Transport hub
A transport hub is a place where passengers and cargo are exchanged between vehicles or/and between transport modes. Public transport hubs include train stations, rapid transit stations, bus stops, tram stop and ferry slips. Freight hubs include classification yards, airports and truck terminals, or combinations of these. For private transport, the parking lot functions as a hub. An interchange service in the scheduled passenger air transport industry involved a "through plane" flight operated by two or more airlines where a single aircraft was used with the individual airlines operating it with their own flight crews on their respective portions of a direct, no change of plane multi-stop flight. In the U. S. a number of air carriers including Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Braniff International Airways, Continental Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Eastern Airlines, National Airlines, Pan Am, Trans World Airlines, United Airlines and Western Airlines operated such cooperative "through plane" interchange flights on both domestic and/or international services in the past with these schedules appearing in their respective system timetables.
Delta Air Lines pioneered the hub and spoke system for aviation in 1955 from its hub in Atlanta, United States, in an effort to compete with Eastern Air Lines. FedEx spoke model for overnight package delivery during the 1970s; when the United States airline industry was deregulated in 1978, Delta's hub and spoke paradigm was annexed by several airlines. A large number of airlines around the world operate hub and spoke systems facilitating passenger connections between their respective flights. Intermodal passenger transport hubs in public transport include bus stations, railway stations and metro stations, while a major transport hub multimodal, may be referred to as a transport center or, in American English or Canadian English, as a transit center. Sections of city streets that are devoted to functioning as transit hubs are referred to as transit malls. Modern electronic passenger information systems and journey planners require a digital representation of the stops and transportation hubs including their topology.
Public transport data information standards such as Transmodel and IFOPT have been developed to provide a common terminology, conceptual models and data exchange formats to allow the collection and distribution of stop and interchange data. Airports have a twofold hub function. First they concentrate passenger traffic into one place for onward transportation; this makes it important for airports to be connected to the surrounding transport infrastructure, including roads, bus services, railway and rapid transit systems. Secondly some airports function as intra-modular hubs for the airlines, or airline hubs; this is a common strategy among network airlines who fly only from limited number of airports and will make their customers change planes at one of their hubs if they want to get between two cities the airline doesn't fly directly between. Airlines have extended the hub-and-spoke model in various ways. One method is to create additional hubs on a regional basis, to create major routes between the hubs.
This reduces the need to travel long distances between nodes. Another method is to use focus cities to implement point-to-point service for high traffic routes, bypassing the hub entirely. There are three kinds of freight hubs: sea-road, sea-rail and road-rail, though they can be sea-road-rail. With the growth of containerization, intermodal freight transport has become more efficient making multiple legs cheaper than through services—increasing the use of hubs. Central station Infrastructure security Intermodal Journey Planner Junction Layover Spoke-hub distribution paradigm
Piedmont
Piedmont is a region in northwest Italy, one of the 20 regions of the country. It borders the Liguria region to the south, the Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna regions to the east and the Aosta Valley region to the northwest, it has an area of 25,402 square kilometres and a population of 4,377,941 as of 30 November 2017. The capital of Piedmont is Turin; the name Piedmont comes from medieval Latin Pedemontium or Pedemontis, i.e. ad pedem montium, meaning “at the foot of the mountains” attested in documents of the end of the 12th century. Other towns of Piedmont with more than 20,000 inhabitants sorted by population: Piedmont is surrounded on three sides by the Alps, including Monviso, where the Po rises, Monte Rosa, it borders with France and the Italian regions of Lombardy, Aosta Valley and for a small fragment with Emilia Romagna. The geography of Piedmont is 43.3 % mountainous, along with extensive areas of plains. Piedmont is the second largest of Italy's 20 regions, after Sicily, it is broadly coincident with the upper part of the drainage basin of the river Po, which rises from the slopes of Monviso in the west of the region and is Italy's largest river.
