Italy
The land of Rome and the Renaissance, of a hundred proud regions, of deep Catholic faith, of the sacred table and the close family, where beauty, food, and belonging are woven into the very texture of daily life. The complete guide.
Italy is a country in southern Europe, a long boot-shaped peninsula reaching into the Mediterranean with the great islands of Sicily and Sardinia, home to about fifty-nine million people. To understand it, begin with its astonishing regional diversity, for Italy was a patchwork of separate states and cities until little more than a century and a half ago, and every region, city, and town keeps a fierce pride, a dialect, a cuisine, and a character all its own; with the immense weight of history, from ancient Rome through the Renaissance, that lies everywhere underfoot; with the deep Catholic faith and the presence of the Vatican in the heart of Rome; with the sacred place of food and the table, perhaps the deepest expression of Italian culture; with the central importance of the family; and with the love of beauty, of the good appearance called bella figura, that runs through everything. From these flow the customs that follow: the warm greeting, the long meal, the great festivals, the evening stroll. This guide walks through each in turn.
Overview
Italy is a country in the south of Europe, a long peninsula shaped like a high-heeled boot stretching down into the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, together with the two great islands of Sicily and Sardinia and many smaller ones. The land runs from the snow-capped Alps in the north, down the spine of the Apennine mountains, to the warm shores of the south, taking in fertile plains, rolling hills famous the world over, ancient cities, and a coastline of legendary beauty. About fifty-nine million people live there, the great majority of them Italian, and the capital is Rome, the eternal city, set in the centre of the peninsula and holding within it the tiny independent Vatican City, seat of the Catholic Church.
Italy is a democratic republic, founded in 1946 when the people voted to end the monarchy, governed under a constitution of 1948 by an elected parliament, a prime minister who leads the government, and a president as head of state. The country is divided into twenty regions, several of them with special autonomy, and this regional structure reflects a far older reality, for Italy was united into a single nation only in the eighteen-sixties, and beneath the modern state lies a deep patchwork of ancient cities, states, and identities. The language is Italian, but countless regional dialects and a few minority tongues are spoken, and Italy is one of the founding members of the European Union and uses the euro.
A few deep forces shape life in Italy. There is the astonishing regional diversity, the fierce local pride of a nation made from many homelands. There is the immense weight of history, from Rome to the Renaissance. There is the deep Catholic faith and the Vatican at the heart of Rome. There is the sacred place of food and the table. There is the central importance of family. And there is the love of beauty, the bella figura, that runs through it all. The sections that follow trace these forces and then walk through the customs of daily life.
A nation of a hundred homelands
The first thing to understand about Italy is that it is, in a deep sense, not one country but many, a nation made from a hundred proud homelands. For most of its long history the Italian peninsula was not a single state at all but a shifting patchwork of kingdoms, republics, duchies, and city-states, of Venice and Florence, Naples and Milan, Rome and Genoa, each with its own rulers, history, art, and ways, and Italy was united into one nation only in the eighteen-sixties, within living memory of grandparents' grandparents. The old saying holds that having made Italy, the task was then to make Italians, and the deep loyalties of many Italians run first to their region, their city, even their town, before the nation.
This long history of separateness has left a regional diversity richer than almost anywhere in Europe. Each of the twenty regions, and within them each city and town, keeps a fierce pride and a strong identity: its own dialect, often so distinct as to be nearly a separate language; its own cuisine, with dishes, ingredients, and ways unknown a province away; its own festivals, patron saints, crafts, and character. The food of Bologna is not the food of Naples; the speech of Venice is not the speech of Palermo; and an Italian is, before all else, a Roman or a Florentine, a Sicilian or a Piedmontese, proud of a home place whose ways go back many centuries.
