Italian culture: made by cities long before there was a country

Why Italy had a literature before a state

The first sustained body of verse in an Italian vernacular was written at a court in Sicily. In the thirteenth century, poets attached to the court of Emperor Frederick II composed lyrics on Provençal models in a refined vernacular, and one of them, the notary Giacomo da Lentini, is credited with inventing the sonnet. Guido Guinizelli founded the school known as the Dolce Stil Novo, which reached Dante Alighieri by way of Guido Cavalcanti.

How Tuscan became the language of Italy

What Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio wrote in the fourteenth century was Tuscan, one dialect among dozens, spoken by a fraction of the peninsula. It won on the strength of what had been written in it. Over the following centuries the other Italian states took up that literary Tuscan for its prestige rather than under anybody's administration, and on unification in 1861 the Kingdom of Italy adopted it as the national language. The standard was fixed by three poets and ratified by a state five and a half centuries later.

Almost everything written between those two dates was written for a court, a city or a republic rather than for a country. Machiavelli's The Prince, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier are addressed to the politics of separate states. Giovanni Francesco Straparola's The Facetious Nights, published between 1550 and 1555, and Giambattista Basile's Pentamerone of 1634 are among the earliest printed fairy tales in Europe. Alessandro Manzoni is the exception that proves how late the country came: writing while the Risorgimento was assembling it, he argued for a unified literary language and produced The Betrothed to demonstrate what one would look like.

Why the new state kept moving its capital

Parliament proclaimed Victor Emmanuel king in Turin on 17 March 1861. Rome was declared the capital ten days later although it was not yet inside the kingdom; the seat of government moved to Florence in 1865, with enough disorder in Turin that the king left the city in haste; and the capital was not formally moved to Rome until July 1871. The residue of that indecision is still on the shelves. Italy runs two national central libraries where most states run one, in Florence and in Rome, because Rome had been the capital of the Papal States and Florence had been an early capital of the kingdom. Both are copyright libraries. Florence catalogues Italian publications and Rome catalogues the foreign publications the state libraries acquire.

How television finished what the schools began

Standard Italian was the language of writing, administration and the classroom for a long time before it was the language of the kitchen. What people spoke at home historically predates it, and several of those tongues are not varieties of Italian at all but separate members of the Romance family, or of no Romance family whatsoever.

Two forces closed the gap during the twentieth century, and only one of them was deliberate. A national education system reduced the variation slowly, over decades. Then economic growth and mass media did the rest in the 1950s and 1960s, with the state broadcaster RAI, whose transmissions resumed in 1954 after being cut off in 1940, setting a spoken standard in the process of filling airtime. What most Italians speak now is a regional variety of Italian, which is a different thing from a regional language, and a great many are at home in both.

What Italians eat depends on the region

The clearest evidence that culture here was organised by city before it was organised by country is in the kitchen, where the working unit is still the province. Milan is known for risotto, Bologna for tortellini, Naples for pizza and Genoa for pesto, and those attributions are not marketing but the record of what was cooked where when the places were separate.

The cookbooks tell the same story. When Italian culinary writing broke from French models in the eighteenth century it did so regionally: Vincenzo Corrado's Il cuoco galante of 1773 out of Naples, which gave the tomato thirteen recipes and a central place for the first time; Antonio Nebbia's Il cuoco maceratese of 1779 out of the Marche; Giovanni Felice Luraschi's Milanese manual of 1829; and Gian Battista and Giovanni Ratto's La cucina genovese of 1871, which carries the first printed recipe for pesto. The book treated as the canon of modern Italian cooking, Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiare bene of 1891, appeared three decades after unification and draws predominantly on Romagna and Tuscany, where Artusi lived. It is still in print.

How Italian food got itself written into law

From the 1950s onward the regional claim was converted into legal protection, mostly through European Union designations. Wine came first under Italian law: the denominazione di origine controllata in 1963 fixed origin, grape and method, and the stricter denominazione di origine controllata e garantita followed in 1980. Cheese, cured meat and olive oil were brought under protected designation of origin and protected geographical indication marks. More than 600 distinct cheeses are made in the country, of which 490 carry one of those marks or the national traditional-product listing, and protected Italian cured meats account for 34% of the cured meat eaten in Europe.

