History of Italy

To the present day

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 primeval 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 hold 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 start 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 crossways 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 healthy to place 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 Jan 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 prefabricated up mostly of the PDS (the Democratic Party of the Left), though in order to acquire 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 primeval 1990s, the political situation had reached a evenhandedly 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 healthy 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 prefabricated in Brussels. Austerity measures, including cuts in pensions and healthcare benefits (to assist Italy’s qualification to join EMU in Jan 1999) angry 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 primeval 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 , harmful 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 grappling the same scrutiny that the political system has undergone during the last decade.

On an everyday level Italians are concerned to improve their calibre 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 illegal 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 intent 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.

Category: History of Italy

The 1970s and 1980s

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 primeval 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 evidenced 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 slammer 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 primeval 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 desist 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 favourite 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 study – the Partito Democratico della Sinistra (“Democratic Party of the Left”).

In its efforts to exclude the left wing from power, the DC had been obligated 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 dilapidated in the primeval 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 preoccupation 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.

Category: History of Italy

The postwar years

A favourite 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 bourgeois 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 obligated 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.

Category: History of Italy

The World Wars

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 finally 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 immoderate secretary of the PSI (Partito Socialista Italiano) in Forlì.

Category: History of Italy

Unification

The start of general 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, city and Piemonte, when King Ferdinand introduced measures that restricted individualized freedom and destroyed many farmers’ livelihoods. A makeshift army quickly gained favourite 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 demand 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 mortal profoundly influenced by these insurgencies was Giuseppe Mazzini. Arrested as Secretary of the Genoese branch of the Carbonari (a secret immoderate society) in 1827 and jailed for three months in 1830, he formulated his political orientation 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 prefabricated 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 start 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

Category: History of Italy

French and Spanish Intervention

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 octad 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 mortal who really established the Spanish in Italy was the dynasty 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 city 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 finally 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, city 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 city 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 primeval industrialization. Lightning changes came in April 1796, when the French armies of general invaded northern Italy. Within a few years the French had been driven out again, but by 1810 general was in command of the whole peninsula, and his puppet regimes remained in charge until Waterloo. Emperor 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.

Category: History of Italy

The emergence of city states

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 angry 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 position 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 equilibrise of power. Yet though there was a equilibrise of power at home, the history of apiece of the independent Italian states became inextricably bound up with the power politics of other European countries

Category: History of Italy