The real pity about the Vittorio Emanuele Monument is that it obscures views of the Capitoline Hill behind – once, in the days of Imperial Rome, the spiritual and political centre of the Roman Empire. Apart from anything else, this hill has contributed key words to the English language, including, of course, “capitol”, and “money”, which comes from the temple to Juno Moneta that once stood up here and housed the Roman mint. The Capitoline also played a significant role in medieval and Renaissance times: the flamboyant fourteenth-century dictator Cola di Rienzo, stood here in triumph in 1347, and was murdered here by an angry mob seven years later – a humble nineteenth-century statue marks the spot where he is said to have died. Michelangelo gave the piazza its present form, redesigning it as a symbol of Rome’s regeneration after the city was sacked in 1527.

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

Greek settlers colonized parts of the Tuscan coast and the Bay of city 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 early 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 visaged 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 surround 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.

One way of spending time in Italy is to combine a holiday with learning the language, or taking one of many summer courses on myriad aspects of Italian art and culture. There are a great many places where you can do this, usually offering language courses of varying levels of intensity for between one and three months