LICEO DE APODACA

Italy
Investigation of my country
Rebeca Garza Ramirez 05/03/2013

This investigation is about the country of Italy

INDEX PAGE 1.HISTORY PAGE2...CULTURE PAGE3STATES PAGE4.ECONOMY PAGE5..NATURAL SOURCES PAGE 6TOPOGRAPHY PAGE7 REFERENT SOURCES PAGE8..PERSONAL CONCLUTION

HISTORY
Excavations throughout Italy reveal a Neanderthal presence dating back to the Paleolithic period, some 200,000 years ago, modern Humans arrived about 40,000 years ago. The Ancient peoples of pre-Roman Italy such as the Umbrians, the Latins ), Volsci, Samnites, the Celts and the Ligures which inhabited northern Italy, and many others were Indo-European peoples; the main historic peoples of non-Indo-European heritage include the Etruscans, the Elymians and Sicani in Sicily and the prehistoric Sardinians. Ancient Rome was at first a small agricultural community founded around the 8th century BC, that grew over the course of the centuries into a colossal empire encompassing the whole Mediterranean Sea, in which Ancient Greek and Roman cultures merged into one civilization. This civilization was so influential that its legacy is profound in the world. Ancient Rome heavily influenced and left its mark in modern government, law, politics, administration, urban planning, engineering, philosophy, architecture, arts and many more aspects in the western world, forming the ground that Western civilization is based upon. In a slow decline since the late 2nd century AD, the empire finally broke into two parts in 395 AD: the Western Roman Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire. The western part under the pressure of the Franks, the Vandals, the Huns, the Goths and other populations from Eastern Europe finally dissolved in 476 AD, when the last western Emperor was deposed by the Barbarian chief Odoacer.

The creation of the Kingdom of Italy was the result of efforts by Italian nationalists and monarchists loyal to the House of Savoy to establish a united state encompassing the entire Italian Peninsula. In the context of the 1848 liberal revolutions that swept through Europe, an unsuccessful war was declared on Austria. The Kingdom of Sardinia again attacked the Austrian Empire in the Second Italian War of Independence of 1859, with the aid of France, resulting in liberating Lombardy. In 186061, Giuseppe Garibaldi led the drive for unification in Naples and Sicily, allowing the Sardinian government led by the Count of Cavour to declare a united Italian kingdom on 17 March 1861. In 1866, Victor Emmanuel II allied with Prussiaduring the Austro-Prussian War, waging the Third Italian War of Independence which allowed Italy to annex Venetia. Finally, as France during the disastrous Franco-Prussian War of 1870 abandoned its garrisons in Rome, the Savoy rushed to fill the power gap by taking over the Papal States.

CULTURE
Italy did not exist as a state until the country's unification in 1861. Due to this comparatively late unification, and the historical autonomy of the regions that comprise the Italian Peninsula, many traditions and customs that are now recognized as distinctly Italian can be identified by their regions of origin. Despite the political and social distinction of these regions, Italy's contributions to the cultural and historical heritage of Europe and the world remain immense. Italy is home to the greatest number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites to date, and has rich collections of art, culture and literature from many different periods. The country has had a broad cultural influence worldwide, also because numerous Italians emigrated to other places during the Italian Diaspora. Furthermore, the nation has, overall, an estimated 100,000 monuments of any sort (museums, palaces, buildings, statues, churches, art galleries, villas, fountains, historic houses and archaeological remains) Italy has a very broad and diverse architectural style, which cannot be simply classified by period, but also by region, due to Italy's division into several city-states until 1861. The basis of the modern Italian language was established by the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri, whose greatest work, the Divine Comedy, is considered among the foremost literary statements produced in Europe during the Middle Ages. There is no shortage of celebrated literary figures in Italy: Giovanni Boccaccio, Giacomo Leopardi, Alessandro Manzoni, Torquato Tasso, Ludovico Ariosto, and Petrarch, whose best-known vehicle of expression, the sonnet, was invented in Italy. From folk music to classical, music has always played an important role in Italian culture. Instruments associated with classical music, including the piano and violin, were invented in Italy, and many of the prevailing classical music forms, such as the symphony, concerto, and sonata, can trace their roots back to innovations of 16th and 17th century Italian music.

