Key facts of the era
Key Events
Who Was in Power
Italy’s story is yours to explore.
Scroll the timeline, open an event, and discover the people and turning points that shaped Italy.
Scroll the timeline, open an event, and discover the people and turning points that shaped Italy.
Explore the kings of Rome, emperors, Lombard and medieval kings, lords of the Italian states, the House of Savoy and the presidents of the Republic. Italy was divided for most of its history, so some reigns overlap; these are not one continuous succession.
A Journey Through the Ages
The history of Italy is much older than the Italian state. For most of the last three thousand years the peninsula, Sicily and Sardinia were shared by many peoples, cities and kingdoms.
Explore prehistoric communities, the Etruscans and the Greek colonies of the south, and the rise of Rome from a city-state to the centre of a Mediterranean empire.
After the fall of the Western Empire, Italy was divided among Ostrogoths, Lombards, Byzantines, the papacy, emperors, Normans, city communes and foreign crowns. It was also the home of the Renaissance.
The Risorgimento created the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. Liberal Italy, the world wars and Fascism followed, and in 1946 Italians voted for the Republic.
c. 850,000 BCE – 400 BCE
Long before Rome ruled anything, the peninsula was a patchwork of peoples: hunters and farmers, Nuragic builders, Etruscan city-states and Greek colonists.
Humans reached Italy hundreds of thousands of years ago, and by the Bronze Age the peninsula held farming villages, the Terramare settlements of the Po valley and the stone towers of Nuragic Sardinia. From the 8th century BCE the Etruscans built rich city-states in central Italy, while Greek colonists founded Syracuse, Taras and dozens of other cities in the south that became known as Magna Graecia. Phoenicians and Carthaginians held western Sicily. These peoples traded, fought and borrowed from one another, and Rome grew up among them.
At Isernia La Pineta in Molise, archaeologists found a large Lower Palaeolithic site with thousands of stone tools and the butchered bones of bison…
Greeks from Euboea founded a trading settlement at Pithekoussai on the island of Ischia, in the Bay of Naples.
Pythagoras of Samos settled in Croton in Calabria and founded a religious and philosophical community that studied mathematics, music and the soul.
Amid a Carthaginian invasion of Sicily, Dionysius took power in Syracuse and ruled for nearly forty years.
753 BCE – 31 BCE
A small Latin town on the Tiber became a republic, united Italy and defeated Carthage, before civil wars tore its government apart.
According to tradition Romulus founded Rome in 753 BCE, and seven kings ruled until the last was expelled in 509 BCE. The new Republic shared power between elected magistrates, the Senate and the people, and slowly conquered its neighbours: by 264 BCE it controlled the peninsula south of the Po. Victory over Carthage, despite Hannibal’s invasion of Italy, made Rome the leading power of the Mediterranean. Conquest brought wealth but also inequality, slave revolts and ambitious generals, and after decades of civil war Octavian’s victory at Actium in 31 BCE ended the Republic.
According to legend, the young city lacked women, so the Romans abducted the daughters of the neighbouring Sabines during a festival.
A commission of ten men, the decemviri, drew up a written code of law displayed on twelve bronze tablets in the Forum.
The Carthaginian general Hannibal marched from Spain across the Pyrenees and the Alps into Italy with an army that included war elephants.
Octavian, Mark Antony and Lepidus formed the Second Triumvirate with legal powers and published new proscriptions.
27 BCE – 476
For five centuries Italy was the heart of an empire stretching from Britain to Mesopotamia, until power moved east and the Western Empire collapsed.
Augustus kept the forms of the Republic while holding supreme power, and the peace he established lasted for two centuries. Rome filled with monuments such as the Colosseum and the Pantheon, while Pompeii, buried by Vesuvius in 79, preserved everyday life. From the 3rd century crises, plague and invasions weakened the empire; Constantine legalised Christianity and founded Constantinople, and the imperial centre drifted east. Italy was sacked by Visigoths and Vandals, and in 476 the Germanic general Odoacer deposed the last western emperor.
