Italy historical timeline

Italy is a very old place and a very young country. The peninsula carried a single state for six centuries under Rome, then did not carry one again for fourteen hundred years, and the modern republic is younger than most of its own city halls. Almost everything a traveller finds inconsistent here — why the trains change character at a regional border, why the signage is bilingual in one valley and not the next, why two towns forty kilometres apart cook differently — is the residue of that gap rather than an accident of administration.

Chronology

1. 312 B.C. The Via Appia is begun, the first of the consular roads. The trunk routes laid over the following two centuries set the corridors the autostrade and main railway lines still follow, because the passes and river crossings they chose are the ones the terrain allows.
2. 79 Vesuvius buries Pompeii and Herculaneum. The lack of air and moisture preserved what it covered for almost 2,000 years, which is why the two best-preserved Roman towns in the world are half an hour from Naples -- and why Pompeii alone now takes some 2.6 million visitors a year, with less than a third of the buildings open that were open in the 1960s.
3. 476 The western empire ends without a successor state. No single city inherits the peninsula, which is why Italy has no long capital tradition and why its great museums are distributed rather than concentrated in one place.
4. 1176 The Lombard League defeats Barbarossa at Legnano and the communes win recognition. The self-governing city becomes the unit of Italian life, and the dialect, the cuisine and the civic rivalry that change every fifty kilometres all date from this settlement holding for centuries.
5. 1454 The Peace of Lodi balances five powers: Milan, Venice, Florence, the Papacy and Naples. Those borders hold in rough outline for three and a half centuries, and the modern regions are drawn on top of them.
6. 1815 The Congress of Vienna restores the old states and hands the north-east to Austria. The fortress ring the Austrians build across Lombardy and the Veneto is still the outer edge of several northern cities.
7. 1839 The Naples-Portici line opens, the first railway in Italy. The network therefore began in the south two decades before unification, under a different state -- part of why the Italian rail map is a set of once-separate systems stitched together rather than one plan.
8. 1861 The Kingdom of Italy is proclaimed, with its capital at Turin. Legal codes are merged unevenly and quickly, which is the origin of the regional variation in property, tenancy and licensing law that a traveller meets as different rules for short lets in different regions.
9. 1871 Rome, taken the previous September, becomes the capital. The Papacy refuses to recognise the new state and the question stays open for nearly sixty years.
10. 1915 Italy enters the First World War, which runs to 11 November 1918, and fights it almost entirely along its own northern frontier. The high-altitude fortifications, tunnels and ossuaries of the Dolomites and the Isonzo are that war, and they are now among the most walked mountain routes in the country.
11. 1922 The March on Rome in October brings Mussolini's National Fascist Party to power, the Blackshirts approaching the capital on 28 October. Two decades of building followed and a visitor meets it constantly -- the EUR district in Rome, the rationalist railway stations, the cleared archaeological avenues, and the inscriptions that were chiselled off rather than the buildings demolished.
12. 1929 The Lateran Treaty creates Vatican City as a sovereign state. It is why a visitor crosses an international border on foot in the middle of Rome, with its own post office, stamps and railway siding on the far side.
13. 1943 Italy signs the Armistice of Cassibile with the Allies on 3 September, ending hostilities between them and beginning twenty months in which the country was a battlefield fought over from south to north. Monte Cassino, the Gothic Line and the bombed centres of Naples, Genoa and Turin date from that period, as do the partisan memorials in almost every northern town.
14. 1948 The republican constitution establishes the regions and grants special statutes to four border and island territories; Friuli Venezia Giulia joins them in 1963. Bilingual road signs in Alto Adige and the Valle d’Aosta are the most visible result.
15. 1964 The Autostrada del Sole opens on 4 October, eight years after construction began, linking Milan to Naples. It is the road spine of the country and the reason a north-south drive is straightforward while an east-west one is not.
16. 1966 The Arno floods Florence on 4 November. The national library alone had 1,300,000 items damaged, a third of its holdings, and the international rescue effort that followed built the modern Italian conservation apparatus -- the restoration labs and techniques behind almost every cleaned fresco and panel a visitor now sees.
17. 1970 The ordinary regions are finally constituted and given real powers. Regional government runs health and much of transport from this point, which is why regional rail, hospital signage and museum opening hours differ so sharply between neighbouring regions.

What survived, and what a traveller meets

Two institutions outlived every state that has governed the peninsula. The parish and diocesan structure of the Church is older than any Italian border and still explains why a town of four thousand people can have a cathedral. And the comune, the self-governing municipality, has run local affairs more or less continuously since the twelfth century; there are nearly eight thousand of them, and the one whose limits you cross is the reason the road surface, the parking rules and the waste collection change without warning.

The most consequential modern date on the list is 1970 rather than 1861. Regional government is recent, it is genuinely powerful, and it is the layer that decides nearly everything a visitor deals with day to day.