Italy is the boot-shaped country in southern Europe, with around 59 million people and more UNESCO World Heritage sites than any other nation on Earth. It has 60 of them, ahead of China. It also contains two entire independent countries inside its borders, has three active volcanoes, and gave the world pizza, pasta, opera, the piano, the thermometer and the modern bank.
The Boot
Italy really is shaped like a boot, complete with a heel and a toe. The heel is Puglia, the toe is Calabria, and Sicily sits just off the toe like a football about to be kicked.
The country is about 301,000 square kilometres and stretches roughly 1,200 kilometres from the Alps in the north down into the Mediterranean. It has around 7,600 kilometres of coastline, and nowhere in Italy is more than about 120 kilometres from the sea.
The Apennine mountains run down the middle like a spine, which is why crossing Italy from east to west takes longer than the distance suggests. The Alps form the northern border with France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia.
Two Countries Inside It
Vatican City is the smallest country in the world at 0.49 square kilometres — about the size of 60 football pitches — with a population of roughly 800. It is entirely surrounded by Rome, has its own post office, radio station, currency design and football team, and its official language for legislation is Latin.
San Marino is the other, on a mountain in northern Italy. It claims to be the oldest republic in the world, founded in 301 by a stonemason fleeing persecution, and it has around 34,000 people.
Both use the euro and both issue their own stamps, which are collectors' items. There is also a strange third case: Campione d'Italia is an Italian town completely surrounded by Switzerland.
Volcanoes
Italy has the only active volcanoes on mainland Europe. Vesuvius, near Naples, buried the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum under metres of ash in 79 CE.
The ash preserved them almost perfectly. Archaeologists have uncovered streets, shops, bakeries with bread still in the ovens, graffiti on the walls and casts of the shapes left by bodies in the hardened ash. Around three million people now live in the danger zone around Vesuvius.
Etna in Sicily is Europe's largest active volcano at around 3,350 metres and erupts frequently — it has been almost continuously active for thousands of years. Stromboli, on a small island, has been erupting roughly every twenty minutes for at least 2,000 years and is nicknamed the lighthouse of the Mediterranean.
Rome
Rome is often called the Eternal City and has been continuously inhabited for around 2,800 years. The Roman Empire at its height ruled from Scotland to the Sahara and from Portugal to Iraq — around 70 million people, roughly a fifth of everyone alive.
The Colosseum held around 50,000 spectators and had a system of trapdoors and lifts underneath to raise animals and scenery into the arena. It could apparently be emptied of its entire crowd in about fifteen minutes through 80 numbered entrances, which is a design modern stadiums still copy.
The Pantheon, finished around 126 CE, still has the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world after nearly 1,900 years. Roman concrete included volcanic ash, which lets it heal its own cracks — modern concrete does not, which is one reason Roman harbour walls have outlasted twentieth-century ones.
Pasta and Pizza
There are over 350 recognised pasta shapes in Italy, each with regional names, and the shape genuinely matters — ridged and hollow shapes hold thick sauces, thin ones suit oil and seafood.
Pizza as we know it comes from Naples. The story goes that in 1889 a chef named Raffaele Esposito made one with tomato, mozzarella and basil for Queen Margherita, giving the colours of the Italian flag and the name of the pizza. Neapolitan pizza-making was added to UNESCO's heritage list in 2017.
Marco Polo did not bring pasta from China, despite the story. Pasta is documented in Sicily in 1154, before he was born. Tomatoes, though, are genuinely a late arrival — they came from the Americas after 1492, so Italian food had no tomato sauce for most of its history.
Try Some Italian Words You Already Use
Almost the entire vocabulary of Western classical music is Italian, because Italy dominated European music when the terms were being written down.
Piano means soft and forte means loud — and the instrument is called a pianoforte because, unlike the harpsichord before it, it could do both. Allegro means cheerful, adagio means at ease, crescendo means growing, tempo means time and solo means alone.
