World travel guide Italy: HISTORY

A smattering of remains exist from the Neanderthals who occupied the Italian peninsula half a million years ago, but the main period of colonization began after the last Ice Age. Evidence of Paleolithic settlements dates from this time, around 20,000 BC, the next development being the spread of Neolithic tribes across the peninsula, between 5000 and 6000 years ago. More sophisticated tribes developed towards the end of the prehistoric period, between 2400 and 1800 BC; those who left the most visible traces were the Ligurians (who inhabited a much greater area than modern Liguria), the Siculi of southern Italy and Latium, and the Sards , who farmed and raised livestock on Sardinia. More advanced still were migrant groups from the eastern Mediterranean, who introduced the techniques of working copper. Later, various Bronze Age societies (1600-1000 BC) built a network of farms and villages in the Apennines, and on the Sicilian and southern coasts, the latter population trading with Mycenaeans in Greece.

Other tribes brought Indo-European languages into Italy. The Veneti, Latins and Umbrii moved down the peninsula from the north, whilst the Piceni and the Messapians in Puglia crossed the Adriatic from what is now Croatia. The artificial line between prehistory and history is drawn around the eighth century BC, with the arrival of the Phoenician alphabet and writing system. Sailing west along the African coast, the Phoenicians established colonies in Sicily and Sardinia, going on to build trade links between Carthage and southern Italy. These soon encouraged the arrival of the Carthaginians , who set themselves up on Sicily, Sardinia and the Latium coast, at the same time as both Greeks and Etruscans were gaining influence.

Greek settlers colonized parts of the Tuscan coast and the Bay of Naples in the eighth century BC, moving on to Naxos on Sicily's Ionian coast, and founding the city of Syracuse in the year 736 BC. The colonies they established in Sicily and southern Italy came to be known as Magna Graecia . Along with Etruscan cities to the north they were the earliest Italian civilizations to leave substantial buildings and written records.

The Greek settlements were hugely successful, introducing the vine and the olive to Italy, and establishing a high-yielding agricultural system. Cities like Syracuse and Tarentum were wealthier and more sophisticated than those on mainland Greece, dominating trade in the central Mediterranean, despite competition from Carthage. Ruins such as the temples of Agrigento and Selinunte , the fortified walls around Gela, and the theatres at Syracuse and Taormina on Sicily attest to a great prosperity, and Magna Graecia became an enriching influence on the culture of the Greek homeland - Archimedes, Aeschylus and Empedocles were all from Sicily. Yet these colonies suffered from the same factionalism as the Greek states, and the cities of Tarentum, Metapontum, Sybaris and Croton were united only when faced with the threat of outside invasion. From 400 BC, after Sybaris was razed to the ground, the other colonies went into irreversible economic decline, to become satellite states of Rome.

The Etruscans were the other major civilization of the period, mostly living in the area between the Tiber and Arno rivers. Their language, known mostly from funerary texts, is one of the last relics of an ancient language common to the Mediterranean. Some say they arrived in Italy around the ninth century BC from western Anatolia, others that they came from the north, and a third hypothesis places their origins in Etruria. Whatever the case, they set up a cluster of twelve city states in northern Italy, traded with Greek colonies to the south and were the most powerful people in northern Italy by the sixth century BC, edging out the indigenous population of Ligurians, Latins and Sabines. Tomb frescoes in Umbria and Lazio depict a refined and luxurious culture with highly developed systems of divination, based on the reading of animal entrails and the flight of birds. Herodotus wrote that the Etruscans recorded their ancestry along the female line, and tomb excavations last century revealed that women were buried in special sarcophagi carved with their names. Well-preserved chamber tombs with wall paintings exist at Cerveteri and Tarquinia , the two major sites in Italy. The Etruscans were technically advanced, creating new agricultural land through irrigation and building their cities on ramparted hilltops - a pattern of settlement that has left a permanent mark on central Italy. Their kingdom contracted, however, after invasions by the Cumans , Syracusans and Gauls , and was eventually forced into alliance with the embryonic Roman state.

The growth of Rome , a border town between the Etruscans and the Latins, gained impetus around 600 BC from a coalition of Latin and Sabine communities. The Tarquins , an Etruscan dynasty, oversaw the early expansion, but in 509 BC the Romans ejected the Etruscan royal family and became a republic , with power shared jointly between two consuls, both elected for one year. Further changes came half a century later, after a protracted class struggle that resulted in the Law of the Twelve Tables , which made patricians and plebeians equal. Thus stabilized, the Romans set out to systematically conquer the northern peninsula, and after the fall of Veii in 396 BC, succeeded in capturing Sutri and Nepi , towns which Livy considered the "barriers and gateways of Etruria". Various wars and truces with other cities brought about agreements to pay harsh tributes.

The Gauls captured Rome in 390, refusing to leave until they had received a vast payment, but this proved a temporary reversal. The Romans took Campania and the fertile land of Puglia after defeating the Samnites in battles over a period of 35 years. They then set their sights on the wealthy Greek colonies to the south, including Tarentum, whose inhabitants turned to the Greek king, Pyrrhus of Epirus for military support. He initially repelled the Roman invaders, but lost his advantage and was defeated at Beneventum in 275 BC. The Romans had by then established their rule in most of southern Italy, and now became a threat to Carthage. In 264 they had the chance of obtaining Sicily , when the Mamertines, a mercenary army in control of Messina, appealed to them for help against the Carthaginians. The Romans obliged - sparking off the First Punic War - and took most of the island, together with Sardinia and Corsica. With their victory in 222 BC over the Gauls in the Po Valley, all Italy was now under Roman control.

