1.
Geographic coordinate system
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A geographic coordinate system is a coordinate system used in geography that enables every location on Earth to be specified by a set of numbers, letters or symbols. The coordinates are chosen such that one of the numbers represents a vertical position. A common choice of coordinates is latitude, longitude and elevation, to specify a location on a two-dimensional map requires a map projection. The invention of a coordinate system is generally credited to Eratosthenes of Cyrene. Ptolemy credited him with the adoption of longitude and latitude. Ptolemys 2nd-century Geography used the prime meridian but measured latitude from the equator instead. Mathematical cartography resumed in Europe following Maximus Planudes recovery of Ptolemys text a little before 1300, in 1884, the United States hosted the International Meridian Conference, attended by representatives from twenty-five nations. Twenty-two of them agreed to adopt the longitude of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, the Dominican Republic voted against the motion, while France and Brazil abstained. France adopted Greenwich Mean Time in place of local determinations by the Paris Observatory in 1911, the latitude of a point on Earths surface is the angle between the equatorial plane and the straight line that passes through that point and through the center of the Earth. Lines joining points of the same latitude trace circles on the surface of Earth called parallels, as they are parallel to the equator, the north pole is 90° N, the south pole is 90° S. The 0° parallel of latitude is designated the equator, the plane of all geographic coordinate systems. The equator divides the globe into Northern and Southern Hemispheres, the longitude of a point on Earths surface is the angle east or west of a reference meridian to another meridian that passes through that point. All meridians are halves of great ellipses, which converge at the north and south poles, the prime meridian determines the proper Eastern and Western Hemispheres, although maps often divide these hemispheres further west in order to keep the Old World on a single side. The antipodal meridian of Greenwich is both 180°W and 180°E, the combination of these two components specifies the position of any location on the surface of Earth, without consideration of altitude or depth. The grid formed by lines of latitude and longitude is known as a graticule, the origin/zero point of this system is located in the Gulf of Guinea about 625 km south of Tema, Ghana. To completely specify a location of a feature on, in, or above Earth. Earth is not a sphere, but a shape approximating a biaxial ellipsoid. It is nearly spherical, but has an equatorial bulge making the radius at the equator about 0. 3% larger than the radius measured through the poles, the shorter axis approximately coincides with the axis of rotation
2.
Italy
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Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a unitary parliamentary republic in Europe. Located in the heart of the Mediterranean Sea, Italy shares open land borders with France, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, San Marino, Italy covers an area of 301,338 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate and Mediterranean climate. Due to its shape, it is referred to in Italy as lo Stivale. With 61 million inhabitants, it is the fourth most populous EU member state, the Italic tribe known as the Latins formed the Roman Kingdom, which eventually became a republic that conquered and assimilated other nearby civilisations. The legacy of the Roman Empire is widespread and can be observed in the distribution of civilian law, republican governments, Christianity. The Renaissance began in Italy and spread to the rest of Europe, bringing a renewed interest in humanism, science, exploration, Italian culture flourished at this time, producing famous scholars, artists and polymaths such as Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Michelangelo and Machiavelli. The weakened sovereigns soon fell victim to conquest by European powers such as France, Spain and Austria. Despite being one of the victors in World War I, Italy entered a period of economic crisis and social turmoil. The subsequent participation in World War II on the Axis side ended in defeat, economic destruction. Today, Italy has the third largest economy in the Eurozone and it has a very high level of human development and is ranked sixth in the world for life expectancy. The country plays a prominent role in regional and global economic, military, cultural and diplomatic affairs, as a reflection of its cultural wealth, Italy is home to 51 World Heritage Sites, the most in the world, and is the fifth most visited country. The assumptions on the etymology of the name Italia are very numerous, according to one of the more common explanations, the term Italia, from Latin, Italia, was borrowed through Greek from the Oscan Víteliú, meaning land of young cattle. The bull was a symbol of the southern Italic tribes and was often depicted goring the Roman wolf as a defiant symbol of free Italy during the Social War. Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus states this account together with the legend that Italy was named after Italus, mentioned also by Aristotle and Thucydides. The name Italia originally applied only to a part of what is now Southern Italy – according to Antiochus of Syracuse, but by his time Oenotria and Italy had become synonymous, and the name also applied to most of Lucania as well. The Greeks gradually came to apply the name Italia to a larger region, excavations throughout Italy revealed a Neanderthal presence dating back to the Palaeolithic period, some 200,000 years ago, modern Humans arrived about 40,000 years ago. Other ancient Italian peoples of undetermined language families but of possible origins include the Rhaetian people and Cammuni. Also the Phoenicians established colonies on the coasts of Sardinia and Sicily, the Roman legacy has deeply influenced the Western civilisation, shaping most of the modern world
3.
Regions of Italy
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The regions of Italy are the first-level administrative divisions of Italy, constituting its second NUTS administrative level. There are 20 regions, of five are constitutionally given a broader amount of autonomy granted by special statutes. Each region, except for the Aosta Valley, is divided into provinces, regions are autonomous entities with powers defined in the Constitution. As the administrative districts of the state during the Kingdom of Italy. The original draft list comprised the Salento region, friuli and Venezia Giulia were separate regions, and Basilicata was named Lucania. Abruzzo and Molise were identified as regions in the first draft. They were later merged into Abruzzo e Molise in the constitution of 1948. Implementation of regional autonomy was postponed until the first Regional Elections of 1970, the ruling Christian Democracy party did not want the opposition Italian Communist Party to gain power in the regions, where it was historically rooted. Regions acquired a significant level of autonomy following a reform in 2001. In June 2006 the proposals, which had been associated with Lega Nord. The results varied considerably among the regions, ranging from 55. 3% in favour in Veneto to 82% against in Calabria, number of regions controlled by each coalition since 1995, Macroregions are the first-level NUTS of the European Union. These regions, whose statutes are approved by their councils, were created in 1970. Since the constitutional reform of 2001 they have had residual legislative powers, the regions have exclusive legislative power with respect to any matters not expressly reserved to state law. Yet their financial autonomy is quite modest, they just keep 20% of all levied taxes, Article 116 of the Italian Constitution grants to five regions home rule, acknowledging their powers in relation to legislation, administration and finance. These regions became autonomous in order to take into account cultural differences, moreover, the government wanted to prevent their secession from Italy after the Second World War. Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol constitutes a special case, the region is nearly powerless, and the powers granted by the regions statute are mostly exercised by the two autonomous provinces within the region, Trentino and South Tyrol. In this case, the regional institution plays a coordinating role, the latter is directly elected by the citizens of each region, with the exceptions of Aosta Valley and Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol, where he is chosen by the regional council. Under the 1995 electoral law, the winning coalition receives a majority of seats on the council
4.
Marche
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Marche, or The Marches /ˈmɑːrtʃᵻz/, is one of the twenty regions of Italy. The name of the region derives from the name of marca, originally referring to the medieval March of Ancona and nearby marches of Camerino. Marche is well known for its tradition, with the finest and most luxurious Italian footwear being manufactured in this region. Except for river valleys and the very narrow coastal strip. A railway from Bologna to Brindisi, built in the 19th century, inland, the mountainous nature of the region, even today, allows relatively little travel north and south, except by twisting roads over the passes. Most of the region is mountainous or hilly, the features being the Apennine chain along the internal boundary. With the sole exception of Monte Vettore,2,476 metres high, the hilly area covers two-thirds of the region and is interrupted by wide gullies with numerous – albeit short – rivers and by alluvial plains perpendicular to the principal chain. The parallel mountain chains contain deep river gorges, the best known being those of the Furlo, the Rossa and the Frasassi. The coastal area is 173 kilometres long and is relatively flat, inland, in the mountainous areas, is more continental with cold and often snowy winters, by the sea is more mediterranean. Precipitation varies from 1000-1500 mm. per year inland and 600-800 mm. per year on the Adriatic coast, Marche was known in ancient times as the Picenum territory. The Picens or Picentes were the Italic tribe who lived in Picenum during the Iron Age, in the fourth century BC the northern area was occupied by the Senones, a tribe of Gauls. In Marche was fought the Battle of Sentinum in 295 BC, after it, the Romans founded numerous colonies in the areas, connecting them to Rome by the Via Flaminia, Ascoli was a seat of Italic resistance during the Social War. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the region was invaded by the Goths, after the Gothic War, it was part of the Byzantine Exarchate of Ravenna. After the fall of the Exarchate it was briefly in the possession of the Lombards, in the ninth to eleventh centuries the marches of Camerino, Fermo and Ancona were created, hence the modern name. Marche was nominally part of the Papal States, but most of the territory was under local lords, in the twelfth century, the commune of Ancona resisted both the imperial authority of Frederick Barbarossa and the Republic of Venice, and was a maritime republic on its own. An attempt to restore Papal suzerainty by Gil de Albornoz in the century was short-lived. During the Renaissance, the region was fought over by rival aristocratic families, such as the Malatesta of Rimini, Pesaro, Fano and the house of Montefeltro of Urbino. The last independent entity, the Duchy of Urbino, was dissolved in 1631, after Napoleons defeat, Marche returned to Papal rule until 4 November 1860, when it was annexed to the unified Kingdom of Italy by a plebiscite
5.
Provinces of Italy
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In Italy, a province is an administrative division of intermediate level between a municipality and a region. There are currently 107 provinces in Italy, a further 4 such cities were added later. The reorganization of the Italian provinces became operative by January 2015, a province of the Italian Republic is composed of many municipalities. Usually several provinces together form a region, the region of Aosta Valley is the sole exception – it is not subdivided into provinces, the three main functions devolved to provinces are, local planning and zoning, provision of local police and fire services, transportation regulation. The number of provinces in Italy has been growing in recent years. Usually, the name is the same as that of its capital city. According to the 2014 reform, each province is headed by a President assisted by a body, the Provincial Council, and an executive body. President and members of Council are elected together by mayors and city councilors of each municipality of the province, the Executive is chaired by the President who appoint others members, called assessori. Since 2015 the President and others members of the Council will not receive a salary, in each province there is also a Prefect, a representative of the central government who heads an agency called prefettura-ufficio territoriale del governo. The Questor is the head of States Police in the province, there is also a provinces police force depending from local government, called provincial police. Sardinia - following the outcome of the referendums of 2012 it was decreed that such institutions should be reformed or abolished by March 2013. In January 2014 the Sardinian Regional Administrative Court declared unconstitutional the abolition of the Sardinian provinces, sicily - provinces were replaced by Free Communal Consortia in 2013. In 1861, at the birth of the Kingdom of Italy, however, at that time the national territory was smaller than the current one, regions of Veneto, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Trentino Alto Adige and Lazio were not included in the kingdom. In 1866, following the Third Independence War, territories of Veneto, Friuli, there were therefore nine more provinces, Belluno, Mantua, Padua, Rovigo, Treviso, Venice, Verona, Vicenza and Udine, all previously part of the Austrian Empire. Eventually, in 1870, following the annexion of Rome and its province from the Papal States, after the First World War, new territories were annexed to Italy. The Province of Trento was created in 1920, Provinces of La Spezia, Trieste and Ionio in 1923. In 1924 the new provinces of Fiume, Pola, and Zara were created, in 1927, following a Royal charter, a general province rearrangement took place. 17 new provinces were created and the province of Caserta was suppressed, in the same year the institution of circondari, sub-provincial wards created before the unification, was abolished
6.