The Po drains the semicircle formed by the. From the highest peaks, the land slopes down to hilly areas, to the upper, to the lower great Padan Plain; the boundary between the two is characterised by resurgent springs—typical of the Padan Plain—which supply fresh water to the rivers and a dense network of irrigation canals. The countryside is diverse: from the rugged peaks of the massifs of Monte Rosa and of Gran Paradiso, to the damp rice paddies of Vercelli and Novara, from the gentle hillsides of the Langhe and of Montferrat to the plains. 7.6% of the entire territory is considered protected area. There are 56 different national or regional parks, one of the most famous is the Gran Paradiso National Park located between Piedmont and the Aosta Valley. Piedmont was inhabited in early historic times by Celtic-Ligurian tribes such as the Taurini and the Salassi, they were subdued by the Romans, who founded several colonies there including Augusta Taurinorum and Eporedia. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the region was successively invaded by the Burgundians, the Ostrogoths, East Romans and Franks.
In the 9th -- 10th centuries there were further incursions by the Saracens. At the time Piedmont, as part of the Kingdom of Italy within the Holy Roman Empire, was subdivided into several marches and counties. In 1046, Oddo of Savoy added Piedmont with a capital at Chambéry. Other areas remained independent, such as the powerful comuni of Asti and Alessandria and the marquisates of Saluzzo and Montferrat; the County of Savoy was elevated to a duchy in 1416, Duke Emanuele Filiberto moved the seat to Turin in 1563. In 1720, the Duke of Savoy became King of Sardinia, founding what evolved into the Kingdom of Sardinia and increasing Turin's importance as a European capital; the Republic of Alba was created in 1796 as a French client republic in Piedmont. A new client republic, the Piedmontese Republic, existed between 1798 and 1799 before it was reoccupied by Austrian and Russian troops. In June 1800 a third client republic, the Subalpine Republic, was established in Piedmont, it fell under full French control in 1801 and it was annexed by France in September 1802.
In the congress of Vienna, the Kingdom of Sardinia was restored, furthermore received the Republic of Genoa to strengthen it as a barrier against France. Piedmont was a springboard for Italy's unification in 1859–1861, following earlier unsuccessful wars against the Austrian Empire in 1820–1821 and 1848–1849; this process is sometimes referred to as Piedmontisation. However, the efforts were countered by the efforts of rural farmers; the House of Savoy became Kings of Italy, Turin became the capital of Italy. However, when the Italian capital was moved to Florence, to Rome, the administrative and institutional importance of Piedmont was reduced and the only remaining recognition to Piedmont's historical role was that the crown prince of Italy was known as the Prince of Piedmont. After Italian unification, Piedmont was one of the most important regions in the first Italian industrialization. Lowland Piedmont is a fertile agricultural region; the main agricultural products in Piedmont are cereals, including rice, representing more than 10% of national production, grapes for wine-making and milk.
With more than 800,000 head of cattle in 2000, livestock production accounts for half of final agricultural production in Piedmont. Piedmont is one of the great winegrowing regions in Italy. More than half of its 700 square kilometres of vineyards are registered with DOC designations, it produces prestigious wines as Barolo, from the Langhe near Alba, the Moscato d'Asti as well as the sparkling Asti from the vineyards around Asti. Indigenous grape varieties include Nebbiolo, Dolcetto, Freisa and Brachetto; the region contains major industrial centres, the main of, Turin, home to the FIAT automobile works. Olivetti, once a major electronics industry whose plant was in Scarmagno, near Ivrea, has now turned into a small-sc
Milan
Milan is a city in northern Italy, capital of Lombardy, the second-most populous city in Italy after Rome, with the city proper having a population of 1,372,810 while its metropolitan city has a population of 3,245,308. Its continuously built-up urban area has a population estimated to be about 5,270,000 over 1,891 square kilometres; the wider Milan metropolitan area, known as Greater Milan, is a polycentric metropolitan region that extends over central Lombardy and eastern Piedmont and which counts an estimated total population of 7.5 million, making it by far the largest metropolitan area in Italy and the 54th largest in the world. Milan served as capital of the Western Roman Empire from 286 to 402 and the Duchy of Milan during the medieval period and early modern age. Milan is considered a leading alpha global city, with strengths in the field of the art, design, entertainment, finance, media, services and tourism, its business district hosts Italy's stock exchange and the headquarters of national and international banks and companies.
