Italy

Italy (Italian: Italia), officially known as the Italian Republic (Repubblica Italiana), is a state of Southern Europe and founding member of the European Union. Its capital city is Rome.

Italy consists of twenty regions, which encompass almost all of the Italian peninsula and most of the Mediterranean islands surrounding it, including the two largest ones, Sicily and Sardinia. Italy's northern border is largely defined by the Alps, which separate it from neighbouring France, Switzerland (whose territory includes the Italian exclave of Campione d'Italia), Austria, and Slovenia (proceeding west to east). The Italian peninsula also includes two sovereign states as land-locked enclaves within Italian territory: San Marino and the Vatican City.

Italy was the cradle of various ancient cultures, most notably that of Ancient Rome, which made it the centre of Western civilisation during the Roman Empire, and continued to play important roles at various times in Western history, be it on the grounds of financial influence (the medieval Marine Republics and early banks), religious importance (as the seat of the Roman Catholic Church), as well as artistic and cultural prominence (most notably during the Italian Renaissance). However, Italy 's importance in world affairs waned since the late Renaissance and the country remained fractured among various small states, until it was finally unified in the second half of the 19th century under the Savoy monarchy. After winning World War I and becoming a dictatorship under Italian fascism in 1922, Italy suffered heavily from World War II. In the post-war period, Italy discarded monarchy in favour of the current democratic parliamentary republic and underwent an "economic boom" which ferried the country from agricultural to an industrial and service economy.

Today Italy is a developed country (7th by GDP and 17th by Human Development Index in the world), integral part of the European Union (having hosted the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957), and also a member of the G8, NATO, Council of Europe, and United Nations. The current President of the Italian Republic is Giorgio Napolitano, and the current President of the Council of Ministers is Silvio Berlusconi. Italy has a little less than 60 million inhabitants who mainly speak the Italian language (although considerable linguistic minorities exist), and struggles to accommodate constantly escalating immigration (especially from Africa and Eastern Europe) in the transition towards a multiethnic society.

Some accounts by Thucydides and Virgil suggest that Italy derived its name from an early leader named Italus, but historical evidence is not firm.