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Italy (Italian: Italia), officially the Italian Republic, (Italian: Repubblica Italiana), is located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe, and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia. Italy shares its northern Alpine boundary with France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia. The independent states of San Marino and the Vatican City are enclaves within the Italian Peninsula, while Campione d'Italia is an Italian exclave in Switzerland.

Italy has been the home of many European cultures, such as the Etruscans and the Romans, and later was the birthplace of the movement of the Renaissance, that began in Tuscany and spread all over Europe. Italy's capital Rome has been for centuries the center of Western civilization, and is the seat of the Catholic Church.

Today, Italy is a democratic republic, and a developed country with the 7th-highest GDP, the 8th-highest Quality-of-life index, and the 20th-highest Human Development Index rating in the world. It is a founding member of what is now the European Union (having signed the Treaty of Rome in 1957), and also a member of the G8, NATO, the Council of Europe, the Western European Union, and the Central European Initiative. Beginning January 1, 2007 Italy became a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.

Etymology

The origin of the term "Italy" (It: Italia), from Latin Italia, is uncertain. According to one of the more common explanations, the term was borrowed through Greek, from Oscan Víteliú, meaning "land of young cattle" (cf. Lat vitulus "calf", Umb vitlo "calf") and named for the god of cattle, Mars. The bull was a symbol of the southern Italian tribes and is often depicted goring the Roman wolf as a defiant symbol of free Italy during the Samnite Wars.

The name Italia applied to a part of what is now southern Italy. According to Antiochus of Syracuse, it originally only referred to the southern portion of the Bruttium peninsula (modern Calabria), but by his time Oenotrians and Italy had become synonymous, and the name also applied to most of Lucania as well. The Greeks gradually came to use the name "Italia" for a greater region, but it was not until the time of the Roman conquests that the term was expanded to cover the entire peninsula.

History

Read more at Wikipedia.org