Two of the most portable Italian foods have been protected as practices rather than as products. Neapolitan pizza was registered with the European Union as a traditional speciality guaranteed in 2009, and the craft of the Neapolitan pizzaiuolo was added to the UNESCO intangible heritage list in 2017. Italian cuisine as a whole was listed as intangible cultural heritage in 2025. The Slow Food movement, founded at Bra in Piedmont in 1986 in response to the arrival of fast food that year, works the same seam from outside the statute book.

Why a meal has the shape it has

The traditional structure runs to four or five courses, though a full sequence is now kept for weddings and holidays and a weekday meal is a primo or a secondo with a side dish and coffee. The primo is the filling course, risotto or pasta; the secondo is the whole piece of meat or fish. Bread sits on the table throughout and is used at the end to wipe the plate, a manoeuvre with its own name, fare la scarpetta. In an OECD comparison of time use, Italians averaged 114 minutes a day eating and drinking. Water and wine are what appears on the table; anything else is unusual. Coffee is drawn as espresso, from a machine of the pump-and-pressure type Achille Gaggia patented in 1937 or from a stovetop moka, and a cappuccino is a morning drink rather than something taken after a meal.

Where the calendar still belongs to the town

Every city keeps its own patron saint and its own holiday for that saint: Rome on the day of Saints Peter and Paul, Milan on Saint Ambrose, Naples on Saint Januarius. The national patronal day, 4 October, honours Francis and Catherine, and it is the exception rather than the rule. A sagra is a town or village festival built around a single product, the grape harvest at Marino or the onion at Cannara, and elsewhere olive oil, chestnuts, pasta or cheese. The official national tourism portal indexes these by region and by comune, which is an administrative admission that the calendar is local property.

Why the neighbourhoods of Siena still race

The Palio di Siena, run between the city's neighbourhoods, has taken place without interruption since the 1630s, and versions of the same contest survive at Asti, Legnano and Ferrara, along with the jousts at Arezzo and Foligno. Florence still plays calcio storico, a medieval form of football, each year in Piazza Santa Croce. Carnival differs by city as everything else does: Venice and Viareggio are the best known, Ivrea, Foiano della Chiana and Satriano di Lucania keep their own forms, and a distinct Sardinian carnival survives that may be rooted in pre-Christian winter rites. In 2013 UNESCO added several Italian processional festivals to the intangible heritage list, among them the Varia di Palmi, the Macchina di Santa Rosa at Viterbo and the faradda di li candareri at Sassari.

What the Catholic Church still holds

In 2017, 74.4% of Italians identified as Roman Catholic. Catholicism stopped being the state religion in 1985. The Holy See, which is the jurisdiction of the pope, is a sovereign entity in international law and is not the same thing as the Vatican City State, which came into existence only in 1929. Under the arrangement known as otto per mille, taxpayers assign a share of income tax to a recognised religious community or to state welfare; Christian, Jewish, Buddhist and Hindu bodies are included, and Islam is not, because no Muslim community has signed a concordat with the state. In 2011 minority Christian communities included an estimated 1.5 million Orthodox Christians, 500,000 Pentecostals and Evangelicals, 251,192 Jehovah's Witnesses and 30,000 Waldensians. Jews have been present in Rome since before the Christian era, and about a fifth of Italian Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

Why opera and the violin came from here

Opera was assembled in the early seventeenth century in Mantua and Venice, where the Teatro San Cassiano is among the earliest institutions of its kind in Europe, and Claudio Monteverdi is one of the people who put it together. The nineteenth century turned it into the popular form, through Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi and Puccini, and La Scala in Milan and the San Carlo in Naples are the houses much of that repertoire was written for.

The instruments came from the same set of towns. Guido of Arezzo established the musical staff. Bartolomeo Cristofori invented the piano. The violin makers worked in Cremona, where Nicolò Amati, Antonio Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri were all active, and in Brescia before them, where Gasparo da Salò worked. The symphony, the concerto and the sonata trace to sixteenth and seventeenth century Italian practice, which is why the vocabulary of Western classical music is in Italian.

Folk music went the other way. Because unification arrived so late, hundreds of separate local musical cultures were never levelled into one, and Slavic, Arabic, Greek, Spanish and Byzantine influence is audible by region. Alan Lomax proposed a division of Italian folk music into geographic spheres in 1956, and the classification is still used. In the modern popular field, the Sanremo Music Festival was the model the Eurovision Song Contest was built from, and Italian entrants won that contest in 1964, 1990 and 2021.