This campanilismo, the loyalty to one's own bell tower, is one of the deepest features of Italian life, and it shapes everything from food to football to local rivalry. Yet over it all lies a shared Italian identity, woven from the common language, the Catholic faith, the love of food and family and beauty, and the immense shared inheritance of history and art, that binds the many homelands into one nation. To understand Italy is to hold both truths together: a single country with a single soul, and a mosaic of a hundred proud regions, each guarding its own ancient and distinctive way of life.
The weight of Rome and the Renaissance
No country carries history quite as Italy does, for the Italian peninsula was the cradle of two of the greatest civilisations the world has known, and their inheritance lies everywhere, underfoot and overhead, in the very texture of daily life. First was ancient Rome, which rose from a small city on the Tiber to rule an empire stretching across the known world, giving Europe its law, its roads, its language, and much of its civilisation, and leaving the Italian land strewn with its monuments, the Colosseum, the Forum, the aqueducts and temples and roads, ruins that are not in museums but woven into the living cities.
Then, more than a thousand years later, came the Renaissance, the great rebirth of art and learning that began in the Italian cities, above all Florence, and reshaped the whole of Western culture. In the workshops and courts of Florence, Rome, Venice, and the other cities, the genius of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and a host of others produced an outpouring of art, architecture, and thought unmatched in human history, and the churches, palaces, and squares of Italy are filled to overflowing with its masterpieces. To these were joined the long ages between and after, the medieval communes, the baroque, the splendour of the Church, so that Italy holds more of the world's great art and historic treasure than almost any other land.
This immense inheritance is not a thing apart from Italian life but woven through it. Italians live among the works of Rome and the Renaissance as a matter of course, in cities whose streets and squares are themselves works of art, and the country guards an extraordinary share of the world's cultural heritage. The weight of so glorious a past shapes the national sense of self, a deep pride in having given the world so much of its civilisation, art, and beauty. To walk through an Italian city is to walk through living history, and to understand Italy is to understand a people who dwell, every day, amid the greatest achievements of the European past.
The Church and the Vatican
Italy is a deeply Catholic country, and the faith has shaped its history, its art, its calendar, and its culture more profoundly than almost any other force. Rome has been the centre of the Roman Catholic Church for the better part of two thousand years, and the Vatican City, the tiny independent state that is the seat of the pope and the headquarters of the Church, sits within the heart of Rome itself. The presence of the papacy has marked Italy beyond measure, in the countless churches and basilicas that crown every town, in the supreme religious art that fills them, and in the rhythms of the Catholic calendar that still order the year.
The great majority of Italians are Roman Catholic, and the faith is woven into the texture of national life, in the patron saints of every town, the feast days and processions, the milestones of baptism, first communion, church wedding, and funeral, and the deep cultural identification with Catholicism that holds even among the many who are not devout. For as across much of Europe, regular churchgoing has declined sharply in modern times, and only a minority now attend Mass weekly, so that for many Italians the faith lives today more in custom, festival, family tradition, and cultural identity than in strict observance.
Yet the Church remains a powerful presence in Italian life and a force in the nation's sense of itself. Its feasts still shape the calendar, its patron-saint festivals still gather the towns, its great churches still stand at the centre of every city, and the pope, the spiritual leader of the world's Catholics, remains a figure of immense significance in Rome and beyond. Other faiths, growing communities of other Christians, Muslims, Jews with their ancient Italian roots, and others, add their presence to a more varied modern Italy. To understand Italy is to understand the deep and lasting mark of the Catholic Church, in faith, in art, in custom, and in the very landscape of the nation.
Bella figura and the love of beauty
Running through the whole of Italian life is a deep love of beauty and a care for appearances captured in a phrase that has no exact translation: bella figura, the beautiful figure, the good impression, the art of presenting oneself, one's home, one's table, and one's life with grace, style, and dignity. To make a bella figura is to show oneself well, to be well-dressed, well-mannered, and elegant, to do things with care and beauty; to make a brutta figura, a bad impression, is something to be avoided, for the sense of how one appears to others matters deeply in Italian culture.
