According to Computerannals, Italy is a republic in southern Europe on the Mediterranean. It borders France to the west, Switzerland and Austria to the north, and Slovenia to the east. Due to the shape of the country, it is often called the Land of Boots.
Italy was formerly divided into a number of small states, but in 1861 was united into a kingdom under the King of Sardinia, Victor Emanuel 2.
Italy encompasses two small states: the Vatican City, located in Rome, and San Marino, located in the Apennines about halfway between Rome and Venice.
TIMELINE:
6-5000 BCE – Evidence of a culture in the south of the country known for the manufacture of pottery.
3000 BCE – Bronze began to be used in Sicily and about 1000 years later peoples from the east created the Rinaldone culture.
13th century BCE – People from Central Europe occupied the northern part of present-day Italy.
800-700 BCE – The Greeks colonized southern Italy, calling it Magna Graecia ( Greater Greece ).
753 BCE – Romulus and Remus were two brothers who founded Rome together. The legend of Romulus and Remus tells that they descended from Aeneas, who was the son of the goddess Venus. The legend has many similarities with much older Greek myths and legends.
500 FVT- o. 400 EVT – Roman Empire. A small people from the city of Rome conquered large tracts of land, so Rome grew from being a small city-state to cover the largest empire of the time. At its height in the 1st century, the Roman Empire covered North Africa, most of Europe and Asia Minor.
101 BC – The Romans use the water wheel to grind grain.
49 BCE – January 10th. Gaius Julius Caesar crosses the Rubicon River with his soldiers and utters the famous words “ Jacta est alea ” – The dice are rolled. Caesar persecuted Gnæus Pompey’s Magnus with his army, but thereby broke Roman law. Thus, a military conflict with the Roman Senate was unavoidable.
46 years BCE – Emperor Julius Caesar introduces the Julian calendar, a better version of the Egyptian calendar. The year is now 365 days and 6 hours and 12 months long.
44 years BCE – Caesar is assassinated with 23 stab wounds, on March 15, in Rome, in Pompey’s Theater, by his former allies, and his friends Brutus and Cassius, were among. The conspirators believed that peace was welcomed, but were instead driven to flee the city, and young adopted nephew, Octavion, seized power and proclaimed himself emperor under the name Augustus. Pax Romana was introduced, the Roman peace that lasted for 200 years.
1300 – The Italian Renaissance dates back to the year 1300, with Dante’s
Divine Comedy ( La Divina Commedia ). The Renaissance, which was as much an economic-civilizational epoch as a cultural or art-historical one, culminated in the early 16th century, and had already then spread its ideals throughout the Western, or Christian world.
1492 – Christopher Columbus was an explorer from Genoa who rediscovered America.
1516 – April 10. The first ghetto. Jews are forced to live in confined areas of Venice. The word “ghetto” comes from the Venetian word “ghetto”, which means foundry. Before it became an exclusive Jewish neighborhood, the ghetto in Venice was originally a place where there were two foundries, writes This Week in History.
1600 – 17 February. The Italian scientist and natural philosopher Giordano Bruno is burned at the stake in Rome because he maintains his theory that the Earth is not the center of the universe.
1610 – January 7. Astronomer Galileo Galilei discovers four of Jupiter’s moons.
1794 – Italy is invaded by Napoleon Bonaparte, who throws the Austrians at the gate. Four years later he occupied Rome and formed the Roman Republic and in Naples the Parthenopean Republic. Only two Italian states escaped Napoleonic dominance: Sicily and Sardinia, where Víctor Manuel I ruled. The French emperor temporarily abolished the power of the popes and deported Pío VII to Savona.
1929 – A later treaty is signed between Italy and the Vatican on February 11, and is the treaty that made the Vatican an independent state with the pope as monarch. It superseded the Warranty Act of 1871, which ensured the inviolability of the pope within the Vatican area, the right to maintain a lifeguard and to conduct his own diplomacy.
1945 – April 28. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and his mistress are captured by Italian partisans and shot. The bodies are brought to Milan and hung up in the city with their heads down.