They also turned a subsequent military threat to their advantage, in what came to be known as the Second Punic War . The Carthaginians had watched the spread of Roman power across the Mediterranean with some alarm, and at the end of the third century BC they allowed Hannibal to make an Alpine crossing into Italy with his army of infantry, horsemen and elephants. Hannibal crushed the Roman legions at Lago Trasimeno and Cannae (216 BC), and then halted at Capua. With remarkable cool, considering Hannibal's proximity, Scipio set sail on a retaliatory mission to the Carthaginian territory of Spain , taking Cartagena, and continuing his journey into Africa . The Carthaginians recalled Hannibal, who was finally defeated by Roman troops at Zama in 202 BC. It was another fifty years before Carthage was taken, closely followed by all of Spain, but the Romans were busy in the meantime adding Macedonian Greece to their territory.

These conquests gave Roman citizens a tax-free existence subsidized by captured treasure, but society was sharply divided into those enjoying the benefits, and those who were not. The former belonged mostly to the senatorial party , who ignored demands for reform by their opposition, the popular party. The radical reforms sponsored by the tribune Gaius Gracchus came too close to democracy for the senatorial party, whose declaration of martial law was followed by the assassination of Gracchus. The majority of people realized that the only hope of gaining influence was through the army, but General Gaius Marius , when put into power, was ineffective against the senatorial clique, who systematically picked off the new regime.

The first century BC saw civil strife on an unprecedented scale. Although Marius was still in power, another general, Sulla, was in the ascendancy, leading military campaigns against northern invaders and rebellious subjects in the south. Sulla subsequently took power and established his dictatorship in Rome, throwing out a populist government which had formed while he was away on a campaign in the east. Murder and exile were common, and cities which had sided with Marius during their struggle for power were punished with massacres and destruction. Thousands of Sulla's war veterans were given confiscated land, but much of it was laid to waste. In 73 BC a gladiator named Spartacus led 70,000 dispossessed farmers and escaped slaves in a revolt, which lasted for two years before they were defeated by the legions.

In the middle of the third century, incursions by Goths in Greece, the Balkans and Asia, and the Franks and Alamanni in Gaul foreshadowed the collapse of the empire. Aurelian (270-75) re-established some order after terrible civil wars, to be followed by Diocletian (284-305), whose persecution of Christians produced many of the Church's present-day saints. Plagues had decimated the population, but problems of a huge but static economy were compounded by the doubling in size of the army at this time to about half a million men. To ease administration, Diocletian divided the empire into two halves, east and west, basing himself as ruler of the western empire in Mediolanum (Milan). This measure brought about a relative recovery, coinciding with the rise of Christianity , which was declared the state religion during the reign of Constantine (306-337). Constantinople , capital of the eastern empire, became a thriving trading and manufacturing city, while Rome itself went into decline, as the enlargement of the senatorial estates and the impoverishment of the lower classes gave rise to something comparable to a primitive feudal system.

Barbarians (meaning outsiders, or foreigners) had been crossing the border into the empire since 376 AD, when the Ostrogoths were driven from their kingdom in southern Russia by the Huns , a tribe of ferocious horsemen. The Huns went on to attack the Visigoths , 70,000 of whom crossed the border and settled inside the empire. When the Roman aristocracy saw that the empire was no longer a shield against barbarian raids, they were less inclined to pay for its support, seeing that a more comfortable future lay in being on good terms with the barbarian successor states.

By the fifth century, many legions were made up of troops from conquered territories, and several posts of high command were held by outsiders. With little will or loyalty behind it, the empire floundered , and on New Year's Eve of 406, Vandals, Alans and Sueves crossed the frozen Rhine into Gaul, chased by the Huns from their kingdoms in what are now Hungary and Austria. Once this had happened, there was no effective frontier. A contemporary writer lamented that "the whole of Gaul is smoking like an enormous funeral pyre". Despite this shock, worse was to come. By 408, the imperial government in Ravenna could no longer hold off Alaric (commander of Illyricum - now Croatia), and he went on to sack Rome in 410, causing a crisis of morale in the west. "When the whole world perished in one city," wrote Saint Jerome, "then I was dumb with silence."

The bitter end of the Roman Empire in the west came after Valentinian III 's assassination in 455. His eight successors over the next twenty years were finally ignored by the Germanic troops in the army, who elected their general Odoacer as king. The remaining Roman aristocracy hated him, and the eastern emperor, Zeno , who in theory now ruled the whole empire, refused to recognize him. In 488, Zeno rid himself of the Ostrogoth leader Theodoric by persuading him to march on Odoacer in Italy. By 493, Theodoric had succeeded, becoming ruler of the western territories.