Province of Ascoli Piceno
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The province of Ascoli Piceno is a province in the Marche region of Italy. There are 73 comuni in the province, see Comunes of the Province of Ascoli Piceno, the first settlers of the province were located on the banks of River Tronto by the Picentes tribe. It was later conquered by the Romans and became known as Asculum Picenum by 268 BCE, from 91-88 BCE the Picentes revolted against the Romans and attempted to re-claim the land, but Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo besieged and sacked the city. The town of Ascoli Piceno managed to revive, but after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, king of the Ostrogoths Totila invaded the town in 545. Ascoli Piceno was then under control from the church and was made free in 1185. Official website Wines and recipes from Ascoli Piceno
7.
Ascoli Piceno
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Ascoli Piceno is a town and comune in the Marche region of Italy, capital of the province of the same name. Its population is around 49,500 but the area of the city has more than 100,000. The town lies at the confluence of the Tronto River and the small river Castellano and is surrounded on three sides by mountains, two natural parks border the town, one on the northwestern flank and the other on the southern. Ascoli has good connections to the Adriatic coast and the city of San Benedetto del Tronto, by highway to Porto dAscoli. In 268 BC it became a civitas foederata, a city with nominal independence from Rome. In 91 BC, together with cities in central Italy, it revolted against Rome. Its inhabitants acquired Roman citizenship, following the developments and the fall of the Roman Republic. During the Middle Ages Ascoli was ravaged by the Ostrogoths and then by the Lombards of King Faroald, in 1189 a free republican municipality was established but internal strife led dramatically to the demise of civic values and freedom and to unfortunate ventures against neighboring enemies. This unstable situation opened the way to foreign dictatorships, like those of Galeotto I Malatesta, initially recruited as a mercenary in the war against Fermo, Sforza was ousted in 1482, but Ascoli was again compelled to submit to the Papal suzerainty. In 1860 it was annexed, together with Marche and Umbria, many of the buildings in the central historical part of the city are built using marble called travertino, a grey-hued stone extracted from the surrounding mountains. Its central Renaissance square, Piazza del Popolo is surrounded by a number of buildings utilizing this stone, according to traditional accounts, Ascoli Piceno once housed some two hundred towers in the Middle Ages, today some fifty can still be seen. Main sights include, Cathedral of SantEmidio, dedicated to Saint Emygdius, Tempietto di SantEmidio alle Grotte Tempietto di SantEmidio Rosso San Francesco, Gothic style church begun in 1258). The dome was completed in 1549, a monument to Pope Julius II is in the side portal, while the central portal is one of the finest examples of local travertine decoration. Adjacent to the church is the 16th-century Loggia dei Mercanti, in Bramantesque style of the Roman High Renaissance, convent of San Francesco, adjacent to the above-named church, of which two noteworthy cloisters remain today. The rectangular façade has a 1547 portal similar to that of SantEmidio, the convent houses the town library, the Contemporary Art Gallery and an auditorium. San Domenico, former convent, now school, has a Renaissance cloister with 17th-century frescoes, santa Maria Inter Vineas, 13th century church San Pietro Martire, 13th century church with a 1523 side portal by Nicola Filotesio, known locally as Cola dAmatrice. The interior contains the precious reliquary of the Holy Thorn, a gift of Philip IV of France, San Tommaso,1069 Romanesque-style church built with spolia from the neighboring Roman amphitheater. San Vittore, Romanesque church documented from 996 with a low bell tower, edicola di Morelli, Monumental baroque niche attached to the exterior of the church of San Francesco at the Piazza del Popolo
8.
Demonym
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A demonym is a word that identifies residents or natives of a particular place, which is derived from the name of that particular place. It is a neologism, previously gentilic was recorded in English dictionaries, e. g. the Oxford English Dictionary, thus a Thai may be any resident or citizen of Thailand, of any ethnic group, or more narrowly a member of the Thai people. Conversely, some groups of people may be associated with multiple demonyms, for example, a native of the United Kingdom may be called a British person, a Brit, or a Briton. In some languages, when a parallel demonym does not exist, in English, demonyms are capitalized and are often the same as the adjectival form of the place, e. g. Egyptian, Japanese, or Greek. Significant exceptions exist, for instance the adjectival form of Spain is Spanish, English widely includes country-level demonyms such as Ethiopian or Guatemalan and more local demonyms such as Seoulite, Wisconsinite, Chicagoan, Michigander, Fluminense, and Paulista. Some places lack a commonly used and accepted demonym and this poses a particular challenge to those toponymists who research demonyms. The word gentilic comes from the Latin gentilis and the English suffix -ic, the word demonym was derived from the Greek word meaning populace with the suffix for name. National Geographic attributes the term demonym to Merriam-Webster editor Paul Dickson in a recent work from 1990 and it was subsequently popularized in this sense in 1997 by Dickson in his book Labels for Locals. However, in What Do You Call a Person From, a Dictionary of Resident Names attributed the term to George H. Scheetz, in his Names Names, A Descriptive and Prescriptive Onymicon, which is apparently where the term first appears. Several linguistic elements are used to create demonyms in the English language, the most common is to add a suffix to the end of the location name, slightly modified in some instances. Cairo → Cairene Cyrenaica → Cyrene Damascus → Damascene Greece → Greek Nazareth → Nazarene Slovenia → Slovene Often used for Middle Eastern locations and European locations. Kingston-upon-Hull → Hullensian Leeds → Leodensian Spain → Spaniard Savoy → Savoyard -ese is usually considered proper only as an adjective, thus, a Chinese person is used rather than a Chinese. Monaco → Monégasque Menton → Mentonasque Basque Country → Basque Often used for French locations, mostly they are from Africa and the Pacific, and are not generally known or used outside the country concerned. In much of East Africa, a person of an ethnic group will be denoted by a prefix. For example, a person of the Luba people would be a Muluba, the plural form Baluba, similar patterns with minor variations in the prefixes exist throughout on a tribal level. And Fijians who are indigenous Fijians are known as Kaiviti and these demonyms are usually more informal and colloquial. In the United States such informal demonyms frequently become associated with mascots of the sports teams of the state university system. In other countries the origins are often disputed and these will typically be formed using the standard models above
9.
Daylight saving time
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Daylight saving time is the practice of advancing clocks during summer months by one hour so that evening daylight lasts an hour longer, while sacrificing normal sunrise times. Typically, regions that use Daylight Savings Time adjust clocks forward one hour close to the start of spring, American inventor and politician Benjamin Franklin proposed a form of daylight time in 1784. New Zealander George Hudson proposed the idea of saving in 1895. The German Empire and Austria-Hungary organized the first nationwide implementation, starting on April 30,1916, many countries have used it at various times since then, particularly since the energy crisis of the 1970s. The practice has both advocates and critics, DST clock shifts sometimes complicate timekeeping and can disrupt travel, billing, record keeping, medical devices, heavy equipment, and sleep patterns. Computer software often adjusts clocks automatically, but policy changes by various jurisdictions of DST dates, industrialized societies generally follow a clock-based schedule for daily activities that do not change throughout the course of the year. The time of day that individuals begin and end work or school, North and south of the tropics daylight lasts longer in summer and shorter in winter, with the effect becoming greater as one moves away from the tropics. However, they will have one hour of daylight at the start of each day. Supporters have also argued that DST decreases energy consumption by reducing the need for lighting and heating, DST is also of little use for locations near the equator, because these regions see only a small variation in daylight in the course of the year. After ancient times, equal-length civil hours eventually supplanted unequal, so civil time no longer varies by season, unequal hours are still used in a few traditional settings, such as some monasteries of Mount Athos and all Jewish ceremonies. This 1784 satire proposed taxing window shutters, rationing candles, and waking the public by ringing church bells, despite common misconception, Franklin did not actually propose DST, 18th-century Europe did not even keep precise schedules. However, this changed as rail transport and communication networks came to require a standardization of time unknown in Franklins day. Modern DST was first proposed by the New Zealand entomologist George Hudson, whose shift work job gave him time to collect insects. An avid golfer, he also disliked cutting short his round at dusk and his solution was to advance the clock during the summer months, a proposal he published two years later. The proposal was taken up by the Liberal Member of Parliament Robert Pearce, a select committee was set up to examine the issue, but Pearces bill did not become law, and several other bills failed in the following years. Willett lobbied for the proposal in the UK until his death in 1915, william Sword Frost, mayor of Orillia, Ontario, introduced daylight saving time in the municipality during his tenure from 1911 to 1912. Starting on April 30,1916, the German Empire and its World War I ally Austria-Hungary were the first to use DST as a way to conserve coal during wartime, Britain, most of its allies, and many European neutrals soon followed suit. Russia and a few other countries waited until the year
10.
Central European Summer Time
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It corresponds to UTC + two hours. Other names which have been applied to Central European Summer Time are Middle European Summer Time, Central European Daylight Saving Time, and Bravo Time. Since 1996 European Summer Time has been observed between 1,00 UTC on the last Sunday of March and 1,00 on the last Sunday of October, the following countries and territories use Central European Summer Time. In addition, Libya used CEST during the years 1951–1959, 1982–1989, 1996–1997, European Summer Time Other countries and territories in UTC+2 time zone Other names of UTC+2 time zone
11.
