Italy, formally the Italian Republic is an European nation comprising of a promontory delimited by the Alps and encompassed by a few islands. Italy is situated in south-focal Europe, and it is additionally viewed as a piece of Western Europe. The nation covers an all out territory of 301,340 km2 (116,350 sq mi) and offers land fringes with France, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, and the enclaved microstates of Vatican City and San Marino. Italy has a regional exclave in Switzerland (Campione) and an oceanic exclave in the Tunisian Sea (Lampedusa). With around 60 million occupants, Italy is the fourth-most crowded part condition of the European Union.

Because of its focal geographic area in Southern Europe and the Mediterranean, Italy has generally been home to heap people groups and societies. Notwithstanding the different old people groups scattered all through current Italy, the most prevalent being the Indo-European Italic people groups who gave the promontory its name, starting from the old style time, Phoenicians and Carthaginians established provinces for the most part in isolated Italy, Greeks set up settlements in the supposed Magna Graecia of Southern Italy, while Etruscans and Celts possessed focal and northern Italy individually. An Italic clan known as the Latins framed the Roman Kingdom in the eighth century BC, which in the long run turned into a republic with a legislature of the Senate and the People. The Roman Republic at first vanquished and acclimatized its neighbors on the promontory, in the long run growing and overcoming portions of Europe, North Africa and Asia. By the main century BC, the Roman Empire rose as the predominant power in the Mediterranean Basin and turned into a main social, political and strict focus, initiating the Pax Romana, a time of over 200 years during which Italy's law, innovation, economy, workmanship, and writing created. Italy remained the country of the Romans and the metropole of the domain, whose inheritance can likewise be seen in the worldwide circulation of culture, governments, Christianity and the Latin content.

During the Early Middle Ages, Italy suffered sociopolitical breakdown and savage intrusions, yet by the eleventh century, various adversary city-states and oceanic republics, principally in the northern and focal locales of Italy, rose to extraordinary flourishing through exchange, trade and banking, laying the basis for present day free enterprise. These for the most part autonomous statelets filled in as Europe's primary exchanging center points with Asia and the Near East, regularly getting a charge out of a more noteworthy level of vote based system than the bigger medieval governments that were combining all through Europe; notwithstanding, some portion of focal Italy was heavily influenced by the religious Papal States, while Southern Italy remained to a great extent primitive until the nineteenth century, in part because of a progression of Byzantine, Arab, Norman, Angevin, Aragonese and other remote victories of the district. The Renaissance started in Italy and spread to the remainder of Europe, getting a recharged intrigue humanism, science, investigation and workmanship. Italian culture thrived, delivering popular researchers, specialists and polymaths. During the middle Ages, Italian pioneers found new courses to the Far East and the New World, introducing the European Age of Discovery. Hundreds of years of infighting between the Italian city-states, for example, the Italian Wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth hundreds of years, left the area divided, and it was in this way vanquished, abused, and further isolated by European powers, for example, France, Spain and Austria.

By the mid-nineteenth century, rising Italian patriotism and calls for autonomy from outside control prompted a time of progressive political change. Following quite a while of outside mastery and political division, Italy was as a rule bound together in 1861, setting up the Kingdom of Italy as an extraordinary power. From the late nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century, Italy quickly industrialized, in particular in the north, and obtained a frontier realm, while the south remained to a great extent ruined and rejected from industrialisation, fuelling an enormous and powerful diaspora. Regardless of being one of the primary victors in World War I, Italy entered a time of financial emergency and social strife, prompting the ascent of an extremist fascism in 1922. Investment in World War II on the Axis side finished in military thrashing, financial devastation and the Italian Civil War. Following the freedom of Italy and the ascent of the opposition, the nation annulled the government, set up a majority rule Republic, and delighted in a drawn out monetary blast, turning into a profoundly created nation.

Today, Italy is viewed as one of the world's most socially and financially propelled nations, with its economy positioning eighth-biggest on the planet and third in the Eurozone by ostensible GDP. Italy has the 6th biggest overall national riches, the third-biggest national bank gold save, and an exceptionally high future. The nation assumes a noticeable job in provincial and worldwide monetary, military, social and political issues; it is both a local power and an incredible power, and is positioned the world's eighth most-dominant military. Italy is an establishing and driving individual from the European Union and an individual from various global foundations, including the UN, NATO, the OECD, the OSCE, the WTO, the G7, the G20, the Union for the Mediterranean, the Council of Europe, Uniting for Consensus, the Schengen Area and some more. The nation has incredibly affected and added to different fields, eminently human expressions, music, writing, theory, science and innovation, design, film, food, sports, just as law, banking and business. As an impression of its social riches, Italy is home to the world's biggest number of World Heritage Sites (55), and is the fifth-most visited nation.