A lull followed. The Senate in Rome and the civil service continued to function, and the remains of the empire were still administered under Roman law. Ostrogothic rule of the west continued after Theodoric's death, but in the 530s the eastern emperor, Justinian , began to plan the reunification of the Roman Empire "up to the two oceans". In 536 his general Belisarius landed in Sicily and moved north through Rome to Ravenna; complete reconquest of the Italian peninsula was achieved in 552, after which the Byzantines retained a presence in the south and in Sardinia for 500 years.

During this time the Christian Church developed as a more or less independent authority, since the emperor was at a safe distance in Constantinople. Continual invasions had led to an uncertain political scene in which the bishops of Rome emerged with the strongest voice - justification of their primacy having already been given by Pope Leo I (440-461), who spoke of his right to "rule all who are ruled in the first instance by Christ". A confused period of rule followed, as armies from northern Europe tried to take more territory from the old empire.

During the chaotic sixth century, the Lombards , a Germanic tribe, were driven southwest into Italy. Rome was successfully defended against them, but by the eighth century the Lombards were extending their power throughout the peninsula. In the middle of that century the Franks arrived from Gaul. They were orthodox Christians, and therefore acceptable to Gallo-Roman nobility, integrating quickly and taking over much of the provincial administration. The Franks were ruled by the Merovingian royal family, but the mayors of the palace - the Carolingians - began to take power in real terms. Led by Pepin the Short , they saw an advantage in supporting the papacy, giving Rome large endowments and forcibly converting pagans in areas they conquered. When Pepin wanted to oust the Merovingians, and become King of the Franks, he appealed to the pope in Rome for his blessing, who was happy to agree, anointing the new Frankish king with holy oil.

This alliance was useful to both parties. In 755 the pope called on the Frankish army to confront the Lombards. The Franks forced them to hand over treasure and 22 cities and castles, which then became the northern part of the Papal States . Pepin died in 768, with the Church indebted to him. According to custom, he divided the kingdom between his two sons, one of whom died within three years. The other was Charles the Great, or Charlemagne.

An intelligent and innovative leader, Charlemagne was proclaimed King of the Franks and of the Lombards, and patrician of the Romans, after a decisive war against the Lombards in 774. On Christmas Day of the year 800, Pope Leo III expressed his gratitude for Charlemagne's political support by crowning him Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire , an investiture that forged an enduring link between the fortunes of Italy and those of northern Europe. By the time Charlemagne died, all of Italy from south of Rome to Lombardy, including Sardinia, was part of the huge Carolingian Empire . The parts which didn't come under his domain were Sicily and the southern coast, which were gradually being reconquered by Arabs from Tunisia; and Puglia and Calabria, colonized by Byzantines and Greeks.

The task of holding these gains was beyond Charlemagne's successors, and by the beginning of the tenth century the family was extinct and the rival Italian states had become prizes for which the western (French) and eastern (German) Frankish kingdoms competed. Power switched in 936 to Otto , king of the eastern Franks. Political disunity in Italy invited him to intervene, and in 962 he was crowned emperor; Otto's son and grandson (Ottos II and III) set the seal on the renewal of the Holy Roman Empire.

On the death of Otto III in 1002, Italy was again without a recognized ruler. In the north, noblemen jockeyed for power, and the papacy was manipulated by rival Roman families. The most decisive events were in the south, where Sicily, Calabria and Puglia were captured by the Normans , who proved effective administrators and synthesized their own culture with the existing half-Arabic, half-Italian south. In Palermo in the eleventh century they created the most dynamic culture of the Mediterranean world.

Meanwhile in Rome, a series of reforming popes began to strengthen the church. Gregory VII , elected in 1073, was the most radical, demanding the right to depose emperors if he so wished . Emperor Henry IV was equally determined for this not to happen. The inevitable quarrel broke out, over a key appointment to the archbishopric of Milan. Henry denounced Gregory as "now not pope, but false monk"; the pope responded by excommunicating him, thereby freeing his subjects from their allegiance. By 1077 Henry was aware of his tactical error and tried to make amends by visiting the pope at Canossa , where the emperor, barefoot and penitent, was kept waiting outside for three days. The formal reconciliation thus did nothing to heal the rift, and Henry's son, Henry V , continued the feud, eventually coming to a compromise in which the emperor kept control of bishops' land ownership, while giving up rights over their investiture.

After this symbolic victory, the papacy developed into the most comprehensive and advanced centralized government in Europe in the realms of law and finance, but it wasn't long before unity again came under attack. This time, the threat came from Emperor Frederick I (Barbarossa), who besieged many northern Italian cities from his base in Germany from 1154. Pope Alexander III responded with ambiguous pronouncements about the imperial crown being a "benefice" which the pope conferred, implying that the emperor was the pope's vassal. The issue of papal or imperial supremacy was to polarize the country for the next two hundred years, almost every part of Italy being torn by struggles between Guelphs (supporting the pope) and Ghibellines (supporting the emperor).

Henry's son, Frederick II , assumed the imperial throne at the age of three and a half, inheriting the Norman Kingdom of Sicily . Later linked by marriage to the great Hohenstaufen dynasty in Germany, he inevitably turned his attentions to northern Italy. However, his power base was small, and opposition from Italian comune and the papacy snowballed into civil war. His sudden death in 1250 marked a major downturn in imperial fortunes.