STATES
The Italian city-states were a political phenomenon of small independent states mostly in the central and northern Italian peninsula between the 10th and 15th centuries. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire urban settlements in Italy generally enjoyed a greater continuity than in the rest of western Europe. Many of these towns were survivors of earlier Etruscan and Roman towns which had existed within the Roman Empire. The republican institutions of Rome had also survived. Some feudal lords existed with a servile labour force and huge tracts of land, but by the 11th century, many cities, including Venice, Milan, Florence, Genoa, Pisa, Siena,Lucca, Cremona and many others, had become large trading metropolises, able to conquer independence from their formal sovereigns.

ECONOMY
Italy has a diversified industrial economy with high gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and developed infrastructure. According to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and The World Factbook, in 2011 Italy was theeighth-largest economy in the world, the fourth-largest in Europe and the third-largest in the Eurozone in terms of nominal GDP, and the tenthlargest economy in the world and fifth-largest in Europe in terms of purchasing power parity(PPP) GDP. Florence was the home to the Italian Renaissance that the area had its own significance based on the abundance and affluence of merchandising, trade, solid banking network and economy in great scale at the time and incited insights on Renaissance technology and History of science in the Renaissance for the further technological advancement on the imagination of [19] engine (for the latter rise and emergence of machine in economic history) of the economy and influenced other European economies in the similar developmental model, such as the Industrial Revolution in United Kingdom. Italy is a member of the Group of Eight (G8) industrialized nations, the European Union and the OECD.

NATURAQL SOURES
Although Italy imports more than 80 percent of the energy resources and raw materials needed for its manufacturing needs, it does have its own natural resources, including deposits of pumice, feldspar and marble. Additionally, Italy has substantial natural gas reserves, located in the Po Valley and off its coast, in the Adriatic. According to the U.S. Department of State, "Italy's economic strength is in the processing and the manufacturing of goods, primarily in small- and medium-sized family-owned firms."

TOPOGRAPHY

Except for the fertile Po River Valley in the north and the narrow coastal belts farther south, Italy's mainland is generally mountainous, with considerable seismic activity. During Roman times, the city of Pompeii, near present-day Naples (Napoli), was devastated first by an earthquake in AD 63 and then by the famed eruption of Mt. Vesuvius (1,277 m/4,190 ft) in AD 79. In the last century, an earthquake in northeastern Italy on 6 May 1976 left more than 900 people dead, and a quake in the south on 23 November 1980 (and subsequent aftershocks) claimed at least 4,500 lives. The Alpine mountain area in the north along the French and Swiss borders includes three famous lakesComo, Maggiore, and Gardaand gives rise to six small rivers that flow southward into the Po. Italy's highest peaks are found in the northwest in the Savoy Alps, the Pennines, and the Graian chain. They include Mont Blanc (4,807 m/15,771 ft), on the French border; Monte Rosa (Dufourspitze, 4,634 m/15,203 ft) and the Matterhorn (Monte Cervino, 4,478 m/14,692 ft), on the Swiss border; and Gran Paradiso (4,061 m/13,323 ft). Marmolada (3,342 m/10,965 ft), in northeast Italy, is

REFERENT SOURCES
1.http://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/Europe/Italy-TOPOGRAPHY.html#b 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Italy 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_city-states 4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italy

PERSONAL CONCLUTION My conclution is that Italy is a really interesting country full of culture and it also haves a lot of naturall sources. The histry of Italy is interesting to and it haves a lot of art and wonderfull buildings all over it, in my opinion Italy is really good talking about economy and it is a really interesting country.