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Italy: Papal States
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Italy was home to many well-known and influential European civilizations, including the Etruscans, Greeks and the Romans. For more than 3,000 years Italy experienced migrations and invasions from Germanic, Celtic, Frankish, Lombard, Byzantine Greek, Saracen, Norman, and Angevin peoples, and was divided into many independent states until 1861 when Italy became a nation-state.
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Italy has a large foreign trade, facilitated by its sizable commercial shipping fleet. The leading exports are textiles and wearing apparel, metals, machinery, motor vehicles, and chemicals; the main imports are machinery, transport equipment, chemicals, food and food products, and minerals (especially petroleum). Tourism is a major source of foreign exchange. The chief trade partners are Germany, France, the United States, and Great Britain. The nation has greatly improved its highway system in the postwar years, especially in the South.
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After the fall of the Roman Empire, the peninsula of Italy was not again politically unified until the nineteenth century. The region emerged from the so-called Dark Ages as an unorganized group of city states. Historically the most important of these were Venice (wealthy because of its trade with the Middle East) and Milan (an important manufacturing center) in the North, Florence (a center of commerce and manufacturing) and the Papal States in the center, and Naples and Sicily in the South. There were ... many smaller and less important city states, such as Mantua, Genoa, and Verona.
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Italy is subdivided into 20 regions (regioni, singular regione). Five of these regions enjoy a special autonomous status that enables them to enact legislation on some of their specific local matters, and are marked by an *:
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Italy is ... home to the Vatican city-state, the center of the Roman Catholic church for nearly 2,000 years. In 2005, after the death of the popular and long-serving Pope John Paul II, a German cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger, was elected Pope Benedict XVI.— Ian Fisher, Dec. 19, 2007
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The kingdom of Naples included all of Italy south of the Papal States, although Sicily formed a separate kingdom. Naples was ruled by the French Angevin dynasty until the succession passed to Alfonso the Magnanimous of Aragon in 1435. Under Alfonso's rule Naples experienced a period of prosperity and artistic brilliance, even though the political order remained different from the city-states of the North. In 1504 Naples was conquered by Spain and ceased to be an independent state for more than two centuries.
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