Emilia-Romagna
Emilia-Romagna is an administrative region of Northeast Italy comprising the historical regions of Emilia and Romagna. Its capital is Bologna, it has an area of 22,446 km2, about 4.4 million inhabitants. Emilia-Romagna is one of the wealthiest and most developed regions in Europe, with the third highest GDP per capita in Italy. Bologna, its capital, has one of Italy's highest quality of life indices and advanced social services. Emilia-Romagna is a cultural and tourist centre, being the home of the University of Bologna, the oldest university in the world, containing Romanesque and Renaissance cities, a former Eastern Roman Empire capital such as Ravenna, encompassing eleven UNESCO heritage sites, being a centre for food and automobile production and having popular coastal resorts such as Cervia, Cesenatico and Riccione. In 2018, the Lonely Planet guide named Emilia Romagna as the best place to see in Europe; the name Emilia-Romagna is a legacy of Ancient Rome. Emilia derives from the via Aemilia, the Roman road connecting Piacenza to Rimini, completed in 187 BC and named after the consul Marcus Aemilius Lepidus.
Romagna derives from Romània, the name of the Eastern Roman Empire applied to Ravenna by the Lombards when the western Empire had ceased to exist and Ravenna was an outpost of the east. Before the Romans took control of present-day Emilia-Romagna, it had been part of the Etruscan world and that of the Gauls. During the first thousand years of Christianity trade flourished, as did culture and religion, thanks to the region's monasteries. Afterwards the University of Bologna—arguably the oldest university in Europe—and its bustling towns kept trade and intellectual life alive, its unstable political history is exemplified in such figures as Matilda of Canossa and contending seigniories such as the Este of Ferrara, the Malatesta of Rimini, the Popes of Rome, the Farnese of Parma and Piacenza, the Duchy of Modena and Reggio. In the 16th century, most of these were seized by the Papal States, but the territories of Parma and Modena remained independent until Emilia-Romagna became part of the Italian kingdom between 1859 and 1861.
After the referendum of 2006, seven municipalities of Montefeltro were detached from the Province of Pesaro and Urbino to join that of Rimini on 15 August 2009. The municipalities are Casteldelci, Novafeltria, San Leo, Sant'Agata Feltria and Talamello. On 20 and 29 May 2012 two powerful earthquakes hit the area, they caused churches and factories to collapse. 200 were injured. The 5.8 magnitude quake left 14,000 people homeless. The region of Emilia-Romagna consists of nine provinces and covers an area of 22,446 km², ranking sixth in Italy. Nearly half of the region consists of plains while 27 % is 25 % mountainous; the region's section of the Apennines is marked by areas of badland erosion and caves. The mountains stretch for more than 300 km from the north to the south-east, with only three peaks above 2,000 m – Monte Cimone, Monte Cusna and Alpe di Succiso; the plain was formed by the gradual retreat of the sea from the Po basin and by the detritus deposited by the rivers. Marshland in ancient times, its history is characterised by the hard work of its people to reclaim and reshape the land in order to achieve a better standard of living.
The geology varies, with lagoons and saline areas in the north and many thermal springs throughout the rest of the region as a result of groundwater rising towards the surface at different periods of history. All the rivers rise locally in the Apennines except for the Po, which has its source in the Alps in Piedmont; the northern border of Emilia-Romagna follows the path of the river for 263 km. The region has a temperate broadleaved and mixed forests and the vegetation may be divided into belts: the Common oak-European hornbeam belt, now covered with fruit orchards and fields of wheat and sugar beet, the Pubescent oak-European hop-hornbeam belt on the lower slopes up to 900 m, the European beech-Silver fir belt between 1,000 and 1,500 m and the final mountain heath belt. Emilia-Romagna has two Italian National Parks, the Foreste Casentinesi National Park and the Appennino Tosco-Emiliano National Park. Emilia-Romagna has been a populated area since ancient times. Inhabitants over the centuries have radically altered the landscape, building cities, reclaiming wetlands, establishing large agricultural areas.