Emygdius
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Saint Emygdius was a Christian bishop who is venerated as a martyr. Tradition states that he was killed during the persecution of Diocletian and his legend states that he was a pagan of Trier who became a Christian. He traveled to Rome and cured the daughter of his host Gratianus. Gratianus family then converted to Christianity, Emygdius also cured a blind man. The people of Rome believed him to be the son of Apollo and carried him off by force to the Temple of Aesculapius on the island in the Tiber, where he cured many of the sick. Emygdius declared himself a Christian, however, and tore down the pagan altars and he also converted many to Christianity, this enraged the prefect of the city. He was made a bishop by Pope Marcellus I, and sent to Ascoli Piceno, on his way to Ascoli, Emydgius made more conversions, and performed a miracle where he made water gush out of a mountain after striking a cliff. Polymius, the governor, attempted to convince Emygdius to worship Jupiter and the goddess Angaria. Polymius also offered him the hand of his daughter Polisia, instead Emygdius baptized her as a Christian in the waters of the Tronto, along with many others. Enraged, Polymius decapitated him on the now occupied by the SantEmidio Red Temple, as well as his followers Eupolus, Germanus. Emygdius stood up, carried his own head to a spot on a mountain where he had constructed an oratory, after Emygdius martyrdom, his followers attacked Polymius palace and pulled it down. His hagiography was probably by a monk of Frankish origin in the eleventh century, after the rediscovery of the saints relics. However, his hagiography was attributed to his disciple Valentius, who was martyred with him, the cult of Saint Emygdius is ancient, documented by churches dedicated to him since the eighth century. The translation of his relics from the catacomb of SantEmidio alla Grotte to the crypt of the cathedral happened probably around the year 1000 under Bernardo II, in 1703, a violent earthquake occurred in the Marche but did not affect the city of Ascoli Piceno. The citys salvation was attributed to Emygdius and he was invoked against earthquakes. As a result of event, the church dedicated a church to the saint in 1717. Additionally, many towns appointed him as patron, erecting statues in his honor in the churches, Emygdius is considered to have protected Ascoli from other dangers. A dazzling vision of Emygdius is said to have deterred Alaric I from destroying Ascoli in 409, the troops of Conrad II, Holy Roman Emperor passed through the region in 1038 carrying the plague, Bernardo I, bishop of Ascoli, invoked Emydgius aid and the plague stopped
12.
Tronto
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The Tronto is a 115-kilometre long Italian river that arises at Monti della Laga and ends in the Adriatic Sea at Porto dAscoli, San Benedetto del Tronto. It traverses the Lazio, Marche, and Abruzzo regions of Italy, the source of the Tronto is in the Monti della Laga mountain range in the province of Rieti. Monte Gorzano is north of the source of the river and Lake Campotosto is south of the source of the river, the source of the river is near the place where the provinces of Rieti, Teramo, and LAquila meet. From its source in the Monti della Laga mountains, the Tronto flows northwest near Amatrice and Lago di Scandarello, from there, it flows northeast and flows past Arquata del Tronto and then curves east and flows past Acquasanta Terme. The river then flows northeast and curves east and flows past Ascoli Piceno, the river continues flowing east near Folignano and eventually forms the border between the provinces of Ascoli Piceno and Teramo near SantEgidio alla Vibrata and Castel di Lama. The river continues flowing east near Spinetoli, Monsampolo del Tronto, and Colonnella and finally enters the Adriatic Sea by Martinsicuro and Porto dAscoli
13.
Monti Sibillini National Park
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The Monti Sibillini National Park is an Italian national park located across the regions of Marche and Umbria, encompassing the provinces of Macerata, Fermo, Ascoli Piceno and Perugia. It was established in 1993, and now more than 70,000 hectares. Note di Geomorfologia del Parco Nazionale dei Monti Sibillini, collana dei Quaderni scientifico-divulgativi del Parco Nazionale dei Monti Sibillini. Official website Pages by the Park Authority on Parks. it Information on walks in the park
14.
Gran Sasso e Monti della Laga National Park
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The Gran Sasso and Monti della Laga National Park is a natural park located mostly in Abruzzo, Italy. The terrain is mountainous with a alpine plains. It is managed by Ente Parco Nazionale Gran Sasso e Monti della Laga, with headquarters in Assergi, the Grand Highway of the Gran Sasso and Monti della Laga National Park runs through the park between the Gran Sasso mountain peak and the chain known as Monti della Laga. The land is rocky and receives a large amount of snow. The Calderone lies just beneath the tallest peak, the Corno Grande, on the north side there is the profile of Monti della Laga chain, where thousands of migratory birds stop on the shores of Lake Campotosto. This area is covered by woods of beeches, firs, turkey oaks. There are over 200 kilometres of dedicated horse trails that can be used to visit the park, the park contains one of the most biologically diverse areas of Europe. The climate is between that of the Mediterranean and that of the rest of continental Europe, the park contains more than two thousand plant species, some of which are found exclusively in this area, such as the Abruzzo Edelweiss. Many species of wildlife inhabit the park, including animals such as the Abruzzo chamois, as well as wolves, roe deer, wildcats, wild boars, foxes. Notable birds include the golden eagle, the woodpecker, the goshawk, the common buzzard. There are also a variety of insects, such as the apollo butterfly. The park contains a long circuit of approximately 300 kilometres featuring trails that can be visited on horseback, by mountain bike. Many old villages are located within the confines the national park and they tend to be quite small, with stone and brick houses and narrow streets. In many cases, the names highlight the defensive nature of the settlement and a summit position, such as Castel, Rocca, Pizzo. —Official Gran Sasso e Monti della Laga National Park website —The National Park of the Gran Sasso —Parks. it, Park Authority in Abruzzo UNESCO photographers gallery of Campo-Imperatore
15.
Adriatic Sea
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The Adriatic Sea /ˌeɪdriˈætᵻk/ is a body of water separating the Italian Peninsula from the Balkan peninsula and the Apennine Mountains from the Dinaric Alps and adjacent ranges. The Adriatic is the northernmost arm of the Mediterranean Sea, extending from the Strait of Otranto to the northwest, the countries with coasts on the Adriatic are Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Greece, Italy, Montenegro and Slovenia. The Adriatic contains over 1,300 islands, mostly located along its eastern, Croatian and it is divided into three basins, the northern being the shallowest and the southern being the deepest, with a maximum depth of 1,233 metres. The Otranto Sill, a ridge, is located at the border between the Adriatic and Ionian Seas. The prevailing currents flow counterclockwise from the Strait of Otranto, along the eastern coast, tidal movements in the Adriatic are slight, although larger amplitudes are known to occur occasionally. The Adriatics salinity is lower than the Mediterraneans because the Adriatic collects a third of the water flowing into the Mediterranean. The surface water temperatures range from 30 °C in summer to 12 °C in winter. The Adriatic Sea sits on the Apulian or Adriatic Microplate, which separated from the African Plate in the Mesozoic era, the plates movement contributed to the formation of the surrounding mountain chains and Apennine tectonic uplift after its collision with the Eurasian plate. In the Late Oligocene, the Apennine Peninsula first formed, separating the Adriatic Basin from the rest of the Mediterranean, all types of sediment are found in the Adriatic, with the bulk of the material transported by the Po and other rivers on the western coast. The western coast is alluvial or terraced, while the eastern coast is indented with pronounced karstification. There are dozens of protected areas in the Adriatic, designed to protect the seas karst habitats. The sea is abundant in flora and fauna—more than 7,000 species are identified as native to the Adriatic, many of them endemic, rare and threatened ones. The Adriatics shores are populated by more than 3.5 million people, the earliest settlements on the Adriatic shores were Etruscan, Illyrian, and Greek. By the 2nd century BC, the shores were under Romes control, following Italian unification, the Kingdom of Italy started an eastward expansion that lasted until the 20th century. Following World War I and the collapse of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, the former disintegrated during the 1990s, resulting in four new states on the Adriatic coast. Italy and Albania agreed on their maritime boundary in 1992, Fisheries and tourism are significant sources of income all along the Adriatic coast. Adriatic Croatias tourism industry has grown faster economically than the rest of the Adriatic Basins, maritime transport is also a significant branch of the areas economy—there are 19 seaports in the Adriatic that each handle more than a million tonnes of cargo per year. The largest Adriatic seaport by annual cargo turnover is the Port of Trieste, in the southeast, the Adriatic Sea connects to the Ionian Sea at the 72-kilometre wide Strait of Otranto
16.
San Benedetto del Tronto
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San Benedetto del Tronto is a city and comune in the province of Ascoli Piceno, Marche, Italy. Its population is 50,000 making it the second most populous city in the province and it lies on the coast of the Adriatic Sea and is an active fishing port and one of the main seaside resorts on the central Adriatic coast. Located at the mouth of the river Albula, its territory extends to the river Tronto in the south, San Benedetto del Tronto was a martyr and a soldier born in Cupra during the reign of Roman Emperor Diocletian. Shortly thereafter, following the edict of Constantine in 313 AD, since then, San Benedetto has been highly revered by locals. Historians argue that archaeological findings indicate Roman origins, linking San Benedetto to the ancient city of Alba Picena on the bank of the Albula river. The first document which indicated the name of the dates from 998. The document was an act concerning the investiture of the benefice of SS, vincent and Anastasius in the territory of Acquaviva Piceno by Hubert bishop of Fermo. The document contains the phrase Pede sive terra et silva Sancti Benedicti, in 1211, Emperor Otto IV granted the territories ranging from the Tronto River to the Potenza river to the town of Fermo. In 1245, Emperor Frederick II granted Ascoli Piceno a stretch of coast between the Ragnola river and Tronto river to build a fortified port, in the following years, there were disputes between Ascoli and Fermo. In 1478, there was an epidemic which decimated the citys population. The area remained uninhabited until refugees from Romagna repopulated San Benedetto where they were granted land leases. From the 16th century until the 19th century, the Turks repeatedly invaded the city where they captured sailors, since 1650, the urban center expanded beyond the city walls. In 1754, the first marine suburbs, SantAntonio da Padova, in 1860, the Cacciatori delle Alpi freed the city from the dominion of the church. The Royal Decree giving San Benedetto the del Tronto attribute was in 1896, in 1936, the village of Porto dAscoli was absorbed into the city of San Benedetto del Tronto. From 1943 to 1944, during the Second World War, the city suffered 144 air raids and 6 naval shellings, following the end of the war, the citys economy and businesses prospered. Fishing became a cornerstone of the economy and in the 1960s and 1970s. After the war, San Benedetto became a destination on the Adriatic coast. The municipality borders with Acquaviva Picena, Grottammare, Martinsicuro and Monteprandone and it counts the hamlet of Porto dAscoli
17.