In terms of GDP, it has the third-largest economy among European cities after Paris and London, but the fastest in growth among the three, is the wealthiest among European non-capital cities. Milan is considered part of the Blue Banana and one of the "Four Motors for Europe"; the city has been recognized as one of the world's four fashion capitals thanks to several international events and fairs, including Milan Fashion Week and the Milan Furniture Fair, which are among the world's biggest in terms of revenue and growth. It hosted the Universal Exposition in 1906 and 2015; the city hosts numerous cultural institutions and universities, with 11% of the national total enrolled students. Milan is the destination of 8 million overseas visitors every year, attracted by its museums and art galleries that boast some of the most important collections in the world, including major works by Leonardo da Vinci; the city is served by a large number of luxury hotels and is the fifth-most starred in the world by Michelin Guide.
The city is home to two of Europe's most successful football teams, A. C. Milan and F. C. Internazionale, one of Italy's main basketball teams, Olimpia Milano; the etymology of the name Milan remains uncertain. One theory holds that the Latin name Mediolanum planus. However, some scholars believe that lanum comes from the Celtic root lan, meaning an enclosure or demarcated territory in which Celtic communities used to build shrines. Hence Mediolanum could signify the central sanctuary of a Celtic tribe. Indeed, about sixty Gallo-Roman sites in France bore the name "Mediolanum", for example: Saintes and Évreux. In addition, another theory links the name to the boar sow an ancient emblem of the city, fancifully accounted for in Andrea Alciato's Emblemata, beneath a woodcut of the first raising of the city walls, where a boar is seen lifted from the excavation, the etymology of Mediolanum given as "half-wool", explained in Latin and in French; the foundation of Milan is credited to two Celtic peoples, the Bituriges and the Aedui, having as their emblems a ram and a boar.
Alciato credits Ambrose for his account. The Celtic Insubres, the inhabitants of the region of northern Italy called Insubria, appear to have founded Milan around 600 BC. According to the legend reported by Livy, the Gaulish king Ambicatus sent his nephew Bellovesus into northern Italy at the head of a party drawn from various Gaulish tribes; the Romans, led by consul Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio Calvus, fought the Insubres and captured the city in 222 BC. They conquered the entirety of the region, calling the new province "Cisalpine Gaul" – "Gaul this side of the Alps" – and may have given the site its Latinized Celtic name of Mediolanum: in Gaulish *medio- meant "middle, center" and the name element -lanon is the Celtic equivalent of Latin -planum "plain", thus *Mediolanon meant " in the midst of the plain". In 286 the Roman Emperor Diocletian moved the capital of the Western Roman Empire from Rome to Mediolanum. Diocletian himself chose to reside at Nicomedia in the Eastern Empire, leaving his colleague Maximian at Milan.
Maximian built several gigantic monuments, the large circus, the thermae or "Baths of Hercules", a large complex of imperial palaces and other services and buildings of which fewer visible traces remain. Maximian increased the city area surrounded by a new, larger stone wall encompassing an area of 375 acres with many 24-sided towers; the monumental area had twin towers. From Mediolanum the Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan in 313 AD, granting tolerance to all religions within the Empire, thus paving the way for Christianity to become the dominant religion of Roman Europe. Constantine had come to Mediolanum to celebrate the wedding of his sister
Baudolino
Baudolino is a 2000 novel by Umberto Eco about the adventures of a man named Baudolino in the known and mythical Christian world of the 12th century. Baudolino was translated into English in 2001 by William Weaver; the novel presented a number of particular difficulties in translation, not the least of, that there are ten or so pages written in a made-up language, a mixture of Latin, medieval Italian and other languages. In the year of 1204, Baudolino of Alessandria enters Constantinople, unaware of the Fourth Crusade that has thrown the city into chaos. In the confusion, he saves his life. Niketas is amazed by his language genius, speaking many languages he has never heard, on the question: if he is not part of the crusade, he? Baudolino begins to recount his life story to Niketas, his story begins in 1155, when Baudolino – a talented Italian peasant boy – is sold to and adopted by the emperor Frederick I. At court and on the battlefield, he is educated in reading and writing Latin and learns about the power struggles and battles of northern Italy at the time.