The poet Virgil died in 19 BCE leaving unfinished the Aeneid, an epic tracing Rome's origins to the Trojan hero Aeneas.
Trajan dedicated a column in his new forum, carved with a spiral frieze of his conquest of Dacia.
Diocletian divided power among four emperors.
After the murder of Valentinian III, the Vandal king Genseric sailed from Carthage and plundered Rome for two weeks, carrying off treasures and…
476 – 1122
After Rome fell, Italy was never again united under one ruler for more than a thousand years; kings, emperors and popes competed for its lands.
Theodoric’s Ostrogothic kingdom preserved Roman government until Justinian’s long Gothic War reclaimed Italy for Constantinople, leaving it exhausted. In 568 the Lombards invaded and split the peninsula between their kingdom and Byzantine territories centred on Ravenna. The popes turned to the Franks for protection: Charlemagne conquered the Lombards and was crowned emperor in Rome in 800, and the Donation of Pepin founded the Papal States. Arabs conquered Sicily, maritime republics such as Venice and Amalfi grew rich on trade, and Normans carved out lordships in the south, while emperors and popes clashed over who held the higher authority.
Odoacer, leader of the Germanic troops in Italy, deposed the boy emperor Romulus Augustulus at Ravenna and sent the imperial insignia to…
Byzantine emperor Constans II campaigned against the Lombard duchy of Benevento, visited Rome, where he stripped bronze from monuments, and settled…
Amalfi, on the coast south of Naples, became a leading trading city with links to Constantinople, Egypt and the Levant.
Emperor Henry V and Pope Callixtus II agreed that bishops would be elected by the Church and invested with spiritual symbols by the Church, while…
1130 – 1559
Self-governing cities grew rich on trade and banking, and their rivalries and patronage produced Dante, Giotto, Leonardo and Michelangelo.
In 1130 Roger II united the Norman south into the Kingdom of Sicily, while northern cities governed themselves as communes and defeated Frederick Barbarossa at Legnano. Florence, Venice, Genoa and Milan grew into powerful city-states, and the gold florin became Europe’s standard coin. Many communes fell under signori such as the Visconti and the Medici. Despite the Black Death, the 14th and 15th centuries saw the Renaissance: Petrarch, Brunelleschi, Botticelli and Leonardo reshaped art and learning. From 1494 France and Spain fought over Italy in the Italian Wars, which ended in 1559 with Spain dominant.
Roger II's palace chapel in Palermo combined Byzantine mosaics, a painted Islamic wooden ceiling and Latin architecture.
Pope Clement V, a Frenchman, settled in Avignon.
Sandro Botticelli painted the Primavera and later The Birth of Venus, allegories influenced by Neoplatonic philosophy of the Medici circle.
After a siege of more than a year, Siena surrendered to imperial and Florentine forces.
1559 – 1845
Much of Italy was ruled from Madrid, Vienna or Paris, yet it remained a centre of the Baroque, of science and of the Enlightenment.
After 1559 Spain ruled Milan, Naples, Sicily and Sardinia directly and dominated most other states. The Counter-Reformation shaped religious life, Galileo was tried by the Inquisition, and plague and revolts struck Milan and Naples, yet Rome became the capital of Baroque art. The wars of the early 18th century passed Italian lands to Austria and to Bourbon princes. Napoleon swept away the old order after 1796: Venice lost its independence, new republics carried the tricolour, and a Kingdom of Italy was created in the north. The Congress of Vienna restored the old rulers in 1815, but the idea of a united Italy survived.
France renounced its Italian claims.
A powerful earthquake devastated south-eastern Sicily, killing around 60,000 people and destroying Catania, Noto, Ragusa and many other towns.
The congress of the Cispadane Republic, meeting in Reggio Emilia, adopted a green, white and red tricolour as its flag.
Giuseppe Verdi's Nabucco premiered at La Scala.
1846 – 1945
The Risorgimento united Italy under the House of Savoy, but the young kingdom’s social tensions and wartime trauma opened the way to Fascism and disaster.