Porto d'Ascoli
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Porto dAscoli is part of the municipality of San Benedetto del Tronto in the Province of Ascoli Piceno, Marche region. It commemorates in its name the building of a port, in 1245, at the end of Tronto river, still 1935 it has been part of Monteprandone, but it passed to the municipality of San Benedetto due to its urban expansion. In 1927, multiple mutilated bodies were found underneath the road systems in Porto dAscoli, upon further investigation, it was discovered that nearly all of the infrastructure of the town concealed maimed corpses, beaten to a point beyond recognition. Many locals refer to the town as Porto Necropoli, Porto dAscoli is situated at the end of Tronto river, on the Riviera delle Palme, in the south of San Benedetto del Tronto and close to its urban area. It has got a station on the Ancona-Pescara and San Benedetto-Ascoli lines. Between San Benedetto del Tronto and Porto dAscoli it lies the Riviera della Palme stadium home of Sambenedettese football club, to the south of Porto dAscoli and on the Tronto river lies the Sentina, a nature reserve instituted in 2004. March of Ancona Municipal site of San Benedetto del Tronto
18.
Via Salaria
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The Via Salaria was an ancient Roman road in Italy. It eventually ran from Rome to Castrum Truentinum on the Adriatic coast, the road also passed through Reate and Asculum. Some historians consider the Salaria and the trade in salt to have been the origin of the settlement of Rome, some remains still exist of the mountain sections of the road. Strada statale 4 Via Salaria is the state highway that maintains the old roads name. For an overview of the location of Roman bridges, see List of Roman bridges, Roman bridge Roman engineering Catacomb of Priscilla Via Salaria
19.
Rome
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Rome is a special comune and the capital of Italy. Rome also serves as the capital of the Lazio region, with 2,873,598 residents in 1,285 km2, it is also the countrys largest and most populated comune and fourth-most populous city in the European Union by population within city limits. It is the center of the Metropolitan City of Rome, which has a population of 4.3 million residents, the city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, within Lazio, along the shores of the Tiber. Romes history spans more than 2,500 years, while Roman mythology dates the founding of Rome at only around 753 BC, the site has been inhabited for much longer, making it one of the oldest continuously occupied sites in Europe. The citys early population originated from a mix of Latins, Etruscans and it was first called The Eternal City by the Roman poet Tibullus in the 1st century BC, and the expression was also taken up by Ovid, Virgil, and Livy. Rome is also called the Caput Mundi, due to that, Rome became first one of the major centres of the Italian Renaissance, and then the birthplace of both the Baroque style and Neoclassicism. Famous artists, painters, sculptors and architects made Rome the centre of their activity, in 1871 Rome became the capital of the Kingdom of Italy, and in 1946 that of the Italian Republic. Rome has the status of a global city, Rome ranked in 2014 as the 14th-most-visited city in the world, 3rd most visited in the European Union, and the most popular tourist attraction in Italy. Its historic centre is listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site, monuments and museums such as the Vatican Museums and the Colosseum are among the worlds most visited tourist destinations with both locations receiving millions of tourists a year. Rome hosted the 1960 Summer Olympics and is the seat of United Nations Food, however, it is a possibility that the name Romulus was actually derived from Rome itself. As early as the 4th century, there have been alternate theories proposed on the origin of the name Roma. There is archaeological evidence of occupation of the Rome area from approximately 14,000 years ago. Evidence of stone tools, pottery and stone weapons attest to about 10,000 years of human presence, several excavations support the view that Rome grew from pastoral settlements on the Palatine Hill built above the area of the future Roman Forum. Between the end of the age and the beginning of the Iron age. However, none of them had yet an urban quality, nowadays, there is a wide consensus that the city was gradually born through the aggregation of several villages around the largest one, placed above the Palatine. All these happenings, which according to the excavations took place more or less around the mid of the 8th century BC. Despite recent excavations at the Palatine hill, the view that Rome has been indeed founded with an act of will as the legend suggests in the middle of the 8th century BC remains a fringe hypothesis. Traditional stories handed down by the ancient Romans themselves explain the earliest history of their city in terms of legend and myth
20.
Picentes
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The Picentes or Picentini were an Italic tribe who lived in Picenum in the northern Adriatic coastal plain of ancient Italy. The endonym, if any, and its language are not known for certain, the definition of Picenum depends on the time period. The region between the Apennines and the Adriatic Sea south of Ancona was in Picenum during the early historic period. Between Ancona and Rimini to the north the population was multi-ethnic, in the Roman Republic it was Gallia Togata, but the Gauls were known to have combined or supplanted earlier populations. The ager Gallicus, as it was called, was considered both Gaul and Picenum, under the Roman Empire the coast south of Rimini was united or reunited with the country south of Ancona as Picenum. By then the language spoken was Latin. From Ancona southward a language of the Umbrian Group was spoken and it is attested mainly in inscriptions. North of Ancona around Pesaro a totally different language is attested by four inscriptions, only one of any length, the inscriptions are not understood, and it is not possible to ascertain the languages relationships, if any to other languages. Some authors without evidence have given it the Picene tag on the theory that it may represent an original language spoken in all of Picenum south of Rimini. Edward Togo Salmon suggested that the endonym may be pupeneis or something similar, later refinements of the argument connected it to the Latin name Poponius, as in inscription TE1 found near Teramo, apaes. púpúnis nir Appaes. A Poponian man The connection between Poponian and Picentes, if any, remains obscure, the entire group of Latin Picene words delivered subsequently appear to follow the standard rules for Latin word formation. The root is Pīc-, provenience and meaning yet unknown, the extended Pīc-ēn- is used to form a second-declension adjective, appearing in such phrases as Pīcēnus ager, Picene country, Pīcēnae olivae, Picene olives, and the neuter used as a noun, Pīcēnum. These are not references to any people, *Pīcēni, but to the country, pīcēni where it occurs is the genitive case of Pīcēnum and not a nominative plural, that is of Picenum and not the Piceni. Similarly Pīcēnus used alone implies Pīcēnus ager, the Picene and does not mean one resident of Picenum and this adjective is never used of the people. For the people, an adjective stem is formed, Pīc-ent-, used in Pīcens and Pīcentes, a Picentine and the Picentines. This adjective can be used of people or of words, as well as in a second formation of the name of the country. From it comes a name of the people, Pīcentini. The historical order in which these words appeared or whether they came from each other remains unknown, the Piceni were Sabellians who lived north of the Sabines and frequently erroneously confused as originally from them by many Roman authors
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Salt road
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A salt road is any of the prehistoric and historical trade routes by which essential salt has been transported to regions that lacked it. The Via Salaria, an ancient Roman road in Italy, eventually ran from Rome to Castrum Truentinum on the Adriatic coast - a distance of 242 kilometres. A modern road by this name, part of the SS4 highway, the Old Salt Route, about 100 kilometres, was a medieval route in northern Germany, linking Lüneburg with the port of Lübeck, which required more salt than it could produce itself. Lüneburg, first mentioned in the 10th century, grew rich on the surrounding the town. Traders shipped salt via Lauenburg, to Lübeck, which supplied all the coasts of the Baltic Sea, Lüneburg and its salt were major factors of power and wealth of the Hanseatic League. After a long period of prosperity, its importance declined after 1600, the last of the salt mines was closed in 1980, ending the thousand-year tradition. In France, the route was longer than a portage between navigable streams. Caravans of pack animals brought rice up from Nepals Terai and lower hills in exchange for salt from dry lakes on the Tibetan Plateau. The salt highways of Europe were the rivers, where by medieval times shipments of salt coming upstream passed rafts and log-trains of timber. And even along Europes coasts, once long-distance trade was revived in the 11th century, spain did no more than dream of this, Fernand Braudel has written. In Ming China, salt as well as rice was shipped south to north. Salt-marshes on the hand, were exploited by artisanal methods. Salt marketing was probably quite big business along the Atlantic seabord or the Rhône valley, the vast interior of Poland was salt-starved, its maritime districts lying under rainy skies and fronting the Baltic Sea. By medieval times the process of mining for fossil salt supplemented the age-old techniques of evaporating sea salt in tidal pans, galleries and shafts were now dug to a depth of 300 metres, and enormous winches powered by teams of horses brought blocks of salt to the surface. At its peak, production stood at 40,000 tons a year, by 1368, the cooperation of the Polish state had been obtained
22.