This love of beauty is not mere vanity but a profound and serious value, woven through every part of life. It shows in the famous Italian elegance of dress, in the care taken over the look of a meal, a shop window, a piazza; in the national genius for art, design, fashion, and craftsmanship; in the importance of style and good taste, of doing and making things beautifully. Italians have given the world an enormous share of its sense of beauty, in art and architecture, in fashion and design, in food and craft, and the pursuit of the beautiful and the well-made is a point of deep national pride and identity.
Bound up with bella figura is a strong sense of personal dignity and the respect owed to it, the care each person takes for their own standing and self-presentation. Italians value courtesy, warmth, and good manners, and they are sensitive to how they are treated and seen. For a visitor, the lesson is to understand that appearances, manners, and the care taken over things genuinely matter here, that to dress and behave with some elegance and respect is appreciated, and that the Italian love of beauty is a serious and admirable thing, not a frivolity. To understand Italy is to understand this deep devotion to beauty, style, and the good appearance, the bella figura that graces the whole of Italian life.
Greetings and the warmth of talk
Italians are warm, expressive, and sociable, and their greetings are correspondingly affectionate and lively. Among friends and family the usual greeting is a kiss on each cheek, given between women and between men and women, along with a warm handshake and often a touch on the arm; among men, a firm handshake, an embrace among close friends. The greetings come in Italian, a warm ciao among friends for both hello and goodbye, a more formal buongiorno by day, buonasera in the evening, and arrivederci on parting, all delivered with genuine warmth.
Italian conversation is famously animated, expressive, and rich. Italians speak with passion and with the whole body, with a celebrated language of gesture, the hands moving in eloquent accompaniment to the words, and with an expressiveness, a volume, and a warmth that can surprise the more reserved. Talk is a great pleasure and an art, conversation is lively and engaged, and people stand close, look one another in the eye, for a direct and open gaze is a mark of honesty and engagement, and are not afraid of interruption or of speaking with feeling. This warmth and expressiveness is one of the great charms of Italian social life.
Manners are warm but also matter, and courtesy is valued. People are addressed with proper titles and the formal form in more formal or first meetings, moving to the friendly form once a warmer footing is reached, and respect is shown to elders, who are held in honour. For a visitor, the way to get on is to meet the Italian warmth with warmth of one's own: to greet people properly and affectionately, to be courteous and well-mannered, and to enter into the lively spirit of Italian sociability. A little Italian is warmly welcomed, and an open, warm, expressive manner opens every door in this most sociable of cultures.
The sacred table
If any one thing lies at the very heart of Italian culture, it is food, for in Italy the table is something close to sacred, and the growing, cooking, sharing, and savouring of good food is perhaps the deepest expression of the national soul. Italian cuisine, beloved and imitated the world over, is in truth not one cuisine but a hundred, for every region, city, and town has its own dishes, ingredients, and ways, fiercely guarded and deeply distinct, so that the food of Emilia-Romagna, with its rich pasta and Parmesan, is a world apart from the food of Sicily, with its sun and sea and Arab traces. The pasta of one place, the rice of another, the bread, the oil, the wine, all vary with the land.
For all its variety, Italian cooking shares a common soul: the devotion to fresh, seasonal, local ingredients of the highest quality, simply and respectfully prepared, so that the flavour of the thing itself shines. The great traditions of pasta in its endless forms, of pizza born in Naples, of risotto and polenta in the north, of cured meats and cheeses guarded by law and pride, of fish along the coasts, of the fruits and vegetables of the season, of olive oil and wine, run through the whole. Food is taken with deep seriousness, its traditions protected, its rules, what is eaten when, what goes with what, observed with care, for to cook and eat well is a serious and joyful art.
