A high-level overview of the empire that shaped Italy and Europe. The Roman Empire was one of the most powerful and influential states in world history. At its height, it controlled vast territories across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, shaping politics, law, language and culture for centuries.
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Archaeologists working in southern Italy have uncovered a 2,400-year-old burial ground containing dozens of tombs from the ancient Samnite civilisation including child burials.
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Long before the Roman Empire dominated the Mediterranean, the Roman Republic fought a series of conflicts that would determine its control of the Italian peninsula. Among the most decisive were the Samnite Wars, a set of three major wars fought between Rome and the Samnites during the fourth and early third centuries BC.
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The revolutionary thinker Giuseppe Mazzini, one of the key figures behind the movement for Italian unification, died on 10th March 1872 in Pisa.
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On 7th March 1785, Italian writer Alessandro Manzoni was born in Milan. He would go on to shape the modern Italian language and produce what is widely regarded as the most important novel in Italian literature.
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The Risorgimento was the political and social movement that led to the unification of Italy in the 19th century. Lasting roughly from the early 1800s until 1871, it transformed the Italian peninsula from a patchwork of independent states into a single nation: the Kingdom of Italy.
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The archaeological landscape known as the Valley of the Temples, located near Agrigento on the southern coast of Sicily, is one of the most important surviving testimonies of ancient Greek civilisation outside Greece. Spread across a ridge overlooking the Mediterranean, the site contains some of the best-preserved Doric temples in the world and offers a […]
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Pietro Novelli, widely regarded as the most important Sicilian artist of the 17th century, was born on 2nd March 1603 in Monreale, just outside Palermo.
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Luisa Sanfelice, the aristocrat executed after the fall of the Parthenopean Republic, was born on 28th February 1764 in Naples.
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On 25 February 1866, Benedetto Croce was born in Pescasseroli, in the Abruzzo region of central Italy. Over the course of a long intellectual life, Croce became one of the most influential European thinkers of the 20th century, shaping debates on philosophy, aesthetics, historiography and liberal politics.
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