Italy

Abstract Even today, the geographic and demographic structure of Italy is indebted to the pre-Roman period. In 900 BCE, for example, the peninsula was a world of small villages inhabited by a few hundred people living in huts made of clay and straw; by the end of the millennium, it included several hundred cities, each endowed with monumental architecture and thousands of city dwellers. More generally, the Italian peninsula, which initially occupied a geopolitically peripheral position in the Mediterranean region, became the center of the political decision-making process in the first century BCE. Even by mid-millennium, there were already very large cities, including the coastal Etruscan cities, some Venetic cities, Rome, and all the major Greek colonies, aided by artisans from abroad and intensified overseas commerce. Despite this development, at the beginning of the second century, the reality of the Italic peoples was radically different from that of the Romans. But within a few generations, as a by-product of dramatic events (the Social War, the civil wars) and as an important pebble in a larger mosaic, the empire, the Italian unification would be completed. In fact, pre-Roman territorial and cultural divisions came to the fore and re-emerged once the tiny cultural construction of Italian unity under Augustus was swept away. Two fundamental features seem to characterize Italian identity: a significant degree of military aggression and an astonishingly high degree of human mobility. Both are explored in depth in this introduction, along with historical questions of identity, unity, and periodization.