More than the food itself, it is the meal as a shared and unhurried occasion that lies at the heart of things. A proper Italian meal is a leisurely affair of several courses, the antipasto, the pasta or rice, the meat or fish, the salad, the cheese and fruit and sweet and coffee, taken in order and never rushed, and it is above all a time to gather, to talk, to be together. The meal is the great daily act of family and friendship, and hospitality centres on it utterly. A guest is welcomed with food in abundance and pressed warmly to eat, for to feed someone generously is the deepest Italian expression of love and welcome. To understand Italy is to understand that the table is the centre of life, and the shared meal its greatest pleasure.
Coffee, the aperitivo, and the bar
Beyond the great meal, the daily rituals of coffee and the drink hold a cherished place in Italian life, and the neighbourhood bar, the Italian cafe, is one of the small temples of the culture. Coffee is a serious and ritual matter, taken many times through the day, almost always as the small, strong shot of espresso, drunk quickly while standing at the bar counter, a swift and sociable pause in the day. The rules are firm and dear to Italian hearts: the milky cappuccino is a thing of the morning only, never to be drunk after a meal or later in the day, when the espresso or its small cousins reign.
The bar is far more than a place to drink coffee; it is a daily social hub, where one stops for a quick espresso and a word with the barista and the neighbours, takes a pastry in the morning, a light lunch at midday, and where the rhythms of the day are marked. In the evening comes another beloved ritual, the aperitivo, the pre-dinner drink, a glass of wine, a spritz, or a cocktail taken with friends, often with a spread of little snacks and bites, in the sociable hour before dinner, a relaxed and cherished moment of unwinding and gathering that is one of the great pleasures of Italian life.
These daily rituals, the espresso at the counter, the aperitivo at dusk, the pause at the bar, are small but deeply Italian, expressions of the national love of pleasure, sociability, and the savouring of life's simple good things. For a visitor, to take an espresso standing at a neighbourhood bar, or a spritz at the aperitivo hour, is to taste the easy, sociable rhythm of Italian daily life. To understand Italy is to understand these cherished rituals of coffee and drink, and the central place of the bar in the round of the Italian day.
Family and the Sunday lunch
The family lies at the very centre of Italian life, the deepest and most enduring of all its bonds. Italian family ties are famously strong and close, reaching well beyond parents and children to embrace grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins in a warm and tightly woven web, and the family remains the first source of love, support, identity, and belonging. The bonds between the generations are especially strong, and it is common, particularly in the south, for grown children to live close to or even with their parents, for several generations to remain near one another, and for the family to be the great anchor of a person's life.
The supreme expression of family life is the Sunday lunch, the pranzo della domenica, the great weekly gathering when the family comes together around the table for a long, abundant, and joyful meal. Three generations may gather, the food flows course after course over many hours, and the day is given to family, food, and togetherness, the cornerstone of the Italian week. To this are joined the great feasts of the year, Christmas and Easter above all, when families gather in even greater number for the traditional dishes and the warmth of being together, the deepest celebrations of the Italian calendar.
Modern life has brought change, and Italy now records some of the lowest birth rates in the world, with smaller families and grown children marrying later, and the old patterns shifting as women take their place in work and public life and the young move for opportunity. Yet the family remains the bedrock of Italian society, the source of welfare, support, and belonging far beyond what the state provides, and the bonds of kin remain extraordinarily strong. To understand Italy is to understand the central, sustaining place of the family, gathered each Sunday around the table, in the life of every Italian.
The passeggiata and the piazza
One of the most beloved and characteristic of all Italian customs is the passeggiata, the evening stroll, the leisurely walk taken in the cool of the early evening through the streets and squares of the town. As the day's work ends and before dinner, Italians of every age dress with care and go out to walk, slowly and sociably, up and down the main street and around the central square, to see and be seen, to greet friends and neighbours, to pause for an aperitivo or an ice cream, to talk and to enjoy the simple pleasure of being out among one's fellow townspeople in the gentle hour of dusk.