Charles of Anjou , brother of King Louis IX of France, defeated Frederick II's heirs in southern Italy, and received Naples and Sicily as a reward from the pope. His oppressive government finally provoked an uprising on Easter Monday 1282, a revolt that came to be known as the Sicilian Vespers , as some two thousand occupying soldiers were murdered in Palermo at the sound of the bell for vespers. For the next twenty years the French were at war with Peter of Aragon , who took Sicily and then tried for the southern mainland.

If imperial power was on the defensive, the papacy was in even worse shape. Knowing that the pontiff had little military backing or financial strength left, Philip of France sent his men to the pope's summer residence in 1303, subjecting the old man to a degrading attack. Boniface died within a few weeks; his French successor, Clement V, promptly moved the papacy to Avignon .

The declining political power of the major rulers was countered by the growing autonomy of the cities. By 1300, a broad belt of some three hundred virtually independent city states stretched from central Italy to the northernmost edge of the peninsula. In the middle of the century the population of Europe was savagely depleted by the Black Death - brought into Europe by a Genoese ship returning from the Black Sea - but the city states survived, developing a concept of citizenship quite different from the feudal lord-and-vassal relationship. By the end of the fourteenth century the richer and more influential states had swallowed up the smaller comune , leaving four as clear political front runners. These were Genoa (controlling the Ligurian coast), Florence (ruling Tuscany), Milan , whose sphere of influence included Lombardy and much of central Italy, and Venice . Smaller principalities, such as Mantua and Ferrara, supported armies of mercenaries, ensuring their security by building impregnable fortress-palaces.

Perpetual vendettas between the propertied classes often induced the citizens to accept the overall rule of one signore in preference to the bloodshed of warring clans. A despotic form of government evolved, sanctioned by official titles from the emperor or pope, and by the fifteenth century most city states were under princely rather than republican rule. In the south of the fragmented peninsula was the Kingdom of Naples ; the States of the Church stretched up from Rome through modern-day Marche, Umbria and the Romagna; Siena, Florence, Modena, Mantua and Ferrara were independent states, as were the Duchy of Milan , and the maritime republics of Venice and Genoa , with a few odd pockets of independence like Lucca, for example, and Rimini.

The commercial and secular city states of late medieval times were the seed bed for the Renaissance , when urban entrepreneurs (such as the Medici) and autocratic rulers (such as Federico da Montefeltro) enhanced their status through the financing of architectural projects, paintings and sculpture. It was also at this time that the Tuscan dialect - the language of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio - became established as Italy's literary language; it later became the nation's official spoken language.

By the mid-fifteenth century the five most powerful states - Naples, the papacy, Milan, and the republics of Venice and Florence - reached a tacit agreement to maintain the new balance of power. Yet though there was a balance of power at home, the history of each of the independent Italian states became inextricably bound up with the power politics of other European countries.

The inevitable finally happened when an Italian state invited a larger power in to defeat one of its rivals. In 1494, at the request of the Duke of Milan, Charles VIII of France marched south to renew the Angevin claim to the Kingdom of Naples. After the accomplishment of his mission, Charles stayed for three months in Naples, before heading back to France; the kingdom was then acquired by Ferdinand II of Aragon , subsequently ruler of all Spain.

The person who really established the Spanish in Italy was the Habsburg Charles V (1500-1558), who within three years of inheriting both the Austrian and Spanish thrones bribed his way to being elected Holy Roman Emperor. In 1527 the imperial troops sacked Rome , a calamity widely interpreted at the time as God's punishment to the disorganized and dissolute Italians. The French remained troublesome opposition, but they were defeated at Pavia in 1526 and Naples in 1529. With the treaty of Cateau-Cambresis in 1559, Spain held Sicily, Naples, Sardinia, the Duchy of Milan and some Tuscan fortresses, and they were to exert a stranglehold on Italian political life for the next 150 years. The remaining smaller states became satellites of either Spanish or French rule; only the papacy and Venice remained independent.

Social and economic troubles were as severe as the political upheavals. While the papacy combatted the spread of the Reformation in northern Europe, the major manufacturing and trading centres were coming to terms with the opening up of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean trade routes - discoveries which meant that northern Italy would increasingly be bypassed. Mid-sixteenth-century economic recession prompted wealthy Venetian and Florentine merchants to invest in land rather than business, while in the south high taxes and repressive feudal regimes produced an upsurge of banditry and even the raising of peasant militias - resistance that was ultimately suppressed brutally by the Spanish.

The seventeenth century was a low point in Italian political life, with little room for manoeuvre between the papacy and colonial powers. The Spanish eventually lost control of Italy at the start of the eighteenth century when, as a result of the War of the Spanish Succession, Lombardy, Mantua, Naples and Sardinia all came under Austrian control. The machinations of the major powers led to frequent realignments in the first half of the century. Piemonte, ruled by the Duke of Savoy, Victor Amadeus II, was forced in 1720 to surrender Sicily to the Austrians in return for Sardinia. In 1734 Naples and Sicily passed to the Spanish Bourbons, and three years later the House of Lorraine acquired Tuscany on the extinction of the Medici.

