Welcome!  Genealogy is a journey of a lifetime.  My goal is to honor my husband's Italian heritage  by researching his lineage and tracing his family history back to its roots.  While most information  on living people is hidden, I have elected to show names.  By leaving this heritage site open to  all, I hope that "cousins" will contact us and provide missing information on various branches in  our tree. Enjoy your visit and we hope to hear from you....

History of Italy
 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Italian peninsula shows evidence of habitation by anatomically modern humans beginning about  43,000 years ago. It is reached by the Neolithic as early as 6000 BC (Cardium Pottery in Coppa  Nevigata). The Italian Bronze Age begins around 1500 BC, likely corresponding to the arrival of  Indo-European speakers whose descendants would become the Italic peoples of the Iron Age; alongside  the early Italic cultures, however, the Etruscan civilization in central Italy and Greek colonies in  the south flourished during 8th to 5th centuries BC.

Among the Italic peoples, the Latins, originally situated in the Latium region, and their Latin  language would come to dominate the peninsula with the Roman conquest of Italy in the 3rd century  BC. The Roman Republic and later the Roman Empire dominated Italy for many centuries, and  furthermore established the culture and civilization of Western Europe in general, including the  adoption and subsequent spread of Christianity as state religion at the end of the 4th century.

The decline and collapse of the Western Empire by the end of the 5th century is taken to mark the  end of Late Antiquity. A Lombard Kingdom of Italy was established, although parts of the peninsula  remained under Byzantine rule and influence until the 11th century. The Lombard kingdom was  incorporated into Francia and ultimately the Holy Roman Empire, although the rise of city-states,  and especially the powerful maritime republics in the medieval period led to political  fragmentation. Ultimately, after the disastrous Italian Wars, the peninsula was divided among the  great powers of Early Modern Europe, Spain and Austria, and later fell to the French Empire under  Napoleon I, the Papal States being reduced to the control of the Holy See over Rome.

With the rise of nationalism and the idea of the nation state in the 19th century, the peninsula was  unified in the late 19th century. The new Kingdom of Italy, established in 1861, quickly modernized  and built a large colonial empire, colonizing parts of Africa, and countries along the  Mediterranean. However, many regions of the young nation (notably, the South) remained rural and  poor, originating the Italian diaspora. Part of the victorious allied powers of World War I, Italy  defeated its historical enemy, the Austrian Empire. Soon afterwards, however, the liberal state  collapsed to social unrest: the Fascists, led by Benito Mussolini, took over and set up an  authoritarian dictatorship. Italy joined the Axis powers in World War II, falling into a bloody  Civil War in 1943, with the Fascist faction finally defeated in the spring of 1945.

In 1946, as a result of a Constitutional Referendum, the monarchy was abolished.[1] The new republic  was proclaimed on 2 June 1946. In the 1950s and 1960s, Italy saw a period of rapid modernization and  sustained economic growth, the so-called Italian economic miracle. The country, coming back to  international politics among Western democratic powers, joined the European Economic Community  (which has later constituted the European Union), the United Nations, NATO, the G7 and the  Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Italy is currently ranked as a major  regional power