He is sent to Paris to become a scholar. In Paris, he learns about the legendary kingdom of Prester John. From this event onward, Baudolino dreams of reaching this fabled land; the earlier parts of the story follow the general historical and geographical outlines of 12th-century Europe, with special emphasis on the Emperor Frederick's futile efforts to subdue the independent and assertive city states of Northern Italy. Baudolino, being both a beloved adopted son to the Emperor and a loyal native of the newly founded and rebellious town of Alessandria, plays a key role in effecting reconciliation between the Emperor and the Alessandria townspeople, who are led by Baudolino's biological father; the incident of the death of Emperor Frederick, while on the Third Crusade, is a key element of the plot. This part involves an element of secret history – the book asserts that Emperor Frederick had not drowned in a river, as history records, but died mysteriously at night while hosted at the castle of a sinister Armenian noble.
This part constitutes a historical detective mystery – a historical locked room mystery – with various suspects suggested, each of whom had a clever means of killing the Emperor, with Baudolino acting as the detective. After the Emperor's death and his friends set off on a long journey, encompassing 15 years, to find the Kingdom of Prester John. From the moment when they depart eastwards, the book becomes pure fantasy – the lands which the band travels bearing no resemblance to the continent of Asia at that or any other historical time, being rather derived from the various myths which Europeans had about Asia – including the aforementioned Christian myth of the Kingdom of Prester John, as well as the Jewish myth of the Ten Lost Tribes and the River Sambation, some earlier accounts provided by Herodotos. Baudolino meets eunuchs, Blemmyes and pygmies. At one point, he falls in love with a female satyr-like creature who recounts to him the full Gnostic creation myth. Philosophical debates are mixed with comedy, epic adventure and creatures drawn from the strangest medieval bestiaries.
After many disastrous adventures, the destruction of Prester John's Kingdom by the White Huns followed by a long stint of slavery at the hands of the Old Man of the Mountain and surviving members of his band of friends return to Constantinople undergoing the agony of the Fourth Crusade – the book's starting point. The wise and rather cynical Niketas Choniates helps Baudolino to at last discover the truth about how the Emperor Frederick died – with shattering results for Baudolino and his friends. Invented by EcoBaudolino – young man of Alessandria, protagonist a reference to the patron saint; the monopod Gavagai, a reference to Quine's example of indeterminacy of translation. The putative successors of Hypatia of Alexandria Deacon John, leprous sub-ruler of Pndapetzim based on Baldwin IV of Jerusalem. Other fictional or legendary beingsKyot Gagliaudo Aulari, legendary saviour of Alessandria, his wife, who are Baudolino's biological parents Prester John Basilisk Manticore Chimera Satyrs Blemmyes Panotti Unicorn Cynocephaly RocHistoricalFrederick Barbarossa Niketas Choniates Rainald of Dassel The Old Man of the Mountain Pope Alexander III Beatrice I, Countess of Burgundy The Archpoet Otto of Freising A member of the ancient Artsruni noble clan Andronicus I Comnenus Stephen Hagiochristophorites Isaac II Angelos The Venerable Bede White Huns Enrico Dandolo Robert de Boron 2000, Bompiani, Pub date??
2000, hardback 2001, Editora Record, Pub date?? 2001, paperback 2002, UK, Secker & Warburg, Pub date 15 October 2002, hardback 2002, USA, Pub date 15 October 2002, hardcover 2002, France and Fasquelle, Pub date 12 February 2002, paperback 2002, USA, Recorded Books, Pub date? October 2002, audiobook 2003, Fabbri - RCS Libri, Pub date? January 2003, paperback (Italian ed
House of Sforza
The House of Sforza was a ruling family of Renaissance Italy, based in Milan. They acquired the Duchy of Milan from the previously-ruling Visconti family in the mid-15th century, lost it to the Spanish Habsburgs about a century later. Francesco I Sforza ruled Milan, having acquired the title of Duke of Milan after marrying in 1441 the natural daughter and only heir of the last Duke of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti, Bianca Maria, making the Sforzas the heirs of the house of Visconti; the family held the seigniory of Pesaro, starting with Muzio Attendolo's second son, Alessandro. The Sforza held Pesaro after the death of Costanzo II Sforza. Muzio's third son, founded the branch of Santa Fiora, who held the title of count of Cotignola. Members of this family held important ecclesiastical and political positions in the Papal States, moved to Rome in 1674, taking the name of Sforza Cesarini; the Sforza became allied with the Borgia family through the arranged marriage between Lucrezia Borgia and Giovanni.