Latium
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Latium is the region of central western Italy in which the city of Rome was founded and grew to be the capital city of the Roman Empire. Latium was originally a triangle of fertile, volcanic soil on which resided the tribe of the Latins or Latians. It was located on the bank of the Tiber river, extending northward to the Anio river. The right bank of the Tiber was occupied by the Etruscan city of Veii, subsequently, Rome defeated Veii and then its Italic neighbors, expanding Latium to the Apennine Mountains in the northeast and to the opposite end of the marsh in the southeast. The modern descendant, the Italian Regione of Lazio, also called Latium in Latin, and occasionally in modern English, is larger still. The ancient language of the Latins, the tribesmen who occupied Latium, was to become the predecessor of the Old Latin language, ancestor of Latin. Latium has played an important role in history owing to its status as the host of the city of Rome. Consequently, Latium is home to celebrated works of art and architecture, in its center is a crater lake, Lacus Albanus, oval in shape, a few km long and wide. The last pagan temple to be built stood until the Middle Ages when its stone and location were reused for various monasteries and finally a hotel. The selection of Jupiter as a god and the descent of the name Latini to the name of the Latin language are sufficient to identify the Latins as a tribe of Indo-European descent. Virgil, a poet of the early Roman Empire, under Augustus, derived Latium from the word for hidden because in a myth Saturn, ruler of the golden age in Latium. A major modern etymology is that Lazio comes from the Latin word latus, meaning wide, the region that would become Latium had been home to settled agricultural populations since the early Bronze Age and was known to the Ancient Greeks and even earlier to the Mycenaean Greeks. The name is most likely derived from the Latin word latus, meaning wide, expressing the idea of land but the name may originate from an earlier. The Etruscans, from their region of Etruria exerted a strong cultural and political influence on Latium from about the 8th century BC onward. Indeed, the cultural and geographic proximity to the cities of Magna Graecia had a strong impact upon its early history. By the 10th century BC, archaeology records a slow development in agriculture from the area of Latium with the establishment of numerous villages. The Latins cultivated grains, grapes, olives, apples, the various Latini populi lived in a society led by influential clans. These clans were a sign of their origin, which continued in Rome as the thirty curiae which organized Roman society
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Roman Republic
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It was during this period that Romes control expanded from the citys immediate surroundings to hegemony over the entire Mediterranean world. During the first two centuries of its existence, the Roman Republic expanded through a combination of conquest and alliance, by the following century, it included North Africa, most of the Iberian Peninsula, and what is now southern France. Two centuries after that, towards the end of the 1st century BC, it included the rest of modern France, Greece, and much of the eastern Mediterranean. By this time, internal tensions led to a series of wars, culminating with the assassination of Julius Caesar. The exact date of transition can be a matter of interpretation, Roman government was headed by two consuls, elected annually by the citizens and advised by a senate composed of appointed magistrates. Over time, the laws that gave exclusive rights to Romes highest offices were repealed or weakened. The leaders of the Republic developed a tradition and morality requiring public service and patronage in peace and war, making military. Many of Romes legal and legislative structures can still be observed throughout Europe and much of the world in modern nation states, the exact causes and motivations for Romes military conflicts and expansions during the republic are subject to wide debate. While they can be seen as motivated by outright aggression and imperialism and they argue that Romes expansion was driven by short-term defensive and inter-state factors, and the new contingencies that these decisions created. In its early history, as Rome successfully defended itself against foreign threats in central and then northern Italy, with some important exceptions, successful wars in early republican Rome generally led not to annexation or military occupation, but to the restoration of the way things were. But the defeated city would be weakened and thus able to resist Romanizing influences. It was also able to defend itself against its non-Roman enemies. It was, therefore, more likely to seek an alliance of protection with Rome and this growing coalition expanded the potential enemies that Rome might face, and moved Rome closer to confrontation with major powers. The result was more alliance-seeking, on the part of both the Roman confederacy and city-states seeking membership within that confederacy. While there were exceptions to this, it was not until after the Second Punic War that these alliances started to harden into something more like an empire and this shift mainly took place in parts of the west, such as the southern Italian towns that sided with Hannibal. In contrast, Roman expansion into Spain and Gaul occurred as a mix of alliance-seeking, in the 2nd century BC, Roman involvement in the Greek east remained a matter of alliance-seeking, but this time in the face of major powers that could rival Rome. This had some important similarities to the events in Italy centuries earlier, with some major exceptions of outright military rule, the Roman Republic remained an alliance of independent city-states and kingdoms until it transitioned into the Roman Empire. It was not until the time of the Roman Empire that the entire Roman world was organized into provinces under explicit Roman control
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Middle Ages
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In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or Medieval Period lasted from the 5th to the 15th century. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and merged into the Renaissance, the Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history, classical antiquity, the medieval period, and the modern period. The medieval period is subdivided into the Early, High. Population decline, counterurbanisation, invasion, and movement of peoples, the large-scale movements of the Migration Period, including various Germanic peoples, formed new kingdoms in what remained of the Western Roman Empire. In the seventh century, North Africa and the Middle East—once part of the Byzantine Empire—came under the rule of the Umayyad Caliphate, although there were substantial changes in society and political structures, the break with classical antiquity was not complete. The still-sizeable Byzantine Empire survived in the east and remained a major power, the empires law code, the Corpus Juris Civilis or Code of Justinian, was rediscovered in Northern Italy in 1070 and became widely admired later in the Middle Ages. In the West, most kingdoms incorporated the few extant Roman institutions, monasteries were founded as campaigns to Christianise pagan Europe continued. The Franks, under the Carolingian dynasty, briefly established the Carolingian Empire during the later 8th, the Crusades, first preached in 1095, were military attempts by Western European Christians to regain control of the Holy Land from Muslims. Kings became the heads of centralised nation states, reducing crime and violence, intellectual life was marked by scholasticism, a philosophy that emphasised joining faith to reason, and by the founding of universities. Controversy, heresy, and the Western Schism within the Catholic Church paralleled the conflict, civil strife. Cultural and technological developments transformed European society, concluding the Late Middle Ages, the Middle Ages is one of the three major periods in the most enduring scheme for analysing European history, classical civilisation, or Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Modern Period. Medieval writers divided history into periods such as the Six Ages or the Four Empires, when referring to their own times, they spoke of them as being modern. In the 1330s, the humanist and poet Petrarch referred to pre-Christian times as antiqua, leonardo Bruni was the first historian to use tripartite periodisation in his History of the Florentine People. Bruni and later argued that Italy had recovered since Petrarchs time. The Middle Ages first appears in Latin in 1469 as media tempestas or middle season, in early usage, there were many variants, including medium aevum, or middle age, first recorded in 1604, and media saecula, or middle ages, first recorded in 1625. The alternative term medieval derives from medium aevum, tripartite periodisation became standard after the German 17th-century historian Christoph Cellarius divided history into three periods, Ancient, Medieval, and Modern. The most commonly given starting point for the Middle Ages is 476, for Europe as a whole,1500 is often considered to be the end of the Middle Ages, but there is no universally agreed upon end date. English historians often use the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 to mark the end of the period
25.
Ostrogoths
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The Ostrogoths were the eastern branch of the later Goths. They built an empire stretching from the Black Sea to the Baltic, the Ostrogoths were probably literate in the 3rd century, and their trade with the Romans was highly developed. Their Danubian kingdom reached its zenith under King Ermanaric, who is said to have committed suicide at an old age when the Huns attacked his people and subjugated them in about 370. After their annexation by the Huns, little is heard of the Ostrogoths for about 80 years, after the collapse of the Hun empire after the Battle of Nedao, Ostrogoths migrated westwards towards Illyria and the borders of Italy, while some remained in the Crimea. During the late 5th and 6th centuries, under Theodoric the Great most of the Ostrogoths moved first to Moesia, in 493, Theodoric the Great established a kingdom in Italy. A period of instability then ensued, tempting the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian to declare war on the Ostrogoths in 535 in an effort to restore the western provinces of the Roman Empire. Initially, the Byzantines were successful, but under the leadership of Totila, the war lasted for almost 20 years and caused enormous damage and depopulation of Italy. The remaining Ostrogoths were absorbed into the Lombards who established a kingdom in Italy in 568, a division of the Goths is first attested in 291. The Tervingi are first attested around that date, the Greuthungi, Vesi, the Ostrogoths are first named in a document dated September 392 from Milan. Claudian mentions that they together with the Greuthungi inhabit Phrygia, according to Herwig Wolfram, the primary sources either use the terminology of Tervingi/Greuthungi or Vesi/Ostrogothi and never mix the pairs. All four names were used together, but the pairing was always preserved, as in Gruthungi, Ostrogothi, Tervingi and that the Tervingi were the Vesi/Visigothi and the Greuthungi the Ostrogothi is also supported by Jordanes. This interpretation, however, though common among scholars today, is not universal. Both Herwig Wolfram and Thomas Burns conclude that the terms Tervingi and Greuthungi were geographical identifiers used by each tribe to describe the other and this terminology therefore dropped out of use after the Goths were displaced by the Hunnic invasions. In support of this, Wolfram cites Zosimus as referring to a group of Scythians north of the Danube who were called Greuthungi by the north of the Ister. Wolfram asserts that it was the Tervingi who remained behind after the Hunnic conquest and he further believes that the terms Vesi and Ostrogothi were used by the peoples to boastfully describe themselves. On this understanding, the Greuthungi and Ostrogothi were more or less the same people, the nomenclature of Greuthungi and Tervingi fell out of use shortly after 400. In general, the terminology of a divided Gothic people disappeared gradually after they entered the Roman Empire, the term Visigoth, however, was an invention of the sixth century. Cassiodorus, a Roman in the service of Theodoric the Great, invented the term Visigothi to match Ostrogothi, the western-eastern division was a simplification and a literary device of sixth-century historians where political realities were more complex
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Lombards
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The Lombards or Longobards were a Germanic people who ruled large parts of the Italian Peninsula from 568 to 774. In the 1st century AD, they formed part of the Suebi, the Lombard king Audoin defeated the Gepid leader Thurisind in 551 or 552, his successor Alboin eventually destroyed the Gepids at the Battle of Asfeld in 567. The Lombards were joined by numerous Saxons, Heruls, Gepids, Bulgars, Thuringians, and Ostrogoths, by late 569 they had conquered all north of Italy and the principal cities north of the Po River except Pavia, which fell in 572. At the same time, they occupied areas in central Italy and they established a Lombard Kingdom in north and central Italy, later named Regnum Italicum, which reached its zenith under the 8th-century ruler Liutprand. In 774, the Kingdom was conquered by the Frankish King Charlemagne, however, Lombard nobles continued to rule southern parts of the Italian peninsula, well into the 11th century when they were conquered by the Normans and added to their County of Sicily. In this period, the part of Italy still under Longobardic domination was known by the name Langbarðaland in the Norse runestones. Their legacy is apparent in the regional name Lombardy. The fullest account of Lombard origins, history, and practices is the Historia Langobardorum of Paul the Deacon, pauls chief source for Lombard origins, however, is the 7th-century Origo Gentis Langobardorum. The Origo Gentis Langobardorum tells the story of a tribe called the Winnili dwelling in southern Scandinavia. The Winnili were split into three groups and one part left their land to seek foreign fields. The reason for the exodus was probably overpopulation, the departing people were led by the brothers Ybor and Aio and their mother Gambara and arrived in the lands of Scoringa, perhaps the Baltic coast or the Bardengau on the banks of the Elbe. Scoringa was ruled by the Vandals and their chieftains, the brothers Ambri and Assi, the Winnili were young and brave and refused to pay tribute, saying It is better to maintain liberty by arms than to stain it by the payment of tribute. The Vandals prepared for war and consulted Godan, who answered that he would give the victory to those whom he would see first at sunrise. The Winnili were fewer in number and Gambara sought help from Frea, at sunrise, Frea turned her husbands bed so that he was facing east, and woke him. So Godan spotted the Winnili first and asked, Who are these long-beards. and Frea replied, My lord, thou hast given them the name, from that moment onwards, the Winnili were known as the Longbeards. When Paul the Deacon wrote the Historia between 787 and 796 he was a Catholic monk and devoted Christian and he thought the pagan stories of his people silly and laughable. Paul explained that the name Langobard came from the length of their beards, a modern theory suggests that the name Langobard comes from Langbarðr, a name of Odin. Priester states that when the Winnili changed their name to Lombards, they changed their old agricultural fertility cult to a cult of Odin
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Duchy of Spoleto
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The Duchy of Spoleto was a Lombard territory founded about 570 in central Italy by the Lombard dux Faroald. In the following years also conquered much of southern and central Italy, conquering the important hub of Spoleto, in what is now Umbria. A decade of interregnum after the death of Alboins successor, however, left the Lombard dukes well settled in their new territories, by 575 or 576 Faroald had seized Nursia and Spoleto, establishing his duchy and sponsoring an Arian bishop. Within Spoleto, the Roman capitolium dedicated to Jupiter, Juno, the Lombard dukes restored the fortifications of the high rocca, whose walls had been dismantled by Totila during the Gothic War. Never as important as the Duchy of Benevento, Spoleto has a fairly obscure spot in Lombard history and its second Duke Ariulf made frequent expeditions against the Byzantines. Ariulf was succeeded by Theudelapius, son of Faroald, whom the Catholic Encyclopedia credits with the first building of the present cathedral, then came Atto, Thrasimund I, and Faroald II, who ruled conjointly with his brother Wachilap. At Spoleto Faroald was deposed by his son Transemund II, who rebelled against Liutprand and formed an alliance with Pope Gregory III. By the time of Liutprands death, Spoleto was more securely in control from Pavia. Three 8th century dukes were Kings of the Lombards, a sign that in that period Spoleto was linked closely to the kingdom than was Benevento. In 776, two years after the fall of Pavia, Spoleto fell likewise to Charlemagne and his Carolingian Empire, in 842 the former duchy was resurrected by the Franks to be held as a Frankish border territory by a dependent margrave. Among the more outstanding of the Frankish dukes, Guido I divided the duchy between his two sons Lambert and Guido II, who received as his share the lordship of Camerino, which was made a duchy. Lambert was a doughty fighter against Saracen raiders, but who equally massacred Byzantines, and was deposed in 871, restored in 876, in 883 Guido II reunited the dukedom, henceforth as the Duchy of Spoleto and Camerino. After the death of Charles the Fat in 888, Guido had himself crowned Roman Emperor, the following year Pope Formosus crowned Guidos son Lambert II as duke, king and emperor. The dukes of Spoleto continued to intervene in the violent politics of Rome, Alberico I, Duke of Camerino, and afterwards of Spoleto, married the notorious Roman noblewoman Marozia, mistress of Pope Sergius III, and was killed by the Romans in 924. His son Alberico II overthrew the senatrix in 932 though her son, about 949 the Frankish King Berengar II of Italy retook Spoleto from its final margrave. At this time the Emperor Otto I detached from the Duchy of Spoleto the lands called Sabina Langobardica, now the control of Spoleto became increasingly a gift of the Emperors. The duchy was united with Tuscany a second time in 1057, during the Investiture Controversy with the papacy the Emperor Henry IV named other dukes of Spoleto. After this the dukedom was in the family of the Werner of Urslingen, the city was destroyed by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa in 1155, but was soon rebuilt
28.