Relatively enlightened Bourbon rule in the south did little to arrest the economic polarization of society, but the northern states advanced under the intelligent if autocratic rule of Austria's Maria Theresa (1740-80) and her son Joseph II (1780-92) who prepared the way for early industrialization. Lightning changes came in April 1796, when the French armies of Napoleon invaded northern Italy. Within a few years the French had been driven out again, but by 1810 Napoleon was in command of the whole peninsula, and his puppet regimes remained in charge until Waterloo. Napoleonic rule had profound effects, reducing the power of the papacy, reforming feudal land rights and introducing representative government to Italy. Elected assemblies were provided on the French model, giving the emerging middle class a chance for political discussion and action.

The fall of Napoleon led to the Vienna Settlement of 1815, by which the Austrians effectively restored the old ruling class. Metternich , the Austrian Chancellor, did all he could to foster any local loyalties that might weaken the appeal of unity, yet the years between 1820 and 1849 became years of revolution. Uprisings began in Sicily, Naples and Piemonte, when King Ferdinand introduced measures that restricted personal freedom and destroyed many farmers' livelihoods. A makeshift army quickly gained popular support in Sicily, and forced some concessions, before Ferdinand invited the Austrians in to help him crush the revolution. In the north, the oppressive laws enacted by Vittorio Emanuele I in the Kingdom of Piemont sparked off student protests and army mutinies in Turin. Vittorio Emanuele abdicated in favour of his brother, Carlo Felice, and his son, Carlo Alberto ; the latter initially gave some support to the radicals, but Carlo Felice then called in the Austrians, and thousands of revolutionaries were forced into exile. Carlo Alberto became King of Piemont in 1831. A secretive, excessively devout and devious character, he did a major volte-face when he assumed the throne by forming an alliance with the Austrians.

In 1831 further uprisings occurred in Parma, Modena, the Papal States, Sicily and Naples. Their lack of co-ordination, and the readiness with which Austrian and papal troops intervened, ensured that revolution was short-lived. But even if these actions were unsustained, their influence grew.

One person profoundly influenced by these insurgencies was Giuseppe Mazzini. Arrested as Secretary of the Genoese branch of the Carbonari (a secret radical society) in 1827 and jailed for three months in 1830, he formulated his political ideology and set up " Young Italy " on his release. Among the many to whom the ideals of "Young Italy" appealed was Giuseppe Garibaldi , soon to play a central role in the Risorgimento , as the movement to reform and unite the country was known.

Crop failures in 1846 and 1847 produced widespread famine and cholera outbreaks . In Sicily an army of peasants marched on the capital, burning debt collection records, destroying property and freeing prisoners. Middle- and upper-class moderates were worried, and formed a government to control the uprising, but Sicilian separatist aims were realized in 1848. Fighting spread to Naples, where Ferdinand II made some temporary concessions, but nonetheless he retook Sicily the following year. At the same time as the southern revolution, serious disturbances took place in Tuscany, Piemonte and the Papal States. Rulers fled their duchies, and Carlo Alberto altered course again, prompted by Metternich's fall from power in Vienna: he granted his subjects a constitution and declared war on Austria. In Rome, the pope fled from rioting and Mazzini became a member of the city's republican triumvirate in 1849, with Garibaldi organizing the defences.

None of the uprisings lasted long. Twenty thousand revolutionaries were expelled from Rome, Carlo Alberto abdicated in favour of his son Vittorio Emanuele II after military defeats at the hands of the Austrians, and the dukes returned to Tuscany, Modena and Parma. One thing which did survive was Piemonte's constitution, which throughout the 1850s attracted political refugees to this cosmopolitan state.

After the Risorgimento, some things still hadn't changed. The ruling class were slow to move towards a broader based political system, while living standards actually worsened in some areas, particularly in Sicily. When Sicilian peasant farmers organized into fasci - forerunners of trade unions - the prime minister sent in 30,000 soldiers, closed down newspapers and interned suspected troublemakers without trial. In the 1890s capitalist methods and modern machinery in the Po Valley created a new social structure, with rich agrari at the top of the pile, a mass of farm labourers at the bottom, and an intervening layer of estate managers.

In the 1880s Italy's colonial expansion began, initially concentrated in bloody - and ultimately disastrous - campaigns in Abyssinia and Eritrea in 1886. In 1912 Italy wrested the Dodecanese islands and Libya from Turkey, a development deplored by many, including Benito Mussolini , who during this war was the radical secretary of the PSI (Partito Socialista Italiano) in Forlì.

A popular mandate declared Italy a republic in 1946, and Alcide de Gasperi's Democrazia Cristiana (DC) party formed a government. He remained in power until 1953, sustained by a succession of coalitions. Ever since then, the regular formation and disintegration of governments has been the norm, a political volatility that reflects the sharp divisions between rural and urban Italy, and between the north and the south of the country. A strong manufacturing base and large-scale agriculture have given most people in the north a better material standard of living than previous generations, but the south still lags far behind, despite such measures as the establishment in 1950 of the Cassa del Mezzogiorno development agency, which has pumped much-needed funds into the region.

During the 1950s Italy became a front-rank industrial nation, massive firms such as Fiat and Olivetti helping to double the Gross Domestic Product and triple industrial production. American financial aid - the Marshall Plan - was an important factor in this expansion, as was the availability of a large and compliant workforce, a substantial proportion of which was drawn from the villages of the south.