This alliance failed, as the Borgia family annulled the marriage once the Sforza family were no longer needed. In 1499, in the course of the Italian Wars, the army of Louis XII of France took Milan from Ludovico Sforza. After Imperial German troops drove out the French, Maximilian Sforza, son of Ludovico, became Duke of Milan until the French returned under Francis I of France and imprisoned him. Francesco I, 1450–1466 Galeazzo Maria, 1466–1476 Gian Galeazzo, 1476–1494 Ludovico, 1494–1499 Massimiliano, 1513–1515 Francesco II, 1521–1535 Alessandro, 1445–1473 Costanzo I, 1473–1483 Giovanni, 1483–1500 and 1503–1510 Costanzo II, 1510–1512 Galeazzo, 1512 Muzio Sforza with mistress Lucia da Torsano had 7 illegitimate sons son Gabriele Sforza archbishop of Milan son Francesco I Sforza married Bianca Maria Visconti son Galeazzo Maria Sforza mistress Lucrezia Landriani daughter Bianca Maria, second wife of Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I son Gian Galeazzo, married Isabella of Naples son Francesco, nominally duke under the regency of Ludovico Maria daughter Bona, second wife of King Sigismund I of Poland daughter Ippolita Maria Sforza illegitimate daughter Caterina Sforza married Giovanni de' Medici il Popolano illegitimate son Ottaviano Maria Sforza bishop of Lodi son Ludovico il Moro son Ercole Massimiliano son Francesco II Maria illegitimate daughter Bianca Sforza married to Galeazzo Sanseverino illegitimate son Giovanni Paolo I, marquess of Caravaggio son Ascanio, Cardinal daughter Ippolita Maria, married king of Alfonso II d'Aragon of Naples son Alessandro, first lord of Pesaro son Costanzo I son Giovanni, first husband of Lucrezia Borgia son Costanzo II last ruler of Pesaro Bosio One of the cursed artifacts from Friday the 13th: The Series was the "Sforza Glove", attributed to the original family's possession.
Thomas Harris's character Hannibal Lecter is a descendant of the House of Sforza. In the anime and book series Trinity Blood, one of the Cardinals and Duchess of Milan is named Caterina Sforza. Caterina Sforza appears as a non-playable character in the video game Assassin's Creed 2 and its sequel, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood; the Sforza figure prominently in the Showtime series on the Borgia family. The house is mentioned in a song about the Borgia family in the British edutainment TV show Horrible Histories. Gradara House of Visconti Italian Wars List of rulers of Milan Pesaro Media related to House of Sforza at Wikimedia Commons
Jews
Jews or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and a nation, originating from the Israelites and Hebrews of historical Israel and Judah. Jewish ethnicity and religion are interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish people, while its observance varies from strict observance to complete nonobservance. Jews originated as an ethnic and religious group in the Middle East during the second millennium BCE, in the part of the Levant known as the Land of Israel; the Merneptah Stele appears to confirm the existence of a people of Israel somewhere in Canaan as far back as the 13th century BCE. The Israelites, as an outgrowth of the Canaanite population, consolidated their hold with the emergence of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah; some consider that these Canaanite sedentary Israelites melded with incoming nomadic groups known as'Hebrews'. Though few sources mention the exilic periods in detail, the experience of diaspora life, from the Ancient Egyptian rule over the Levant, to Assyrian captivity and exile, to Babylonian captivity and exile, to Seleucid Imperial rule, to the Roman occupation and exile, the historical relations between Jews and their homeland thereafter, became a major feature of Jewish history and memory.