What the country built and chose to keep

Italy ratified the World Heritage Convention on 23 June 1978 and its first inscription followed in 1979: the rock drawings at Valcamonica, the oldest of which are dated to about 8000 BC. As of 2026 the country holds 62 inscribed properties, 56 of them cultural and 6 natural. Seven are transnational, including the historic centre of Rome, which is shared with the Vatican, Monte San Giorgio and the Rhaetian Railway with Switzerland, and the Venetian works of defence with Croatia and Montenegro.

Read as a list, the inscriptions are a catalogue of former states rather than of national monuments: Arab-Norman Palermo, the early Christian monuments of Ravenna, the Sassi of Matera, Pompeii and Herculaneum, the Etruscan necropolises of Cerveteri and Tarquinia, the trulli of Alberobello, the Val d'Orcia and the Aeolian Islands.

The architecture follows the same division. Roman engineering left the aqueducts, the amphitheatres, the Colosseum and the Pantheon. Ravenna became a Byzantine centre and kept its mosaics. The Romanesque produced Sant'Ambrogio in Milan and the tower at Pisa. Brunelleschi roofed Florence Cathedral with a dome nobody knew how to build, Bramante began the rebuilding of St Peter's, and Andrea Palladio put up villas in the Veneto, one of which, the Villa La Rotonda, became a template copied across Britain and North America. Baroque and neoclassicism both started in Rome and were the last Italian-born styles to spread across Western art.

How cinema and design carried Italy abroad

Italian film began within months of the Lumière brothers, when Vittorio Calcina filmed Pope Leo XIII in 1896. Production concentrated fast: in 1912, the peak year of the silent expansion, 569 films were made in Turin, 420 in Rome and 120 in Milan. Cabiria of 1914 was the first film shown in the White House. Cinecittà was built under Mussolini and used for propaganda as well as for features, and after the war it became the plant behind what was nicknamed Hollywood on the Tiber, with more than 3,000 productions shot there.

Neorealism ran from the mid-1940s to the early 1950s and was made from the condition of the country at the time. What followed was genre work with a domestic audience and an export market: commedia all'italiana, sword-and-sandal pictures, the westerns shot in Spain and Lazio, and the giallo thrillers of the 1970s that reshaped horror elsewhere. Italian films have taken 14 Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film from 28 nominations, and as of 2016 had also won 12 Palmes d'Or, 11 Golden Lions and 7 Golden Bears. The Venice Film Festival, first held in 1932, awards the Golden Lion.

Design split between two cities on the same logic. The older couture houses stayed in Rome; the designer collections show in Milan, which also hosts the Salone del Mobile and the unofficial Fuori Salone that has grown around it. Gio Ponti and Ettore Sottsass worked in furniture, Bruno Munari and Lucio Fontana across art and object, and Turin took the industrial side. The phrase linea italiana entered the furniture trade as a description of a shape rather than of a country.

What Italians watch on a Sunday afternoon

Football is the sport with the audience. The men's national team has won the World Cup four times, in 1934, 1938, 1982 and 2006, and Italian clubs have taken 48 major European trophies. Serie A is the top division and its following is not confined to Italy.

Volleyball and basketball are the other two team sports with results behind them. The men's volleyball team won three consecutive world championships, in 1990, 1994 and 1998, and took Olympic silver in 1996, 2004 and 2016. The basketball team won the European championship in 1983 and 1999 and Olympic silver in 2004. Rugby entered the Six Nations and appears regularly at the World Cup.

Motorsport is the field where a manufacturer stands in for the country. Scuderia Ferrari has competed in Grand Prix racing since 1948 and has taken 232 wins in Formula One. The Italian Grand Prix has been run since 1921 and has been held at Monza in every championship year except 1980. Cycling holds the Giro d'Italia each May, one of the three Grand Tours, and the country has taken part in 47 of the 48 modern Olympic Games, missing only the Summer Games of 1904, with 522 Summer medals and 106 Winter medals to show for it, 235 of them gold. The Winter Games have been held in Italy in 1956, 2006 and 2026, and the Summer Games in 1960.