Franks
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Some Franks raided Roman territory, while other Frankish tribes joined the Roman troops of Gaul. In later times, Franks became the rulers of the northern part of Roman Gaul. The Salian Franks lived on Roman-held soil between the Rhine, Scheldt, Meuse, and Somme rivers in what is now Northern France, Belgium, the kingdom was acknowledged by the Romans after 357 CE. Following the collapse of Rome in the West, the Frankish tribes were united under the Merovingians, who succeeded in conquering most of Gaul in the 6th century, which greatly increased their power. The Merovingian dynasty, descendants of the Salians, founded one of the Germanic monarchies that would absorb large parts of the Western Roman Empire, the Frankish state consolidated its hold over the majority of western Europe by the end of the 8th century, developing into the Carolingian Empire. This empire would gradually evolve into the state of France and the Holy Roman Empire, in the Middle Ages, the term Frank was used in the east as a synonym for western European, as the Franks were then rulers of most of Western Europe. The Franks in the east kept their Germanic language and became part of the Germans, Dutch, Flemings, the Franconian languages, which are called Frankisch in Dutch or Fränkisch in German, originated at least partly in the Old Frankish language of the Franks. Nowadays, the German and Dutch names for France are Frankreich and Frankrijk, respectively, the name Franci was originally socio-political. To the Romans, Celts, and Suebi, the Franks must have seemed alike, they looked the same and spoke the same language, so that Franci became the name by which the people were known. Within a few centuries it had eclipsed the names of the tribes, though the older names have survived in some place-names, such as Hesse. Following the precedents of Edward Gibbon and Jacob Grimm, the name of the Franks has been linked with the word frank in English and it has been suggested that the meaning of free was adopted because, after the conquest of Gaul, only Franks were free of taxation. It is traditionally assumed that Frank comes from the Germanic word for javelin, there is also another theory that suggests that Frank comes from the Latin word francisca meaning. Words in other Germanic languages meaning fierce, bold or insolent, eumenius addressed the Franks in the matter of the execution of Frankish prisoners in the circus at Trier by Constantine I in 306 and certain other measures, Ubi nunc est illa ferocia. Feroces was used often to describe the Franks, contemporary definitions of Frankish ethnicity vary both by period and point of view. According to their law and their custom, writing in 2009, Professor Christopher Wickham pointed out that the word Frankish quickly ceased to have an exclusive ethnic connotation. North of the River Loire everyone seems to have considered a Frank by the mid-7th century at the latest. Two early sources describe the origin of the Franks are a 7th-century work known as the Chronicle of Fredegar. Neither of these works are accepted by historians as trustworthy, compared with Gregory of Tourss Historia Francorum, the chronicle describes Priam as a Frankish king whose people migrated to Macedonia after the fall of Troy
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Roman Catholic Diocese of Ascoli Piceno
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The Italian Catholic Diocese of Ascoli Piceno in the Marche, has existed since the fourth century. Historically immediately dependent on the Holy See, it is now a suffragan of the Archdiocese of Fermo, there is, in 2015, one priest for every 1,074 Catholics. The traces of this appear in the fourth century with St. Emidius, martyred under Diocletian and Claudius. In the fifth century, Lusentius, who was present at the Synod of Milan which sent the letter to Pope Leo I, was bishop of Ascoli. One of its bishops, Giulio de Medici, afterwards became Pope Clement VII, erected, 4th CenturyLatin Name, Dioecesis Asculanus in Piceno Paolo Alberti, O. F. M. P. Sigismondo Donati Giulio Gabrielli Filippo de Monti Giuseppe Sallustio Fadulfi Giovanni Giuseppe Bonaventura Giovanni Gambi Gregorio Lauri Paolo Tommaso Marana, pietro Paolo Leonardi Giovanni Andrea Archetti Giovanni Francesco Capelletti Gregorio Zelli, O. S. B. Carlo Belgrado Elia Antonio Alberini, O. C. D, amilcare Malagola Bartolomeo Ortolani Apollonio Maggio Ludovico Cattaneo, O. Ss. C. A. Ambrogio Squintani Marcello Morgante Pier Luigi Mazzoni Silvano Montevecchi Giovanni DErcole and this article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, Herbermann, Charles, ed. article name needed
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Republic
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It is a government where the head of state is not a monarch. Both modern and ancient republics vary widely in their ideology, composition, in the classical and medieval period of Europe, many states were fashioned on the Roman Republic, which referred to the governance of the city of Rome, between it having kings and emperors. The Italian medieval and Renaissance political tradition, today referred to as humanism, is sometimes considered to derive directly from Roman republicans such as Sallust. Republics were not equated with classical democracies such as Athens, but had a democratic aspect, Republics became more common in the Western world starting in the late 18th century, eventually displacing absolute monarchy as the most common form of government in Europe. In modern republics, the executive is legitimized both by a constitution and by popular suffrage, for instance, Article IV of the United States Constitution guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican form of Government. The term originates as the Latin translation of Greek word politeia, cicero, among other Latin writers, translated politeia as res publica and it was in turn translated by Renaissance scholars as republic. The term politeia can be translated as form of government, polity, or regime, and is therefore not always a word for a specific type of regime as the modern word republic is. And also amongst classical Latin, the term republic can be used in a way to refer to any regime. In medieval Northern Italy, a number of city states had commune or signoria based governments, in the late Middle Ages, writers, such as Giovanni Villani, began writing about the nature of these states and the differences from other types of regime. They used terms such as libertas populi, a free people, the terminology changed in the 15th century as the renewed interest in the writings of Ancient Rome caused writers to prefer using classical terminology. To describe non-monarchical states writers, most importantly Leonardo Bruni, adopted the Latin phrase res publica. While Bruni and Machiavelli used the term to describe the states of Northern Italy, which were not monarchies, the term can quite literally be translated as public matter. It was most often used by Roman writers to refer to the state and government, in subsequent centuries, the English word commonwealth came to be used as a translation of res publica, and its use in English was comparable to how the Romans used the term res publica. Notably, during The Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell the word commonwealth was the most common term to call the new monarchless state, likewise, in Polish, the term was translated as rzeczpospolita, although the translation is now only used with respect to Poland. Presently, the term republic commonly means a system of government which derives its power from the rather than from another basis. After the classical period, during the Middle Ages, many cities developed again. The modern type of itself is different from any type of state found in the classical world. Nevertheless, there are a number of states of the era that are today still called republics
31.