Prior to World War II, the worldwide Jewish population reached a peak of 16.7 million, representing around 0.7% of the world population at that time. 6 million Jews were systematically murdered during the Holocaust. Since the population has risen again, as of 2016 was estimated at 14.4 million by the Berman Jewish DataBank, less than 0.2% of the total world population. The modern State of Israel is the only country, it defines itself as a Jewish and democratic state in the Basic Laws, Human Dignity and Liberty in particular, based on the Declaration of Independence. Israel's Law of Return grants the right of citizenship to Jews who have expressed their desire to settle in Israel. Despite their small percentage of the world's population, Jews have influenced and contributed to human progress in many fields, both and in modern times, including philosophy, literature, business, fine arts and architecture, music and cinema, science and technology, as well as religion. Jews have played a significant role in the development of Western Civilization.
The English word "Jew" continues Iewe. These terms derive from Old French giu, earlier juieu, which through elision had dropped the letter "d" from the Medieval Latin Iudaeus, like the New Testament Greek term Ioudaios, meant both "Jew" and "Judean" / "of Judea"; the Greek term was a loan from Aramaic Y'hūdāi, corresponding to Hebrew יְהוּדִי Yehudi the term for a member of the tribe of Judah or the people of the kingdom of Judah. According to the Hebrew Bible, the name of both the tribe and kingdom derive from Judah, the fourth son of Jacob. Genesis 29:35 and 49:8 connect the name "Judah" with the verb yada, meaning "praise", but scholars agree that the name of both the patriarch and the kingdom instead have a geographic origin—possibly referring to the gorges and ravines of the region; the Hebrew word for "Jew" is יְהוּדִי Yehudi, with the plural יְהוּדִים Yehudim. Endonyms in other Jewish languages include the Yiddish ייִד Yid; the etymological equivalent is in use in other languages, e.g. يَهُودِيّ yahūdī, al-yahūd, in Arabic, "Jude" in German, "judeu" in Portuguese, "Juif" /"Juive" in French, "jøde" in Danish and Norwegian, "judío/a" in Spanish, "jood" in Dutch, "żyd" in Polish etc. but derivations of the word "Hebrew" are in use to describe a Jew, e.g. in Italian, in Persian and Russian.
The German word "Jude" is pronounced, the corresponding adjective "jüdisch" is the origin of the word "Yiddish". According to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, fourth edition, It is recognized that the attributive use of the noun Jew, in phrases such as Jew lawyer or Jew ethics, is both vulgar and offensive. In such contexts Jewish is the only acceptable possibility; some people, have become so wary of this construction that they have extended the stigma to any use of Jew as a noun, a practice that carries risks of its own. In a sentence such as There are now several Jews on the council, unobjectionable, the substitution of a circumlocution like Jewish people or persons of Jewish background may in itself cause offense for seeming to imply that Jew has a negative connotation when used as a noun. Judaism shares some of the characteristics of a nation, an ethnicity, a religion, a culture, making the definition of, a Jew vary depending on whether a religious or national approach to identity is used.
In modern secular usage Jews include three groups: people who were born to a Jewish family regardless of whether or not they follow the religion, those who have some Jewish ancestral background or lineage, people without any Jewish ancestral background or lineage who have formally converted to Judaism and therefore are followers of the religion. Historical definitions of Jewish identity have traditionally been based on halakhic definitions of matrilineal descent, halakhic conversions; these definitions of, a Jew date back to the codification of the Oral
Italian unification
Italian unification known as the Risorgimento, was the political and social movement that consolidated different states of the Italian peninsula into the single state of the Kingdom of Italy in the 19th century. The process began in 1815 with the Congress of Vienna and was completed in 1871 when Rome became the capital of the Kingdom of Italy; the term, which designates the cultural and social movement that promoted unification, recalls the romantic and patriotic ideals of an Italian renaissance through the conquest of a unified political identity that, by sinking its ancient roots during the Roman period, "suffered an abrupt halt of its political unity in 476 AD after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire". However, some of the terre irredente did not join the Kingdom of Italy until 1918 after Italy defeated Austria–Hungary in World War I. For this reason, sometimes the period is extended to include the late 19th-century and the First World War, until the 4 November 1918 Armistice of Villa Giusti, considered the completion of unification.