The revolutions of 1848 failed, but Piedmont under Cavour won French support and defeated Austria in 1859, while Garibaldi’s Thousand conquered the South in 1860. The Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in 1861, took Venice in 1866 and Rome in 1870. Liberal Italy industrialised in the north, while millions emigrated from the south. Victory in World War I came at a terrible cost, and in the unrest that followed Mussolini seized power with the March on Rome in 1922. His dictatorship allied with Hitler and entered World War II; after the armistice of 1943 Italy was divided by occupation and civil war until liberation in April 1945.
The election of Pius IX, who granted an amnesty to political prisoners, raised hopes that the pope might lead a federation of Italian states, as…
Francesco Crispi, a former Garibaldian, became prime minister and pursued strong government, colonial expansion and closer ties with Germany.
At the Socialist congress in Livorno, the left wing led by Amadeo Bordiga and Antonio Gramsci split to form the Communist Party of Italy.
Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti, returning from Moscow, agreed to postpone the question of the monarchy and join a unity government under Badoglio.
1946 – today
Italians chose a republic in 1946; within a generation the country rebuilt, became an industrial power and helped found the European Union.
In the referendum of 2 June 1946 Italians voted to abolish the monarchy, and women voted nationally for the first time. The Christian Democrats governed for decades, Italy joined NATO and signed the Treaties of Rome, and the economic miracle of the 1950s and 60s transformed daily life. The Years of Lead brought political terrorism, including the murder of Aldo Moro, while the state fought the Mafia. The Mani Pulite scandals swept away the old parties in the 1990s, opening a new era of coalitions, Berlusconi, economic crises and the euro, and in 2022 Giorgia Meloni became the first woman prime minister.
The peace treaty cost Italy its colonies, the Dodecanese, and most of Istria, Fiume and Zara to Yugoslavia.
A bomb in the waiting room of Bologna Central Station killed 85 people and wounded over 200.
The global financial crisis hit Italy's economy hard.
The Senate approved an amended version of the government's electoral reform, passed by the Chamber of Deputies in July.
Florence adopted the Ordinances of Justice, which excluded magnates (the old nobility) from government and gave power to the guilds.
Florence's government was led by the Priors, elected from the guilds, in the Palazzo della Signoria, begun in 1299.
The ordinances made Florence a republic of merchants and artisans.
The ordinances made Florence a republic of merchants and artisans.
Communes and signorie
City-states, lords and republics
1250 - 1494
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Italy's history has left legacies far beyond its borders. Etruscan, Greek, Roman, Christian, Byzantine, Arab, Norman and Renaissance traditions overlap across the peninsula; no single one accounts for them all.
Roman law, codified under Justinian and revived at the University of Bologna, underlies the civil law of much of Europe and Latin America. Republican Rome and the medieval communes gave later ages their models of citizenship, elected office and civic life, and Machiavelli founded modern political thought.
Roman engineering, the Renaissance of Brunelleschi, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael, and the Baroque of Bernini shaped the art and architecture of the Western world. Italy has more UNESCO World Heritage Sites than any other country. Galileo's work helped found modern science.
Latin spread across the Roman Empire and became the language of the Church and of learning. Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio made Tuscan the basis of modern Italian. Rome remains the centre of the Catholic Church, and Italian opera, music, cinema, design and food have a worldwide following.
Italy's history also includes conquest, slavery in the Roman world, foreign domination, colonial wars in Africa, Fascist dictatorship and racial laws, the Mafia and political terrorism. Mass emigration took millions of Italians to the Americas and elsewhere in Europe. These histories belong alongside accounts of cultural achievement and state building.
Explore the timeline for the individual events and their sources.
The timeline follows the Italy research backbone compiled for this site (397 events and 131 rulers and ruling periods). Each event includes its own references. Dates in prehistory and for the early kings of Rome are approximate or traditional; summaries and source links should be reviewed as the research develops.
Every event has its own sources. See Sources & Further Reading in each timeline entry. Britannica topic-search links are discovery aids, not citations to a verified article.
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