The DC at first operated in alliance with other right-wing parties, but in 1963, in a move precipitated by the increased politicization of the blue-collar workers, they were obliged to share power for the first time with the Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI). The DC politician who was largely responsible for sounding out the socialists was Aldo Moro , the dominant figure of Italian politics in the 1960s. Moro was prime minister from 1963 to 1968, a period in which the economy was disturbed by inflation and the removal of vast sums of money by wealthy citizens alarmed by the arrival in power of the PSI. The decade ended with the " autunno caldo " ("hot autumn") of 1969, when strikes, occupations and demonstrations paralysed the country.

In the 1970s the situation worsened: bankruptcies increased, inflation hit twenty percent, and unemployment rocketed. More extreme forms of unrest broke out, instigated in the first instance by the far right, who were almost certainly behind a bomb which killed sixteen people in Piazza Fontana, Milan in 1969, and the Piazza della Loggia bombing in Brescia five years later. Neo-fascist terrorism continued throughout the next decade, reaching its hideous climax in 1980, when 84 people were killed and 200 wounded in a bomb blast at Bologna train station. At the same time, a plethora of left-wing terrorist groups sprang up, many of them led by disaffected intellectuals at the northern universities. The most active of these were the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades). Founded in Milan in 1970, they reached the peak of their notoriety eight years later, when a Red Brigade group kidnapped and killed Aldo Moro himself. A major police offensive in the early 1980s nullified most of the Brigate Rosse, but a number of hardline splinter groups from the various terrorist organizations - especially right-wing ones - are still in existence, as was proved in 1988 by the murder of an aide of the prime minister.

Inconsistencies and secrecy beset those trying to discover who was really responsible for the terrorist activity of the Seventies. One Red Brigade member who served 18 years in jail for his part in the assassination of Aldo Moro recently asserted that it was spies working for the Italian secret services and not bona fide members of the group who masterminded the operation. Alberto Franceschini told a parliamentary commission on terrorism in March 1999 that he believed that Brigade members Mario Moretti and Giovanni Senzani were both secret service plants who had infiltrated the group. Their involvement coincided with a particularly bloody phase of activity at a time when Renato Curcio , the orginal leader of the Red Brigades was betrayed to the authorities; the details of the kidnapping implied that certain privileged information was available; and both Moretti and Senzani were exceptional in being allowed to travel to the US when it was the usual US policy to refuse Italian Communists visas.

A recent report prepared by the PDS (Italy's party of the democratic left) for the same parliamentary commission stirred up controversy again in summer 2000. The report referred to the Establishment's " strategy of tension " in the 1970s and early 1980s in which it was said that indiscriminate bombing of the public and the threat of a right-wing coup were devices to stabilize centre-right political control of the country. The perpetrators of bombing campaigns were rarely caught, said the report, because "those massacres, those bombs, those military actions had been organized or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as has been discovered more recently, by men linked to the structures of United States intelligence". "Other bombing campaigns were attributed to the left to prevent the Communist Party from achieving power by democratic means" said Valter Bielli, PDS MP, and one of the report's authors. The report drew furious rebuttals from centre-right groups and the US embassy in Rome.

Yet the DC government survived, sustained by the so-called "historic compromise" negotiated in 1976 with Enrico Berlinguer , leader of the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI). By this arrangement the PCI - polling 34 percent of the national vote, just three points less than the DC - agreed to abstain from voting in parliament in order to maintain a government of national unity. The pact was rescinded in 1979, and after Berlinguer's death in 1984 the PCI's share of the vote dropped to around 27 percent. The combination of this withdrawal of popular support and the collapse of the Communist bloc led to a realignment of the PCI under the leadership of Achille Occhetto , who turned the party into a democratic socialist grouping along the lines of left-leaning parties in Germany or Sweden - a transformation encapsulated by the party's new name - the Partito Democratico della Sinistra ("Democratic Party of the Left").

In its efforts to exclude the left wing from power, the DC had been obliged to accede to demands from minor parties such as the Radical Party , which gained eighteen seats in the 1987 election, one of them going to the porn star Ilona Staller, better known as La Cicciolina . Furthermore, the DC's reputation was severely damaged in the early 1980s by a series of scandals, notably the furore surrounding the activities of the P2 Masonic lodge, when links were discovered between corrupt bankers, senior DC members, and fanatical right-wing groups. As its popularity fell, the DC was forced to offer the premiership to politicians from other parties. In 1981 Giovanni Spadolini of the Republicans became the first non-DC prime minister since the war, and in 1983 Bettino Craxi was installed as the first premier from the PSI, a position he held for four years.

Even through the upheavals of the 1970s the national income of Italy continued to grow, and there developed a national obsession with Il Sorpasso , a term signifying the country's overtaking of France and Britain in the economic league table. Experts disagreed as to whether Il Sorpasso actually happened (most thought it hadn't), and calculations were complicated by the huge scale of tax evasion and other illicit financial dealings in Italy. All strata of society were involved in the withholding of money from central government, but the ruling power in this economia sommersa (submerged economy) was, and to a certain extent still is, the Mafia , whose contacts penetrate to the highest levels in Rome. The most traumatic proof of the Mafia's infiltration of the political hierarchy came in May 1992, with the murders of anti-Mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino , whose killers could only have penetrated the judges' security with the help of inside information.