This view is followed, at the Central Museum of Risorgimento at the Vittoriano. Italy was unified by Rome in the third century BC. For 700 years, it was a kind of territorial extension of the capital of the Roman Republic and Empire, for a long time, a privileged status and so it was not converted into a province. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Italy remained united under the Ostrogothic Kingdom and disputed between the Kingdom of the Lombards and the Byzantine Empire. Following conquest by the Frankish Empire, the title of King of Italy merged with the office of Holy Roman Emperor. However, the emperor was an absentee German-speaking foreigner who had little concern for the governance of Italy as a state. Southern Italy however was governed by the long-lasting Kingdom of Sicily or Kingdom of Naples established by the Normans. Central Italy was governed by the Pope as a temporal kingdom known as the Papal States; this situation persisted through the Renaissance but began to deteriorate with the rise of modern nation-states in the early modern period.
Italy, including the Papal States became the site of proxy wars between the major powers, notably the Holy Roman Empire and France. Harbingers of national unity appeared in the treaty of the Italic League, in 1454, the 15th century foreign policy of Cosimo De Medici and Lorenzo De Medici. Leading Renaissance Italian writers Dante, Boccaccio and Guicciardini expressed opposition to foreign domination. Petrarch stated. Machiavelli quoted four verses from Italia Mia in The Prince, which looked forward to a political leader who would unite Italy "to free her from the barbarians"; the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 formally ended the rule of the Holy Roman Emperors in Italy. However, the Spanish branch of the Habsburg dynasty, another branch of which provided the Emperors, continued to rule most of Italy down to the War of the Spanish Succession. A sense of Italian national identity was reflected in Gian Rinaldo Carli's Della Patria degli Italiani, written in 1764, it told how a stranger entered a café in Milan and puzzled its occupants by saying that he was neither a foreigner nor a Milanese.
"'Then what are you?' they asked.'I am an Italian,' he explained." The Habsburg rule in Italy came to an end with the campaigns of the French Revolutionaries in 1792–97, when a series of client republics were set up. In 1806, the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved by the last emperor, Francis II, after its defeat by Napoleon at the Battle of Austerlitz; the Italian campaigns of the French Revolutionary Wars destroyed the old structures of feudalism in Italy and introduced modern ideas and efficient legal authority. The French Republic spread republican principles, the institutions of republican governments promoted citizenship over the rule of the Bourbons and Habsburgs and other dynasties; the reaction against any outside control challenged Napoleon's choice of rulers. As Napoleon's reign began to fail, the rulers he had installed tried to keep their thrones further feeding nationalistic sentiments. Beauharnais tried to get Austrian approval for his succession to the new Kingdom of Italy, on 30 March 1815, Murat issued the Rimini Proclamation, which called on Italians to revolt against their Austrian occupiers.
After Napoleon fell, the Congress of Vienna restored the pre-Napoleonic patchwork of independent governments. Italy was again controlled by the Austrian Empire and the Habsburgs, as they directly controlled the predominantly Italian-speaking northeastern part of Italy and were, the most powerful force against unification. An important figure of this period was Francesco Melzi d'Eril, serving as vice-president of the Napoleonic Italian Republic and consistent supporter of the Italian unification ideals that would lead to the Italian Risorgimento shortly after his death. Meanwhile and literary sentiment turned towards nationalism.
listen); Piedmontese: Lissandria [liˈsɑŋdrja]) is a city and comune in Piedmont, Italy, and the capital of the Province of Alessandria. The city is sited on the alluvial plain between the Tanaro and the Bormida rivers, about 90 kilometres (56 miles) southeast of Turin.
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Argenteuil, France, since 1960
Jericho, Palestine, since 2004
Hradec Králové, Czech Republic, since 1961
Karlovac, Croatia, since 1963
Rosario, Argentina, since 1988[9]
Alba Iulia, Romania, since 1990
Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). . Encyclopædia Britannica. 1 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 543.
Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). 
