Italy

l'Italia

Places in Italy

Nuraghi, Greeks and early Rome (1800–509 BC)
The Roman Republic (509–27 BC)
The Roman Empire (27 BC–476)
The early Middle Ages (476–1000)
Communes, emperors and popes (1000–1400)
The Renaissance (1400–1559)
Foreign rule and the Baroque (1559–1796)
Napoleon and the Risorgimento (1796–1870)
Liberal Italy and the Great War (1870–1922)
Fascism and the war (1922–1945)
The Republic (1946–)

c. 1700 BC: The nuraghi rise in Sardinia — In the Bronze Age, from around 1700 BC, the people of Sardinia began to build nuraghi: cone-shaped stone towers made of huge blocks laid without mortar.
218–202 BC: Hannibal crosses the Alps — In the Second Punic War, Carthage's general Hannibal marched from Spain over the Pyrenees and the Alps into Italy in 218 BC, with his army and thirty-seven war…
79: Vesuvius buries Pompeii — In AD 79 Vesuvius erupted and buried Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae under ash, stones and hot gas.
568: The Lombards enter Italy — In 568 the Lombards, a Germanic people led by King Alboin, came into Italy through Friuli and took much of the peninsula, later with Pavia as their capital.
25–28 January 1077: The humiliation of Canossa — Pope Gregory VII and the emperor Henry IV were fighting over who should appoint bishops, and the pope had excommunicated the emperor.
1420–1436: Brunelleschi builds the dome of Florence — Florence's cathedral had a hole in its roof more than forty metres wide, and nobody knew how to close it.
1610–1633: Galileo and the telescope — In Padua on 7 January 1610 Galileo Galilei turned a telescope he had improved himself towards Jupiter and saw three small 'stars' beside it; a few nights later…
11 May 1860: Garibaldi and the Thousand — On the night of 5–6 May 1860 Giuseppe Garibaldi sailed from Quarto, near Genoa, with about a thousand volunteers in red shirts on two steamships, and on 11 May…