Try these too: ciao works for both hello and goodbye and comes from a Venetian phrase meaning "I am your slave". Graffiti means scratched. Confetti in Italian means sugared almonds, which is what used to be thrown at weddings. And paparazzi comes from a character's name in a 1960 Fellini film.
Venice
Venice is built on around 118 small islands in a lagoon, connected by roughly 400 bridges, with canals instead of streets. There are no cars in the historic centre at all.
The buildings stand on millions of wooden piles driven into the mud below. The wood has survived for centuries because it is underwater with no oxygen, so it does not rot — over time much of it has partly turned to stone.
The city floods regularly, an event called acqua alta, when high tides and wind push water into the lagoon. Boardwalks go up in St Mark's Square and people wear wellington boots. A system of 78 mobile flood barriers called MOSE became operational in 2020 and has kept the worst tides out.
Art and Inventors
The Renaissance began in Florence in the 1400s, funded largely by the banking family of the Medici. Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, Donatello and Brunelleschi all worked in Italy within a couple of generations.
Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling between 1508 and 1512, standing on scaffolding with his head tilted back — not lying down, as the story goes. He considered himself a sculptor and took the job reluctantly.
Italians also invented the piano, the thermometer, the barometer, eyeglasses, the battery, the radio and the modern bank. Galileo built a telescope in 1609, discovered Jupiter's four largest moons, and got into serious trouble for insisting the Earth went round the sun.
Football and Ferraris
Football, called calcio in Italian, is the national sport by a very long way. Italy has won the World Cup four times, second only to Brazil, and Serie A was for decades the strongest league in the world.
The name calcio comes from an older game, calcio storico, still played in Florence each June in medieval costume on a sand-covered piazza. It combines football, rugby and wrestling, has almost no rules, and matches last fifty minutes.
Italy also builds some of the most desirable cars in the world. Ferrari, Lamborghini, Maserati, Alfa Romeo, Fiat and Ducati are all Italian, and most of them are made within a small area of Emilia-Romagna nicknamed Motor Valley. The Vespa scooter, launched in 1946, was designed to be cheap, easy to ride in a skirt, and clean enough not to stain clothes.
A Very Young Country
Italy the country is younger than the United States. Before 1861 the peninsula was a patchwork of kingdoms, duchies, republics and papal territories, several of them ruled from Austria, France or Spain.
Unification, called the Risorgimento, was completed in 1871 when Rome became the capital. Only around one in ten people in the new country actually spoke Italian at the time — everyone else spoke a regional language.
Those regional languages are still around. Sicilian, Neapolitan, Venetian and Sardinian descend directly from Latin in parallel with Italian rather than from it, and they are separate languages by most linguistic tests. Television did more than schools to spread standard Italian, from the 1950s onwards.
Regions and Rivalries
Italy has 20 regions, five of which have special autonomous status, and the differences between them are enormous. Northern Italy is wealthy and industrial; the south, sometimes called the Mezzogiorno, is poorer and more agricultural, and the gap has been a live political issue since unification.
Food changes completely as you travel. The north cooks with butter, rice and polenta; the south with olive oil, tomatoes and durum wheat pasta. Ask for a cappuccino after 11am and you will get a look, because Italians consider milky coffee a breakfast drink.
Every town has a rivalry with the next one, usually about food, football or a historic slight. Siena's Palio horse race, run twice a summer around the main square, is contested between the city's seventeen contrade — neighbourhoods that people are born into and belong to for life.
Odds and Ends
Italy has the most volcanoes in Europe, the most World Heritage sites in the world, and one of the oldest populations of any country — the average age is over 48.
The Leaning Tower of Pisa started leaning while it was being built in the 1170s, because the ground on one side was too soft. Work stopped for nearly a century and resumed with the upper floors built at a slight angle to compensate, which is why the tower is actually banana-shaped. Engineers removed soil from the high side between 1993 and 2001 and straightened it by about 45 centimetres.
And Italians throw around 3,000 euros of coins into the Trevi Fountain in Rome every day. The money is collected nightly and given to a charity that runs supermarkets for people in need. To keep exploring, read about where Italian is spoken and how volcanoes work.