The murders of the immensely respected Falcone and Borsellino might well come to be seen as marking a fault-line in the political history of modern Italy, and the late 1980s and early 1990s saw the rise of a number of new political parties, as people become disillusioned with the old DC-led consensus. One, Leoluca Orlando's La Rete ("Network"), was founded specifically to counter the Mafia in Sicily, but rapidly evolved into a coalition of groups opposed to the vested interests in the country's town halls and businesses. More successful has been the right-wing Lega Nord (Northern League), whose autocratic leader, Umberto Bossi , capitalized on northern frustration with the state, which they see as supporting a corrupt south on the back of the hard-working, law-abiding north. The Northern League's official aim is now a federation, with Italy divided into two or three parts; they have already dubbed the north "Padania" and minted a separate, unofficial currency (worthless in reality, but a powerful symbol of intent). Formerly a marginalized firebrand, Bossi is now one of the most feared men in Italian politics. The newer Alleanza Democratica , or Democratic Alliance, led by the more circumspect Mario Segni , offers a less divisive alternative to middle-of-the road voters, while the fascist MSI, renamed the Alleanza Nazionale (AN), or National Alliance and now a wide coalition of right-wingers led by the persuasive Gianfranco Tini (who calls himself a post-fascist), has gained ground in recent years.

In 1992 the new government of Giuliano Amato - a politician untainted by any hint of corruption - instigated the biggest round-up of Mafia members in nearly a decade, issuing 241 arrest warrants in Operation Leopard. However, this was nothing compared to the arrest in Palermo, at the beginning of 1993, of Salvatore "Toto" Riina, the Mafia capo di tutti capi (boss of bosses) and the man widely believed to have been behind the Falcone and Borsellino killings. The arrest of Riina followed the testimony of numerous supergrasses; the result of the trials was that key members of the establishment began to be openly implicated in Mafia activities. For example, it was exposed that a murdered associate of the former prime minister Giulio Andreotti was the Mafia's man in Rome, a top-level fixer who would arrange acquittals from the Supreme Court in exchange for support. (Bettino Craxi once called Andreotti a fox, adding "sooner or later all foxes end up as fur coats.")

However, it was Craxi himself who was one of the first to fall from grace, at the beginning of the postwar Italian state's most turbulent period - 1992-96. Craxi was at the centre of the powerful Socialist establishment that ran the key city of Milan, when in February 1992, a minor party official, Mario Chiesa, head of a Milan old people's home, was arrested on corruption charges. It was realized before very long that Chiesa represented just the tip of a long-established culture of kickbacks and bribes that went right to the top of the Italian political establishment, not just in Milan, nicknamed tangentopoli ("bribesville"), but across the entire country. By the end of that year thousands in the city were under arrest and the net was spreading. What came to be known as the Mani Pulite or Clean Hands investigation, led by the crusading Milan judge, Antonio di Pietro, was under way.

The mood of the country changed almost overnight. Suddenly people wanted the politicians, the party officials, all those who had been taking their slice of tangentopoli , out of office. The established Italian parties, most notably the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, were almost entirely wiped out in the municipal elections of 1993. Di Pietro's zeal in tracking down the villains, and in asserting the power of the judiciary over the political establishment, captured the imaginations of the nation in a series of televised trials, and it seemed that no one who had been part of the old order was safe.

The establishment wasn't finished yet, however, and the national elections of 1994 saw yet another political force emerge to fill the power vacuum: the centre-right Forza Italia or "Come On Italy", led by the media mogul Silvio Berlusconi , who used the power of his TV stations to build support, and swept to power as prime minister in a populist alliance - his "Freedom Pole" coalition - with Bossi's Lega Nord and the fascist National Alliance. The fact that Berlusconi was not a politician was perhaps his greatest asset, and most Italians, albeit briefly, saw this as a new beginning - the end of the old, corrupt regime, and the birth of a truly modern Italian state. However, as one of the country's top northern industrialists, and a former crony of Craxi, Berlusconi was as bound up with the old ways as anyone. Not only did he resist all attempts to reduce the scope of his media business, with which, as prime minister, there was a clear conflict of interest, but in time it also emerged that he himself was to be investigated, in a series of inquiries into the tax dealings of his Fininvest group.

Despite the resignation of di Pietro at the end of 1994, Berlusconi was himself forced to resign after the withdrawal of Bossi's Lega Nord from the coalition, and the government collapsed. For once elections were not seen as a solution; instead President Scalfaro leaned on some of the less political, and therefore less corruptible, members of the leadership to form a new, relatively non-partisan government that would institute the necessary economic and political reforms. Led by the relatively colourless finance man Lamberto Dini , this administration managed to stagger on into 1995, if only because of the ongoing political crisis, but by the time 1996 arrived things had once again descended into chaos, with none of a number of compromise candidates able to put together a government. In an attempt to break the deadlock, Scalfaro called elections for April 1996.

