Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
History
Few countries have been on such a roller-coaster ride as Italy. The Italian peninsula
lay at the core of the Roman Empire; one of the world's great monotheistic religions,
Catholicism, has its headquarters in Rome; and it was largely the dynamic city-states
of Italy that set the modern era in motion with the Renaissance. But Italy has known
chaos and deep suffering too. The rise of Europe's nation-states from the 16th century
left the divided Italian peninsula behind. Italian unity was won in blood, but many
Italians have since lived in abject poverty, sparking great waves of migration. The
economic miracle of the 1960s propelled Italy to the top league of wealthy Western
countries but, since the mid-1990s, the country has wallowed in a mire of frustration.
A sluggish economy (hit hard by the global slump that began in 2008), unstable gov-
ernment, widespread corruption and the continuing open sore of the Mafia continue
to overshadow the country's otherwise sunny disposition.
Roberto Rossellini's
Roma, Città Aperta
(Rome, Open City), starring Anna Magnani, is a classic of
Italian neorealist cinema and a masterful look at wartime Rome. The film is the first in his Tri-
logy of War, followed by
PaisÃ
and
Germania anno zero
(Germany: Year Zero).
