Discover Italy

Introduction

Italy is one country made of 20 regions, five of which govern themselves under a special autonomous statute. The peninsula runs from the Alps to the central Mediterranean, with the Tyrrhenian Sea along its western side, the Adriatic along its eastern, and the Ionian between the toe and the heel.

How the country is arranged

Rome, in Lazio, is the capital and by a wide margin the largest city. Every region has its own capital, and several are better known than the region they administer — Florence for Tuscany, Milan for Lombardy, Venice for Veneto, Naples for Campania. Each keeps its own cooking and its own dialect, and in the border regions its own second official language.

What a first visit usually covers

Rome holds the densest concentration of sights in the country, among them the Vatican Museums and St. Peter's Basilica. Florence carries the Renaissance in a centre small enough to cross on foot. Venice is built on the water rather than beside it, and is the one of the three that cannot be understood from a day trip.

High-speed trains connect all three in two to three hours from any one to any other, which is why they make up the standard first itinerary. What that itinerary leaves out is most of the country — the hill towns, the Alps and Dolomites, the southern coasts and the two large islands are reached differently and reward longer stays.

Geography

Italy's famous boot shape runs roughly 1,200 kilometers from the Alps to the Mediterranean, with the Apennine Mountains forming a spine down its center that separates the country's east and west coasts for almost its entire length. The Po Valley in the north is Italy's agricultural heartland, while Sicily and Sardinia -- plus dozens of smaller islands -- round out a territory shaped as much by its mountains and coastline as by its history.

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History

Italy's history runs from Rome's rise as a small river settlement to the seat of an empire spanning three continents, through a thousand years of fragmentation into rival city-states that produced the Renaissance, to a unification barely 160 years old. Few countries pack as many distinct civilizations into one stretch of land -- Roman, medieval, Renaissance, and modern Italy are all still visible, often within the same city block.

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Culture

Italian culture runs on regional identity more than national uniformity -- food, dialect, and local tradition are tied to specific towns and provinces in a way that survived unification largely intact. Opera, cinema, and design all have real Italian roots, but the deeper cultural thread is regional pride: a Sicilian and a Milanese will describe being Italian very differently.

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Climate Patterns

Italy's climate splits along the Apennines: a Mediterranean pattern of hot, dry summers and mild winters along the south and coasts, against a more continental climate in the Po Valley, with real cold and fog in winter. The Alps and Dolomites run on their own alpine calendar entirely, with heavy winter snowfall largely unrelated to conditions just a few hundred kilometers south.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Why is Italy so regionally different for such a small country? It was not one country until 1861, and the units that preceded it had governed themselves for six or seven hundred years. Unification joined the states; it did not dissolve them.

Why is the signage German in some northern valleys? Alto Adige was Austrian until 1919 and holds a special statute protecting German as a co-official language. The border moved; the population did not.