At the heart of this, and of Italian public life generally, stands the piazza, the town square, the great outdoor living room of the Italian community. The piazza, often a thing of real beauty, ringed by churches, cafes, and fine old buildings, with its fountain or its statue at the centre, is where the life of the town gathers: the market by day, the passeggiata by evening, the festivals and gatherings, the meeting of friends, the playing of children, the watching of the world go by from a cafe table. Public life in Italy is lived outdoors, in the shared and beautiful space of the piazza, in a way that gives Italian towns their wonderful sociability and charm.
These customs, the evening stroll and the life of the square, speak to something deep in Italian culture: the love of sociability, of the open air, of beauty, of community, and of the unhurried savouring of life. For a visitor, to join the passeggiata at dusk, or to sit at a cafe in a fine old piazza and watch the life of the town unfold, is to enter into one of the great pleasures of Italian existence. To understand Italy is to understand the passeggiata and the piazza, the evening ritual and the public square at the heart of the sociable, outdoor, beauty-loving life of the Italian town.
Dressing the bella figura
Italians are famous the world over for their elegance of dress, and the care taken over how one looks is a clear and everyday expression of the love of bella figura. To go out well-dressed, neat, and stylish is simply expected, a matter of self-respect and of respect for others, and Italians of every age and station take real care over their appearance, choosing clothes with an eye to quality, fit, and style rather than mere fashion or display. The result is the celebrated Italian elegance, an effortless-seeming good taste that has made Italy a capital of style and given the world some of its greatest fashion.
The rules of dress follow the occasion and the setting with care. One dresses smartly for the passeggiata, for church, for any social occasion; beachwear stays at the beach, and to wander a town in shorts and flip-flops marks one out at once as a careless tourist. In the churches, which are places of worship as well as art, modest dress is expected, with shoulders and knees covered, and a respectful appearance is the rule. Quality and good materials are valued over flashiness, and a certain understated elegance, well-made clothes worn with ease, is the Italian ideal.
For a visitor, the lesson is simple: dress with a little more care than you might at home. Neat, smart, well-fitting clothes are appreciated and help one fit in; to dress sloppily is to make a brutta figura and to mark oneself as an outsider. Cover up modestly in churches, dress smartly for restaurants and social occasions, and lean toward quality and good taste over the casual. None of this need be expensive or elaborate, for the Italian gift is to look good with ease. To understand Italy is to understand that dress is an expression of self-respect and of the deep love of beauty, and that to dress well is, here, to honour both oneself and the company one keeps.
Saints, carnivals, and the year
The Italian year is rich beyond almost any other in festivals, woven from the Catholic calendar, the patron saints of the towns, the seasons of the land, and the deep love of celebration. At the centre stand the great Christian feasts: Christmas, the Natale, with its nativity scenes, the presepe found in every home and church, its feasting and family gathering; Easter, the most solemn and joyful of holy days, with its great processions, especially in the south; and the Epiphany on the sixth of January, when the kindly old witch called the Befana brings sweets to the children, closing the Christmas season.
Above all, Italy is a land of patron-saint festivals, for every town and city has its own holy protector whose feast day is the great local celebration of the year, marked with processions, fireworks, music, food, and devotion. The feast of San Gennaro in Naples, with the famous miracle of the saint's blood; the feast of Saint Agatha in Catania; the countless local feste across the land, each unique to its place, are deeply rooted community events, not tourist shows, gathering whole towns in faith and festivity. To these are joined the great carnivals before Lent, above all the masked splendour of Venice and the float-filled parades of Viareggio.
The land and the seasons bring their own festivals too, the sagre, the food festivals celebrating the local harvest, the olive, the chestnut, the truffle, the wine, the fish, each town honouring its own produce; and the historic pageants and contests, like the famous bareback horse race, the Palio, run between the districts of Siena in medieval splendour. The summer holiday of Ferragosto in mid-August empties the cities for the beaches and the family gathering. Through all of it runs the Italian love of celebration, faith, food, and community. To understand Italy is to understand its endless festivals, where saint and season, faith and feast, town pride and family joy, fill the Italian year.
