Directory:Italy

Map of Italy

Italy (IT), officially the Italian Republic; (Italian: Repubblica Italiana), is a country located in Southern Europe, that comprises the Po River valley, the Italian Peninsula and the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia. It is also called by Italians lo Stivale ("the Boot"), or la Penisola ("the Peninsula"). Italy shares its northern alpine boundary with France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia.

Culture

Italy has been a seminal place for many important artistic and intellectual movements that spread throughout Europe and beyond, including the Renaissance and Baroque. Perhaps Italy's greatest cultural achievements lie in its long artistic heritage, which is often validated through the names of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Donatello, Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Tintoretto, Caravaggio, Bernini, Titian and Raphael, among many others. Beyond art, Italy's contributions to the realms of literature, science, and music cannot be overlooked. Dante, authot of the Divine Comedy Dante, authot of the Divine Comedy

With the basis of the modern Italian language established through the eminent Florentine poet, Dante Alighieri, whose greatest work, the Divina Commedia, is often considered the foremost literary statement produced in Europe during the Middle Ages, there is no shortage of celebrated literary figures; the writers and poets Boccaccio, Giacomo Leopardi, Alessandro Manzoni, Tasso, Ludovico Ariosto, and Petrarca, whose best known vehicle of expression, the sonnet, was invented in Italy. Prominent philosophers include Bruno, Ficino, Machiavelli, and Vico. Modern literary figures and Nobel laureates are nationalist poet Giosuè Carducci in 1906, realist writer Grazia Deledda in 1926, modern theatre author Luigi Pirandello in 1936, poets Salvatore Quasimodo in 1959 and Eugenio Montale in 1975, satiryst and theatre author Dario Fo in 1997.

In science, Galileo Galilei made considerable advancements toward the scientific revolution, and Leonardo da Vinci was the quintessential Renaissance Man. Italy has been the home of many great scientists and inventors: the physicist Fermi, one of the fathers of quantum theory and head of the Manhattan Project; the astronomer Cassini; the physicist Volta, inventor of the electric battery; the mathematicians Lagrange and Fibonacci; Nobel Prize in Physics laureate Marconi, inventor of the radio; and Antonio Meucci, disputable inventor of the telephone.

Regions and Cities

Italy is subdivided into 20 regions (regioni, singular regione).

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External links

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