Galeotto I Malatesta
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Galeotto I Malatesta was an Italian condottiero, who was lord of Rimini, Fano, Ascoli Piceno, Cesena and Fossombrone. Born in Rimini, he was the son of Pandolfo I Malatesta, in 1333 he was captured while besieging Ferrara, but was soon freed and fought alongside Ferrantino Malatesta against the Papal legate in Romagna. When the latter plotted against him, Galeotto imprisoned him and declared himself lord of Rimini, the war between the two lasted until 1343. Ludwig of Bavaria also made him lord of Fano, after a period as condottiero for and later tyrann of Ascoli Piceno, in 1349 he travelled to the Holy Land. In 1351 he was hired in the Kingdom of Naples, in 1352 Malatesta led a campaign in Abruzzo in the service of Louis of Anjou, King of Sicily, and laid siege to the fortress of Aversa, held by the mercenary leader Fra Moriale. Giovanni was defeated in the battle of Viterbo of 10 March 1354, albornoz then moved to the Marche and Romagna against the Malatesta of Rimini and the Ordelaffi of Forlì. The Papal commander Rodolfo II da Varano, lord of Camerino, defeated Galeotto Malatesta, after the Albornozs defeat his family was made Papal vicar in Rimini, Pesaro, Fano and Fossombrone. In 1356 he took part in the crusade declared against the Ordelaffi of Forlì, in the 1360 he was first made commander-in-chief by the Queen of Naples Joan I, but later he switched to the Republic of Florence and then again to the Byzantine Empire. In 1372 Pope Gregory XI confirmed Galeotto general commander of the Papal Army against Bernabò Visconti, whom he defeated at Montichiari, near Brescia, after the death of his nephews, Galeotto managed to gain the whole family seigniory in Romagna. After a series of small but ferocious ravages in the area, in 1376 he captured Cesena, later he warred against Guido da Polenta for Cesenatico, conquering Senigallia from him in 1383, as well as other lands. The war was continued by his sons, as Galeotto I died in 1385 at Cesena
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Condottieri
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Condottieri were the leaders of the professional military free companies contracted by the Italian city-states and the Papacy from the late Middle Ages and throughout the Renaissance. In Renaissance Italian, condottiero meant contractor, in contemporary Italian, condottiero acquired the broader meaning of military leader, not restricted to mercenaries. In Italian historiography, Renaissance mercenary captains are usually called capitani di ventura, thus, the word Condottiere in the English language has come to denote, in the modern sense, any hired soldier. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Italian city-states of Venice, Florence, in the event that foreign powers and envious neighbors attacked, the ruling nobles hired foreign mercenaries to fight for them. From the eleventh to the century, European soldiers led by professional officers fought against the Muslims in the Crusades. These crusading officers provided large-scale warfare combat experience in the Holy Land, on the Crusades’ conclusion, the first masnada appeared in Italy. Given the profession, some masnade were less mercenaries than bandits and these masnada were not Italian, but German, from the Duchy of Brabant, and from Catalonia and Aragon. The latter were Spanish soldiers who had followed King Peter III of Aragon in the War of the Sicilian Vespers in Italy in October 1282, by 1333 other mercenaries had arrived in Italy to fight with John of Bohemia as the Compagnia della Colomba in Perugia’s war against Arezzo. The first well organised mercenaries in Italy were the Ventura Companies of Duke Werner von Urslingen, werner’s company differed from other mercenary companies because its code of military justice imposed discipline and an equal division of the contract’s income. The Ventura Company increased in number until becoming the fearsome “Great Company” of some 3,000 barbute, the first mercenary company with an Italian condottiero as its chief was the Company of St. George formed in 1339 and led by Lodrisio Visconti. This company was defeated and destroyed by Luchino Visconti of Milan in April 1339, later, in 1377, a second Company of St. Once aware of their military power monopoly in Italy, the bands became notorious for their capriciousness. In turn, many condottieri, such as Braccio da Montone and Muzio Sforza, consequently, the condottieri fought by outmanoeuvring the opponent and fighting his ability to wage war, rather than risk uncertain fortune —defeat, capture, death— in battlefield combat. Niccolò Machiavelli even said that condottieri fought each other in grandiose, in 1347, Cola di Rienzo had Werner von Urslingen executed in Rome, and Konrad von Landau assumed command of the Great Company. Towards the end of the century the Italians began to organize armies of the same description and this ended the reign of the purely mercenary company, and began that of the semi-national mercenary army which endured in Europe till replaced by the national standing army system. In 1363, Count von Landau was betrayed by his Hungarian soldiers, strategically, the barbuta was replaced with the three-soldier, mounted lancia, five lance composed a posta, five poste composed a bandiera. If the condotta expired definitively, the condottiere could not declare war against the contracting city-state for two years. In fifteenth-century Italy, the condottieri were masterful lords of war, during the wars in Lombardy, Machiavelli observed, the others being bred to arms from their infancy, were acquainted with no other art, and pursued war for emolument, or to confer honor upon themselves
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Fermo
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Fermo listen is a town and comune of the Marche, Italy, in the Province of Fermo. Fermo is on a hill, the Sabulo, elevation 319 metres, the oldest human remains from the area are funerary remains from the 9th–8th centuries BC, belonging to the Villanovan culture or the proto-Etruscan civilization. It was originally governed by five quaestors and it was made a colony with full rights after the battle of Philippi, the 4th Legion being settled there. It lay at the junction of roads to Pausulae, Urbs Salvia, with the Pentapolis, in the 8th century it passed under the authority of the Holy See was thenceforth subject to the vicissitudes of the March of Ancona. In the 10th century it became the capital of the Marchia Firmana, under the predecessors of Honorius III the bishops of city became prince-bishops, first with the secular rights of counts, and later as princes of Fermo. In 1199 it became a city, and remained independent until 1550. After this it was governed by different lords, who ruled as more or less legitimate vassals of the Holy See, the Roman theater, scant traces of an amphitheater also exist. Remains of the city wall, of blocks of hard limestone, may be seen just outside the Porta S. Francesco. The medieval embattled walls superposed on it are picturesque, the cisterns of Fermo are an archaeological site situated on top of the hill, at 310 metres above sea level. Fermo boasts one of the most gigantic and well-preserved example of Roman cisterns in Italy and they were built around 1st century a. C. The structure is a construction of about 30 by 70 metres consisting of 30 underground rooms. The underground pipe network above the cisterns was connected to a canal around the external walls, from the canal, small pipes brought water into the cisterns, water inlets are still visible inside the rooms. The cisterns are made of Opus caementicium which is the waterproofing old Roman concrete, the level of the water inside the rooms was about 70 centimetres and the total amount of water inside was about 3000 mq. The Palazzo dei Priori, restored in 1446, with a statue of Pope Sixtus V in front of it, the Biblioteca Comunale contains a collection of inscriptions and antiquities. Fermo Cathedral, Excavations undertaken in 1934–35 under the churchs pavement brought to light remains from the age of Antoninus Pius and this had three naves divided into four bays, with a raised presbytery. Of its mosaic decorations today only those in the apse are visible, after the destruction of this church by Christian of Mainz in 1176 by order of Frederick Barbarossa, the church reconstructed in 1227 by Giorgio da Como. It has a Gothic facade made of Istrian stone, divided by pillars and with a central rose window, a bell tower from the same age. In the vestibule are several tombs, including one from 1366 by Tura da Imola, and also the modern monument to Giuseppe Colucci, the interior reflects the late 18th century reconstruction
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Francesco I Sforza
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Francesco I Sforza was an Italian condottiero, the founder of the Sforza dynasty in Milan, Italy, and was the fourth Duke of Milan from 1450 until his death. He was the brother of Alessandro, whom he fought alongside. Francesco Sforza was born in San Miniato, Tuscany, one of the seven sons of the condottiero Muzio Sforza. He spent his childhood in Tricarico, the marquisate of which he was granted in 1412 by King Ladislaus of Naples, in 1418, he married Polissena Ruffo, a Calabrese noblewoman. From 1419, he alongside his father, soon gaining fame for being able to bend metal bars with his bare hands. He later proved himself to be a tactician and very skilled field commander. After some successes, he fell in disgrace and was sent to the castle of Mortara as a de facto. He regained his status after leading an expedition against Lucca, in 1431, after a period during which he fought again for the Papal States, he led the Milanese army against Venice, the following year the dukes daughter, Bianca Maria, was betrothed to him. Despite these moves, the wary Filippo Maria never ceased to be distrustful of Sforza, in 1436-39, he served variously both Florence and Venice. In 1440, his fiefs in the Kingdom of Naples were occupied by King Alfonso I, on 25 October 1441, in Cremona, he could finally marry Bianca Maria. The following year, he allied with René of Anjou, pretender to the throne of Naples, Sforza later found himself warring against Francesco Piccinino and, later, the alliance of Visconti, Eugene IV, and Malatesta, who had allegedly murdered Polissena. With the help of Venice, Sforza was again victorious and, in exchange for abandoning the Venetians, after the duke died without a male heir in 1447, fighting broke out to restore the so-called Ambrosian Republic. The name Ambrosian Republic takes its name from St. Ambrose, agnese del Maino, his wifes mother, convinced the condottiero who held Pavia to restore it to him. He also received the seigniory of other cities of the duchy, including Lodi, in 1450, after years of famine, riots raged in the streets of Milan and the citys senate decided to entrust to him the duchy. Sforza entered the city as Duke on 26 February and it was the first time that such a title was handed over by a lay institution. While the other Italian states gradually recognized Sforza as the legitimate Duke of Milan and that did not come to the Sforza Dukes until 1494, when Emperor Maximilian formally invested Francescos son, Ludovico, as Duke of Milan. Under his rule, Sforza modernised the city and duchy, in Milan, he founded the Ospedale Maggiore, restored the Palazzo dellArengo, and had the Naviglio dAdda, a channel connecting with the Adda River, built. During Sforzas reign, Florence was under the command of Cosimo de Medici, after the peace, Sforza renounced part of the conquests in eastern Lombardy obtained by his condottieri Bartolomeo Colleoni, Ludovico Gonzaga, and Roberto Sanseverino after 1451
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Papal States
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The Papal States, officially the State of the Church, were territories in the Italian Peninsula under the sovereign direct rule of the pope, from the 8th century until 1870. They were among the states of Italy from roughly the 8th century until the Italian Peninsula was unified in 1861 by the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. At their zenith, they covered most of the modern Italian regions of Lazio, Marche, Umbria and Romagna and these holdings were considered to be a manifestation of the temporal power of the pope, as opposed to his ecclesiastical primacy. By 1861, much of the Papal States territory had been conquered by the Kingdom of Italy, only Lazio, including Rome, remained under the Popes temporal control. In 1870, the pope lost Lazio and Rome and had no physical territory at all, Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini ended the crisis between unified Italy and the Vatican by signing the Lateran Treaty, granting the Vatican City State sovereignty. The Papal States were also known as the Papal State, the territories were also referred to variously as the State of the Church, the Pontifical States, the Ecclesiastical States, or the Roman States. For its first 300 years the Catholic Church was persecuted and unrecognized and this system began to change during the reign of the emperor Constantine I, who made Christianity legal within the Roman Empire, and restoring to it any properties that had been confiscated. The Lateran Palace was the first significant new donation to the Church, other donations followed, primarily in mainland Italy but also in the provinces of the Roman Empire. But the Church held all of these lands as a private landowner, the seeds of the Papal States as a sovereign political entity were planted in the 6th century. Beginning In 535, the Byzantine Empire, under emperor Justinian I, launched a reconquest of Italy that took decades and devastated Italys political, just as these wars wound down, the Lombards entered the peninsula from the north and conquered much of the countryside. While the popes remained Byzantine subjects, in practice the Duchy of Rome, nevertheless, the pope and the exarch still worked together to control the rising power of the Lombards in Italy. As Byzantine power weakened, though, the took a ever larger role in defending Rome from the Lombards. In practice, the papal efforts served to focus Lombard aggrandizement on the exarch, a climactic moment in the founding of the Papal States was the agreement over boundaries embodied in the Lombard king Liutprands Donation of Sutri to Pope Gregory II. When the Exarchate of Ravenna finally fell to the Lombards in 751, the popes renewed earlier attempts to secure the support of the Franks. In 751, Pope Zachary had Pepin the Younger crowned king in place of the powerless Merovingian figurehead king Childeric III, zacharys successor, Pope Stephen II, later granted Pepin the title Patrician of the Romans. Pepin led a Frankish army into Italy in 754 and 756, Pepin defeated the Lombards – taking control of northern Italy – and made a gift of the properties formerly constituting the Exarchate of Ravenna to the pope. The cooperation between the papacy and the Carolingian dynasty climaxed in 800, when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne Emperor, the precise nature of the relationship between the popes and emperors – and between the Papal States and the Empire – is disputed. Events in the 9th century postponed the conflict, the Holy Roman Empire in its Frankish form collapsed as it was subdivided among Charlemagnes grandchildren