Meanwhile, the trial of Giulio Andreotti, perhaps the most potent symbol of the sleazy postwar years, at last went ahead in Palermo and he had to answer charges of a long-term conspiracy with the Mafia. Andreotti, seven times Prime Minister of Italy and a senator for life, denied any association, and was acquitted in October 1999 aged 80 after a trial that lasted 5 years, with prosecution evidence depending on the testimony of Mafia informants. In January 1999, Craxi was convicted with twenty others of corruption in connection with kickbacks involving ENEL, the state electrical company. He was sentenced to five years in prison, but died a year later in exile in Tunisia.

Antonio Maccanico succeded Dini but was unable to form a convincing government. For the first time in Italy's history a broad centre-left alliance was formed; known as the ulivo (the "olive tree"), and led by Romano Prodi , head of the small Partito Popolare Italiano (the PPI, or Italian Peoples' Party), it suceeded Maccanico's government. In terms of numbers, ulivo was made up mostly of the PDS (the Democratic Party of the Left), though in order to gain a majority in the Chamber of Deputies the government formed alliances with most of the other parties, including the Lega Nord and the newly created Italian Communist Party, split from the Rifondazione Communista (the Marxist residue of the former PCI) in October 1998.

Compared with the turmoil of the early 1990s, the political situation had reached a fairly even plateau. The Christian Democratic party had dissolved; the shift from proportional representation to a first-past-the-post system had begun; and a trend towards two large coalitions - one to the centre-left and the other to the centre-right - indicated a major break from the fragmented, multiparty political landscape of the postwar era. In the mid- to late-1990s attention shifted to the economy. A series of austerity measures to bring down inflation and reduce public spending began as a prelude to the entry of the lira into the ERM (Exchange Rate Mechanism of the European Union). Italians were keen to join, in preparation for the single currency, the euro , and full economic and monetary union (EMU). They perceived huge benefits; if the euro was strong then interest rates would be low and they would be able to pay off their vast national debt. In addition, the federalism that other Europeans often fear is seen as a positive advantage in Italy - in 1998, La Repubblica noted how dissatisfied Italians were with rule by their own politicians, and how they would be much happier if decisions were made in Brussels. Austerity measures, including cuts in pensions and healthcare benefits (to facilitate Italy's qualification to join EMU in January 1999) provoked demonstrations in Rome and elsewhere.

In October 1998, the relatively prolonged period of stability ended when the Prodi government was defeated in a parliamentary vote of no confidence, carried by a majority of one. The implications of another round of political upheaval were too serious to ignore: with less than three months to the launch of a common European currency, the threat of global recession, and imminent NATO strikes against Serbia, Italy needed a credible government. President Scalfaro acted quickly and appointed the former leader of the Communist PDS, Massimo D'Alema , as Prime Minister designate. The government lasted for eighteen months before he quit after overwhelming defeat in regional elections in April 2000. President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi appointed Italy's finance minister and former PM, Giuliano Amato , to head up a weak centre-left coalition dominated by the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS).

Meanwhile, the popularity of the Alleanza Nazionale, with its anti-immigration policies, reflects a residual racism in present-day Italy. When a black woman was chosen as Miss Italy in 1996, she was criticized for being "unrepresentative of Italian beauty". And a clampdown on prostitution in 1998, which caused passionate national debate, was as much about disapproval of the thousands of immigrant African women making a living this way as it was about "cleaning up the streets".

The untangling of the corrupt systems of party favours and organized crime continues apace. Even di Pietro, the architect of Operation Clean Hands, came under investigation in 1997, though many regarded this as a political move to discredit him. The most influential public figure to have been tried in the late nineties, however, was Berlusconi , who was convicted and sentenced in August 1998 to two years and nine months in jail; Perhaps not surprisingly, Berlusconi has since been acquitted of a number of the charges against him, and, although further offences have come to light (bribing the judiciary among them), the ongoing proceedings have served more as a background to his resurgent politial career than anything else, with Forza Italia triumphing in the European elections of 1999, and doing well, too, in Italy's regional elections of April 2000.

These polls were a disaster for the ruling left coalition, and the prime minister Massimo d'Alema decided to call it a day immediately afterwards, bringing back Giuliano Amato, a long-established political fixer of the left, as the country's 58th prime minister since World War II.

In this way, Italian politics are perhaps much the same as they ever were, with one coalition quickly succeeding another. However, there is a feeling that the investigations of the early 1990s lanced a boil and that the country is moving on. The public sector now appears to operate slightly more for the benefit of its users than for state employees and cultural and artistic institutions have been renovated and injected with new funds.

In the Church's Holy Year , damaging evidence emerged of the extent to which the Catholic Church, motivated by anti-Communist ideology, helped the Nazis during World War II by laundering money and supplying intelligence about allied invasion plans. It seems that the Vatican may soon face the same scrutiny that the political system has undergone during the last decade.

On an everyday level Italians are concerned to improve their quality of life and are ready to try out new measures, among them car-free days in Rome, Florence, Milan and 143 other towns and cities, where for several consecutive Sundays at the beginning of 2000, cars and lorries were banned between the hours of 10am to 6pm (a central government fund of £300m paid for improved, subsidised transport on these days and free entry to museums and galleries). A Slow Cities movement is carrying the idea of a more tranquil, less stressed urban way of life forward, campaigning on a variety of issues including better food (less fast food) and a healthier environment.