Weddings and the milestones of life
The great milestones of life in Italy are marked with warmth, ceremony, and the gathering of the family, in the Catholic tradition and with deep local custom. Birth and baptism bring the family together to welcome the child into the faith and the family, and the milestones of childhood, the first communion and the confirmation, are important family occasions. Through all of them runs the central place of the family and the Church in marking the passage of a life.
The wedding is the great celebration, traditionally a church ceremony followed by a long and abundant feast, generous in food, wine, and joy, gathering the wider family and the whole community in the Italian way. Old customs surround it: the sugared almonds called confetti, given to guests as favours, white for the wedding, in odd numbers for luck; the warmth and abundance of the wedding feast; the deep involvement of the family. Italian weddings are joyful, festive, and generous, expressions of the love of family, food, and celebration. In modern times many couples marry later, or live together without marrying, and civil weddings have become common alongside church ones, part of the great social changes of recent decades.
Death, too, is marked in the Catholic way, with the funeral Mass, the gathering of family and community in mourning and support, and the visiting of the cemetery, especially on All Saints' and All Souls' days in early November, when families bring flowers to honour their dead, a deeply observed Italian custom. Through the milestones of life, from baptism to funeral, run the enduring threads of Italian culture: the central place of the family, the rites of the Catholic faith, the warmth of community, and the love of gathering and feasting. To understand Italy is to understand these milestones, where family and faith mark the passage of every Italian life.
Work, business, and the Italian way
Italian working life blends real professionalism and creativity with the warmth, the personal relationships, and the regional differences that mark the wider culture. Personal relationships and trust matter greatly in Italian business, perhaps more than in colder northern cultures, and a deal often rests on the rapport built between people, over a coffee or a long lunch, as much as on the contract itself. Connections, the network of family, friends, and acquaintances, run through working life, and it is through people one knows and trusts that much gets done.
The style of work reflects the culture: warm and personal, attentive to bella figura in dress and manner, and woven through with the pleasures of food and sociability, for the long business lunch is a real institution and much is settled at the table. Hierarchy and respect for seniority matter, titles are used and valued, and proper courtesy is expected. At the same time Italy is a land of formidable creativity and craftsmanship, home to great industries and a vast world of small and family firms, especially in the prosperous north, that produce some of the finest design, fashion, food, and manufacturing in the world.
The pace and rhythm of work follow Italian life: the importance of the long midday break in many places, the sacredness of the August holiday when much of the country closes, the slower and more relationship-driven way of doing things, which can frustrate the impatient outsider but rewards the patient who invest in the personal bond. Bureaucracy is famously heavy and slow, and Italians have long practice in navigating it. For a visitor or a partner in business, the keys are to build the personal relationship, to be patient, to show courtesy and good appearance, and to honour the rhythms of Italian life. To understand Italy is to understand a working culture where the personal, the regional, and the pleasurable are woven into the professional.
Art, fashion, and design
Italy's contribution to the beauty of the world is almost beyond reckoning, and the love of art, style, and fine making remains a living force in the modern nation. The country that gave the world the art of Rome and the Renaissance is still a place where art, architecture, and design are cherished and where craftsmanship is honoured, and Italians live among an inheritance of beauty unmatched anywhere, in cities that are themselves works of art and in the greatest concentration of cultural treasure on earth. The arts, music, opera born in Italy, painting, sculpture, architecture, remain a deep source of national pride and identity.
In the modern age this love of beauty has flowered above all in fashion and design, fields in which Italy leads the world. Italian fashion, from the great houses of Milan, Rome, and Florence, is a global byword for elegance and quality, and Milan stands among the world's fashion capitals. Italian design, in everything from cars and furniture to the smallest household objects, is celebrated for a genius that marries beauty with function, and the very phrase made in Italy carries a promise of style, quality, and fine craftsmanship that the world prizes. The artisan tradition runs deep, with each region keeping its own crafts, the glass of Venice, the leather of Florence, the ceramics, the lace, the fine work of skilled hands.
