In April 2005, regional elections had disastrous results for
Berlusconi's center-right coalition. The dismal state of the economy was
blamed for the poor showing. In parliamentary elections held April 2006,
the center-left Union coalition led by Romano Prodi won 49.8% of the vote
and Berlusconi's House of Liberties coalition won 49.7%—a mere 25,000 vote
difference. Berlusconi refused to concede and called for a recount. He
eventually relented, and Prodi was given the go-ahead by the newly
installed president Giorgio Napolitano to form a government. Prodi served
as prime minister once before (1996–98) and also as president of the
European Union. Prodi's government proved fragile almost immediately.
Indeed, he submitted his resignation in February 2007, just nine months
into his term, after a key foreign-policy vote about the deployment of
troops to Afghanistan and an expansion of a U. S. military base failed in
the Senate. Days later, the Senate, facing the prospect of Silvio
Berlusconi returning to power, narrowly passed a vote of confidence in
Prodi's government. Prodi remained in office, surely to face similar
obstacles in the near future. And he did. In January 2008, the Udeur party
bolted from his coalition, costing Prodi his majority in the senate. He
survived a no-confidence vote in the lower house of parliament, but lost
in the senate, 161 to 156, forcing his government to resign. Parliament
was dissolved, and elections were set for April. Berlusconi saw the crisis
as an opportunity for a political comeback. On April 15, 2008, with help
from Northern League support, Berlusconi and his center-right government
won elections ensuring him a third term as prime minister.
On May 8, 2008, Berlusconi was sworn in for his third term as prime
minister and announced his cabinet choices, including Franco Frattini as
foreign minister and Giulio Tremonti as economics minister. Berluconi's
cabinet remains dominated by center-right politicians and includes few
women.