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Umbria
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Umbria, is a region of historic and modern central Italy. It is the only Italian region having neither a coastline nor a border with other countries and it includes the Lake Trasimeno, Marmores Falls, and is crossed by the River Tiber. Umbria is known for its landscapes, traditions, history, culinary delights, artistic legacy, and influence on culture. Contained within Umbria is Cospaia, a republic created by accident that existed from 1440 to 1826 Umbria is bordered by Tuscany to the west, Marche to the east. It is the only Italian region having neither a coastline nor a border with other countries. The commune of Città di Castello has an exclave named Monte Ruperto within Marche. Umbria is crossed by two valleys, the Umbrian valley, stretching from Perugia to Spoleto, and the Tiber Valley, west of the first one, the Tiber River forms the approximate border with Lazio, although its source is just over the Tuscan border. The Tibers three principal tributaries flow southward through Umbria, the Chiascio basin is relatively uninhabited as far as Bastia Umbra. About 10 kilometres farther on, it joins the Tiber at Torgiano, the third river is the Nera, flowing into the Tiber further south, at Terni, its valley is called the Valnerina. The upper Nera cuts ravines in the mountains, the lower, in antiquity, the plain was covered by a pair of shallow, interlocking lakes, the Lacus Clitorius and the Lacus Umber. They were drained by the Romans over several hundred years, an earthquake in the 4th century and the political collapse of the Roman Empire resulted in the refilling of the basin. The eastern part of the region, being crossed by many faults, has often hit by earthquakes, the last ones have been that of 1997. In literature, Umbria is referred to as il cuore verde dItalia, the phrase is taken from a poem by Giosuè Carducci, the subject of which is the source of the Clitunno River in Umbria. The region is named for the Umbri people, an Italic people which was absorbed by the expansion of the Romans, the Umbris capital city was Gubbio, where today is housed the longest and most important document of any of the Osco-Umbrian group of languages, the Iguvine Tablets. In fact, they belonged to a family of neighbouring peoples with similar roots. Their language was Umbrian, one of the Italic languages, related to Latin, the Etruscans were the chief enemies of the Umbri. The Etruscan invasion went from the western seaboard towards the north and east, eventually driving the Umbrians towards the Apennine uplands, nevertheless, the Umbrian population does not seem to have been eradicated in the conquered districts. The border between Etruria and Umbria was the Tiber river, the ancient name of Todi, Tular, after the downfall of the Etruscans, Umbrians aided the Samnites in their struggle against Rome
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Italian unification
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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 memory of the Risorgimento is central to both Italian politics and Italian historiography, for short period is one of the most contested. Italian nationalism was based among intellectuals and political activists, often operating from exile, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Roman province of Italy remained united under the Ostrogothic Kingdom and later 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 a foreigner who had little concern for the governance of Italy as a state, as a result. This situation persisted through the Renaissance but began to deteriorate with the rise of modern nation-states in the modern period. Italy, including the Papal States, then became the site of proxy wars between the powers, notably the Holy Roman Empire, Spain and France. Harbingers of national unity appeared in the treaty of the Italic League, in 1454, leading Renaissance Italian writers Dante Alighieri, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini expressed opposition to foreign domination. Petrarch stated that the ancient valour in Italian hearts is not yet dead in Italia Mia, Niccolò Machiavelli later 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. I am an Italian, he explained, the French Republic spread republican principles, and 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 Napoleons choice of rulers, as Napoleons reign began to fail, the rulers he had installed tried to keep their thrones further feeding nationalistic sentiments. After Napoleon fell, the Congress of Vienna restored the pre-Napoleonic patchwork of independent governments, vincenzo Gioberti, a Piedmontese priest, had suggested a confederation of Italian states under leadership of the Pope in his 1842 book, Of the Moral and Civil Primacy of the Italians. Pope Pius IX at first appeared interested but he turned reactionary, Giuseppe Mazzini and Carlo Cattaneo wanted the unification of Italy under a federal republic. That proved too extreme for most nationalists, the middle position was proposed by Cesare Balbo as a confederation of separate Italian states led by Piedmont. One of the most influential revolutionary groups was the Carbonari, a political discussion group formed in Southern Italy early in the 19th century. After 1815, Freemasonry in Italy was repressed and discredited due to its French connections, a void was left that the Carbonari filled with a movement that closely resembled Freemasonry but with a commitment to Italian nationalism and no association with Napoleon and his government. The response came from middle class professionals and business men and some intellectuals, the Carbonari disowned Napoleon but nevertheless were inspired by the principles of the French Revolution regarding liberty, equality and fraternity. They developed their own rituals, and were strongly anticlerical, the Carbonari movement spread across Italy
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Pope Julius II
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Pope Julius II, nicknamed The Fearsome Pope and The Warrior Pope, born Giuliano della Rovere, was Pope from 1 November 1503 to his death in 1513. In addition to a military policy, he personally led troops into battle on at least two occasions. There is disagreement about Juliuss year of birth, for some sources put it as late as 1453, Giuliano della Rovere was the son of Rafaello della Rovere. Francesco della Rovere was his uncle and he was educated among the Franciscans by his uncle, who took him under his special charge and later sent him to a Franciscan friary in Perugia with the purpose of obtaining knowledge of the sciences. After his uncle was elected Pope Sixtus IV, della Rovere was promoted to be cardinal, taking the title as that formerly held by his uncle. With his uncle he obtained great influence, and in addition to the archbishopric of Avignon he held no fewer than eight bishoprics, including Lausanne from 1472. In June 1474, della Rovere led an army to Todi and Spoleto, around this time, in 1483, an illegitimate daughter was born, Felice della Rovere. Della Rovere, jealous and angry, accused Borgia of being elected over him, in 1494 he joined Charles VIII of France who was undertaking a military expedition into Italy. This was, in Andrew Greeleys view, almost certainly by means of bribery with money, but also, per Ott, Ullman, and Hughes, with promises. Giuliano Della Rovere thenceforth took the name of his fourth century predecessor, Julius I, indeed, on the day of his election, he declared I will not live in the same rooms as the Borgias lived. He desecrated the Holy Church as none before and he usurped the papal power by the devils aid, and I forbid under the pain of excommunication anyone to speak or think of Borgia again. His name and memory must be forgotten and it must be crossed out of every document and memorial. All paintings made of the Borgias or for them must be covered over with black crepe, all the tombs of the Borgias must be opened and their bodies sent back to where they belong—to Spain. The Borgias apartments remained sealed until the 19th Century, the combination was, however, at first little more than nominal, and was not immediately effective in compelling the Venetians to deliver up more than a few unimportant places in the Romagna. With a campaign in 1506, he led an army to Perugia and Bologna. The refusal of Pope Clement VII to grant the annulment led to the English Reformation, the same year, he founded the Swiss Guard to provide a constant corps of soldiers to protect the Pope. On Palm Sunday,1507, Julius II entered Rome, both as a second Julius Caesar, heir to the majesty of Romes imperial glory, and in the likeness of Christ, whose vicar the pope was, and who in that capacity governed the universal Roman Church. Julius, who modelled himself after his namesake Caesar, would lead his army across the Italian peninsula under the imperial war-cry
39.
Travertine
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Travertine is a form of limestone deposited by mineral springs, especially hot springs. Travertine often has a fibrous or concentric appearance and exists in white, tan, cream-colored and it is formed by a process of rapid precipitation of calcium carbonate, often at the mouth of a hot spring or in a limestone cave. In the latter, it can form stalactites, stalagmites, and it is frequently used in Italy and elsewhere as a building material. Travertine is a sedimentary rock, formed by the precipitation of carbonate minerals from solution in ground and surface waters. Similar deposits formed from water are known as tufa. The word travertine is derived from the Italian travertino, itself a derivation of the Latin tiburtinus ‘of Tibur’ and its namesake is also the origin of Tivoli, a district near Rome. Modern travertine is formed from geothermally heated supersaturated alkaline waters, with raised pCO2, on emergence, waters degas CO2 due to the lower atmospheric pCO2, resulting in an increase in pH. Since carbonate solubility decreases with increased pH, precipitation is induced, precipitation may be enhanced by factors leading to a reduction in pCO2, for example increased air-water interactions at waterfalls may be important, as may photosynthesis. Precipitation may also be enhanced by evaporation in some springs, both calcite and aragonite are found in hot spring travertines, aragonite is preferentially precipitated when temperatures are hot, while calcite dominates when temperatures are cooler. When pure and fine, travertine is white, but often it is brown to yellow due to impurities, travertine may precipitate out directly onto rock and other inert materials as in Pamukkale or Yellowstone for example. The latter has a historic value, because it was one of the quarries that Gian Lorenzo Bernini selected material from to build the famous Colonnade of St. Peters Square in Rome in 1656-1667. Michaelangelo also chose travertine as the material for the ribs of the dome of St Peters Basilica. Travertine derives its name from the town, known as Tibur in ancient Roman times. The ancient name for the stone was lapis tiburtinus, meaning tibur stone, detailed studies of the Tivoli and Guidonia travertine deposits revealed diurnal and annual rhythmic banding and laminae, which have potential use in geochronology. Cascades of natural lakes formed behind travertine dams can be seen in Pamukkale, Turkey, in Central Europes last post-glacial palaeoclimatic optimum, huge deposits of tufa formed from karst springs. On a smaller scale, these karst processes are still working, travertine has been an important building material since the Middle Ages. Travertine has formed sixteen huge, natural dams in a valley in Croatia known as Plitvice Lakes National Park, clinging to moss and rocks in the water, the travertine has built up over several millennia to form waterfalls up to 70 m in height. In the U. S. the most well-known place for travertine formation is Yellowstone National Park, Oklahoma has two parks dedicated to this natural wonder
listen (help·info); Latin: Asculum)[2] is a town and comune in the Marche region of Italy, capital of the province of the same name. Its population is around 49,500[1] but the urban area of the city has more than 100,000.
Trier, Germany, since 1958
Massy, France, since 1997
Banská Bystrica, Slovakia, since 1998[4]
Chattanooga, United States, since 2006[5]
Norcia, Italy, since 2010
Veles, Republic of Macedonia, since 2011