1980-92 – During this period, corruption had cost the state about $ 20 billion. Pga. bribes for officials and politicians, public investment in Italy is 25% more expensive than in the rest of the EU.
1990 – January 7. The Leaning Tower of Pisa closes to tourists because the slope has become too dangerous. The tower reopens in 2001 after being stabilized.
1992 – At the end of May, Judge Giovanni Falcone – the Mafia’s enemy No. 1 – is killed in Sicily. This was a contributing factor to the election of the Christian Oscar Luigi Scalfaro as president. Two months after the murder of Falcone, the mafia attacked his successor, Paolo Borsellino, who led the investigation into organized crime.
The same year, prosecutor Antonio di Pietro launched investigations that revealed a complex system of illegal operations involving politicians from across the political spectrum, capitalists and the mafia.
1993 – During the year, lawsuits were filed against more than 1,000 politicians and capitalists in the so-called ” clean hands ” operation. Among the accused were i.a. the former Prime Ministers Bettino Craxi (Social Democrat) and Giulio Andreotti (Christian Democrat).
2006 – On April 11, Italy’s most wanted man, Bernardo Provenzano, former frontman of the Italian mafia La Cosa Nostra, was arrested on a farm in the city of Corleone in Sicily, after hiding for 43 years. El tratturi – the tractor as he was known on the island – was considered the head of the Sicilian mafia and had been wanted since he was sentenced in absentia to life in prison for the murder of 2 judges in 1992.
2009 – In April, Italy was hit by an earthquake with a magnitude of 5.8 on the Richter scale. It hit L’Aquila, the capital of Abruzzo, and cost 308 lives. About 3-10,000 buildings were damaged. That the earthquake had such catastrophic consequences despite its poor strength was due to the fact that the buildings were built of concrete of an unusually poor quality. Berlusconi commented on the quake and the catastrophic situation for the approximately 40,000 homeless people, saying that ” they just have to play when they are on a camping holiday. Go to the beach, enjoy life, we pay for it all ». The Prime Minister’s misplaced humor guarded the tradition faithfully furore.
2012 – In September, the Supreme Court upheld the convictions of 22 CIA agents, a North American officer and 2 Italian intelligence officers for abducting Abu Omar in Milan in March 2003 and taking him to Egypt, where he was tortured by US friends: the Mubarak dictatorship. The North American defendants were convicted in absentia. The Supreme Court also ordered 5 other top officers of the Italian intelligence service brought to justice for their participation in the affair. They had otherwise been released in 2010 when a court of appeal in Milan had ruled that their cases could not be tried as it would « reveal state secrets ». Also in September called The EU Parliament calls on all Member States to publish all information on US rendition programs in Europe. In Denmark, the government had already closed the case to avoid revealing the Danish participation in the US illegal torture program.
On October 26, Silvio Berlusconi was sentenced to four years in prison for tax evasion. Berlusconi, along with ten others, was convicted of tampering with television rights. In total, about 1.8 billion kroner has been evaded. Berlusconi has the opportunity to appeal the verdict twice and will only go to jail when all appeal options have been exhausted. However, his fierce struggle for his political life ended in December, when a majority voted to deprive him of his parliamentary immunity. Furthermore, the legislation is such that a parliamentarian can only return 6 years after a verdict, so Berlusconi will not be able to return until 2019 at the earliest, but before that a very long series of lawsuits awaits him, which he has pushed ahead for 15 years.
On November 23, 23 CIA agents were found guilty in a court in Milan of abducting Egyptian Imam Abu Omar in 2003. The agents abducted him and brought him to Egypt, where he was tortured and charged with terrorism for several years. He was never charged but remains under surveillance by Egyptian authorities. The CIA’s Milan chief was sentenced to 8 years in prison, while 22 other agents were each given 5 years in prison. They were also sentenced to pay 1 million. € in compensation to Omar and ½ mio. € in compensation to his wife. The abduction was part of the US so-called rendition program, in which the superpower in particular in 2001-07 systematically violated The Torture Convention by abducting suspects and having them subjected to torture in client states. The United States refused to extradite the 23 to prosecution in Italy, and they were therefore convicted in absentia.
