Importantes características geográficas de Italia

I would like to write this assignment about a country that I would always like to visit and that I think i know enough about to do this research.

Italy is definitely one of the most beautiful countries in the world, the famous long peninsula shaped like a boot, surrounded on the west by tyrrhenian sea, is full of culture, art and history every where. While Italy is best known for the Venice canals, its major waterway is the Po River and its many tributaries. Other important geographical features are its two famous volcanoes, Vesuvius and Etna. Italy also has many mountains, making it ideal skiing country, but its highest point is Mont Blanc (4,810 metres or 15,781 feet high). Italy’s diverse landscape also leads to equally diverse climates. In the north, summers are very hot and winters are very cold (especially in the alps, where the temperatures can get very harsh). The climate evens out as you head south, though the regions south of Rome can have a few weeks of extremely hot weather when the African wind Sirocco passes through.The history of Italy can be characterized as two periods of unity separated by a millennia and a half of division. In the sixth to third centuries BCE the Italian city of Rome conquered Peninsular Italy; According to the founding myth of Rome, the city was founded on 21 April 753 BC by twin brothers Romulos and Remuss. Rome was then governed by the legendary Seven Kings for the following 150 years. Over the next few centuries this empire spread to dominate the Mediterranean and Western Europe. After the Italian part of the Roman Empire declined and “fell” in the fifth century Italy was the target of several invasions, and the previously united region broke apart into several smaller bodies, including the Papal States, governed by the Catholic Pope. A number of powerful and trading orientated city states emerged, including Florence, Venice and Genoa; these incubated the Renaissance. Italy, and its smaller states, also went through stages of foreign domination.

Unification and independence movements for Italy developed ever stronger voices in the nineteenth century after Napoleon created a short lived Kingdom of Italy. A war between Austria and France in 1859 allowed several small states to merge with Piedmont; a tipping point had been reached and a Kingdom of Italy was formed in 1861, growing by 1870 - when the Papal States joined – to cover almost all of what we now call Italy. Modern Italy is democratic republic, and has been since the modern constitution came into effect in 1948. This followed a referendum in 1946 which voted to abolish the previous monarchy by twelve million votes to ten.As a major seaport (and at points in its history, a major political power), Italy has been a melting pot of many cultures: Germanic, Celtic, Norman, Frankish, Byzantine.

Because of the country’s diverse heritage, and the many periods of prosperity its various cities enjoyed, Italy was home to some of the world’s greatest artists, and most beautiful masterpieces of architecture, painting and sculpture. No art student can study the development of European culture without encountering the Italian Renaissance and Baroque, or complete one’s degree without studying the works of Italian masters like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Donatello, Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Tintoretto, Caravaggio, Bernini, Titian and Raphael. Its churches and villas are some of the most admired in the world, and in fact the country enjoys the distinction having the largest number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites (41 as of July 13, 2006).Italy has also left its mark in literature, due to the work of the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri, whose Divine Comedy is said to be one the most important European works of the Medieval period. Other well known writers are Boccaccio, Giacomo Leopardi, Alessandro Manzoni, Tasso, Ludovico Ariosto, and Petrarca. In Philosophy, Italy is known for Machiavelli, Vico, and Bruno. The great literary tradition was continued by modern writers like Nobel Laureate Giosuè Carducci, Grazia Deledda, Luigi Pirandello, Salvatore Quasimodo, Eugenio Montale and Dario Fo. Italian scientists have also been responsible for some of the biggest breakthroughs: Galileo Galilei, Fermi, Cassini, Marconi, Meucci. Leonardo Da Vinci, while better known for his art, was also an inventor. Italy is also credited to have been the birthplace of the piano and the violin, and classical musical forms like the symphony, sonata and concerto. Some of the world’s greatest composers, like Vivaldi, Corelli, Paganini, Rossini,

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