This love of the beautiful and the well-made is not confined to the famous houses but runs through the whole culture, in the care taken over the look of a shop, a meal, a home, a person, the everyday pursuit of bella figura. It is one of Italy's greatest gifts to the world and one of the deepest expressions of its soul, the conviction that life should be lived beautifully and that beauty is worth the trouble. To understand Italy is to understand this living tradition of art, fashion, design, and craft, the modern flowering of an ancient and unbroken devotion to beauty.
North and south
Among all the regional divisions of Italy, the deepest and most spoken-of is the great divide between the north and the south, the Mezzogiorno, a difference of economy, history, and character that has marked the nation since its founding. The north, with its great industrial cities, Milan, Turin, and the rest, its prosperous farms and family firms, its closeness to the rest of Europe, is wealthy, fast-paced, and industrial, one of the richest regions of the continent. The south, the Mezzogiorno, with its sun and sea, its ancient towns and deep traditions, has long been poorer, more agricultural, and slower, shaped by a harder history.
The differences run deep and old, rooted in centuries of separate history, the north long tied to the trading cities and the wider Europe, the south long under foreign crowns and a different order. They show in economy and wealth, in pace and temperament, often said to be cooler and more reserved in the north, warmer and more expressive in the south, in food, in dialect, and in the strength of old customs and family ties, which run especially deep in the south. The economic gap between a prosperous north and a struggling south has been one of the great challenges of the Italian nation, and the movement of southerners north for work has shaped modern Italy.
These differences should not be drawn too sharply, for both north and south share the deep common threads of Italian culture, the language, the faith, the love of food and family and beauty, and both hold fiercely to their Italian identity. And the south, for all its hardships, is a land of extraordinary richness, in history, art, warmth, tradition, and beauty, the cradle of much that the world loves best about Italy. The divide is real, a genuine difference of two Italies within one nation, yet it is held within a shared and powerful national identity. To understand Italy is to understand this old division of north and south, one of the deepest features of the nation made from many homelands.
The nation today
Italy today is a prosperous, democratic republic of about fifty-nine million people, a founding member of the European Union and one of the world's major economies, with its capital at Rome. It is governed under its constitution of 1948 by an elected parliament, a prime minister who leads the government, and a president as head of state, and it is divided into twenty regions, several with special autonomy. The current prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, in office since 2022, is the first woman to lead an Italian government. Italy uses the euro, and the Vatican City, seat of the Catholic Church and now of Pope Leo XIV, lies within Rome.
Modern Italy is a wealthy and advanced nation, a leader in fashion, design, manufacturing, food, and the arts, and a country of extraordinary beauty that draws many millions of visitors each year to its cities, coasts, and countryside, for tourism is a great pillar of its economy. Yet it faces real challenges: a heavy public debt and an economy that has struggled to grow; the old gap between a prosperous north and a poorer south; one of the lowest birth rates in the world and an ageing population; the questions raised by immigration; and the slow weight of bureaucracy. These are the concerns of a mature and sophisticated nation working to sustain its prosperity and its place in Europe and the world.
Through its modern life, Italy holds firmly to the identity that defines it. The fierce regional pride of a hundred homelands endures; the immense inheritance of Rome and the Renaissance is cherished; the Catholic faith still marks the calendar and the towns; the sacred table and the Sunday lunch still gather the family; the love of beauty, the bella figura, still graces daily life; and the customs of the passeggiata, the piazza, the festival, and the long meal endure. To know Italy is to meet one of the world's most beloved nations, a land that has given humanity an incomparable share of its art, beauty, and pleasure, and that lives still, amid its glorious past, with a genius for the good and beautiful life.