Italy: Regions, Cities & Travel Guide

What is Italy known for?

Italy was the core of the Roman Empire, and later the cradle of the Renaissance. Alongside Greece, it is counted among the birthplaces of Western culture, and it holds more UNESCO World Heritage Sites than any country on earth. The proof is everywhere.

High art and ancient monuments lie scattered the length of the peninsula, while Rome, Florence, and Venice gather the largest share of visitors and Milan, Naples, and Turin guard collections of their own.

Where is Italy?

Italy runs south from the European mainland as one long peninsula, narrowing as it drops into the Mediterranean Sea. The country sits in southern and western Europe at once. The Alps close the top of it.

They draw most of the land border and lift the ground into high rock and lasting snow, the highest ground in the country. Four neighbours line that mountain frontier. France lies to the west, Switzerland and Austria stand across the north, and Slovenia adjoins the eastern end.

South of the range the peninsula stretches for hundreds of kilometres toward the centre of the Mediterranean Sea. Beyond the mainland the territory breaks into nearly 800 islands. Sicily and Sardinia are by far the largest, both set well out in the open sea.

There is more inside the borders than Italy alone. Two enclaves sit wholly within them: the Vatican City, ringed by Rome, and the small Republic of San Marino on higher ground inland. Sea lies on almost every side, so the coast shapes the country as much as the mountains do.

From the snow of the Alps to the southern shore of Sicily, the land spans a long reach of coast and climate.

What is the history of Italy?

Few places have shaped Europe so long. Italy was the core of the mighty Roman Empire. Rome itself grew from a single city into the capital of that empire.

From there its power reached across the Mediterranean Sea and deep into Europe over many centuries, until the empire at last broke apart. Older still was the debt to Greece. Greek thought and Roman order together are remembered as the birthplace of Western culture.

After the empire, for long stretches, the peninsula was a patchwork of separate states rather than one country. Then those same cities lit the Renaissance, the rebirth of art and learning that began here and reshaped the wider world. Florence, Venice, Rome, Milan, and Naples still hold much of what those centuries produced.

It is from these ages that Italy keeps more UNESCO World Heritage Sites than any other country, in high art and standing monuments alike. Unity itself came late. The modern Italian Republic, the Repubblica Italiana, dates from 1946.

Its capital is Rome, the same city where the oldest part of the whole story first began.

What is Italy like?

Culture here is not kept behind glass. Italy holds more UNESCO World Heritage Sites than any country on earth, and most of that heritage stands in streets and squares that people still use every day. The Roman past and the Renaissance are the two deepest layers.

Both began here. Ancient monuments from the age of the Roman Empire share the same cities as the art and architecture of the Renaissance, the movement that started on the peninsula and remade European taste. That is why the country is counted, with Greece, among the birthplaces of Western culture.

What Italy did not invent it often inherited, much of it from Greece, then reshaped and passed on. The art is spread, not gathered in one capital. Almost every old city has its share.

Rome, Florence, Venice, Naples, and the other great cities each keep collections, churches, and monuments of their own. A church, a square, or a single old wall can hold centuries at once. Italian, the language of the Repubblica Italiana, carries the whole of it.

Here the past is lived in, not shut away.

What is the climate of Italy?

Length sets the pattern. Most of Italy sits in the temperate band, but the long reach from the Alps to Sicily pulls the weather into very different moods. Along the coasts and across the south the climate is broadly Mediterranean, with warm, dry summers and milder, wetter winters.

Inland and uphill it cools. The Alps in the north carry cold, snowy winters, and snow lingers on the high peaks long after the lowlands have warmed. Sicily and Sardinia, far out in the Mediterranean Sea, stay the warmest of all.

How do you get to Italy?

Italy is simple to reach. Four countries touch it by land: France, Switzerland, Austria, and Slovenia. Road and rail cross those borders through and around the Alps, tying the country into the rest of Europe.

Travellers from further off mostly come by air, landing first at the largest cities before fanning out down the peninsula. The sea does the rest. Ferries cross the Mediterranean Sea to Sicily and Sardinia, and the long coastline keeps almost every part of the country within reach of water.