All these transformations in past centuries changed the aspect of the region, converting large natural areas to cultivation, up until the 1960s. The trend changed, agricultural lands began giving way to residential and industrial areas; the increase of urban-industrial areas continued at high rates until the end of the 2010s. In the same period and mountainous areas saw an increase in the registration of semi-natural areas, because of the abandonment of agricultural lands. Land use changes can have strong effects on ecological functions. Human interactions such as agriculture and deforestation affect soil function, e.g. food and other biomass production, storing and transformation, habitat and gene pool. In the Emilia-Romagna plain, which represents half of the region and where three quarters of the population of the region live, the agricultural land area has been reduced by 157 km2 while urban and industrial areas
Italian National Institute of Statistics
The Italian National Institute of Statistics is the main producer of official statistics in Italy. Its activities include the census of population, economic censuses and a number of social and environmental surveys and analyses. Istat is by far the largest producer of statistical information in Italy, is an active member of the European Statistical System, coordinated by Eurostat, its publications are released under creative commons "Attribution" license. Istat was created in 1926 as "Central Institute of Statistics", to collect and organize essential data about the nation, it took its current denomination with the reform of 1989. This gave Istat statutory responsibility for the coordination and standardization of official statistics collected or published under the aegis of the national statistical system SISTAN, whose membership includes the statistical offices of ministries, national agencies, provinces, chambers of commerce, similar bodies. Since 4 August 2009, Enrico Giovannini, former Chief statistician of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, has been the President of the institute.
Istituto Centrale di Statistica: Alberto Canaletti Gaudenti Lanfranco Maroi Giuseppe De Meo Guido Maria Rey Istituto Nazionale di Statistica: Guido Maria Rey Alberto Zuliani Luigi Biggeri Enrico Giovannini Antonio Golini Giorgio Alleva Istat has 18 regional offices which host public access points named Centri di informazione statistica, in English Statistical information centers. The center in Rome offers data from Eurostat; the library, established in 1926, is open to the public and contains Istat publications and international works on statistical and socioeconomics subjects, journals from other national statistical institutes and international organizations. The library collection receives about 2800 periodical journals. There are 1500 volumes printed prior to 1900. Official Website SISTAN
Northern Italy
Northern Italy is a geographical region in the northern part of Italy. Non-administrative, it consists of eight administrative Regions in northern Italy: Aosta Valley, Liguria, Emilia-Romagna, Friuli-Venezia Giulia and Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol; as of 2014, its population was 27,801,460. Rhaeto-Romance and Gallo-Italic languages are spoken in the region, as opposed to the Italo-Dalmatian languages spoken in the rest of Italy. For statistic purposes, the Istituto Nazionale di Statistica uses the terms Northwest Italy and Northeast Italy for two of Italy's five statistical regions in its reporting; these same subdivisions are used to demarcate first-level Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics regions within the European Union, the Italian constituencies for the European Parliament. Northern Italy was called by different terms in different periods of History. During ancient times the terms Cisalpine Gaul, Gallia Citerior or Gallia Togata were used to define that part of Italy inhabited by Celts during the 4th and 3rd centuries BC.
Conquered by the Roman Republic in the 220s BC, it was a Roman province from c. 81 BC until 42 BC, when it was merged into Roman Italy. Until that time, it was considered part of Gaul that part of Gaul on the "hither side of the Alps", as opposed to Transalpine Gaul. After the fall of the Roman Empire and the settlement of the Lombards the name Langobardia Maior was used, in the Early Middle Ages, to define the domains of the Lombard Kingdom in Northern Italy; the Lombard territories beyond were called Langobardia Minor, consisting of the Duchies of Spoleto and Benevento. During the Late Middle Ages, after the fall of the northern part of the Lombard Kingdom to Charlemagne, the term Longobardia was used to mean Northern Italy within the medieval Kingdom of Italy; as the area became partitioned in regional states the term Lombardy subsequentially shifted to indicate only the area of the Duchies of Milan, Mantua and Modena and only to the area around Milan. In late modern period the term High Italy was used, for example by the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale Alta Italia during the second World War.
Starting from the 1960s the term Padania was sometimes used as geographical synonym of Po Valley. The term appeared sparingly until the early 1990s, when Lega Nord, a federalist and, at times, separatist political party in Italy, proposed Padania as a possible name for an independent state in Northern Italy. Since it has carried strong political connotations. In pre-Roman centuries it was inhabited by different peoples among whom the Ligures, the ancient Veneti, who prospered through their trade in amber and breeding of horses, the Etruscans, who colonized Northern Italy from Tuscany, founded the city of Bologna and spread the use of writing; these people founded several cities like Turin and Milan and extended their rule from the Alps to the Adriatic Sea. Their development was halted by the Roman expansion in the Po Valley from the 3rd century BC onwards. After centuries of struggle, in 194 BC the entire area of what is now Northern Italy became a Roman province with the name of Gallia Cisalpina.
The Roman culture and language overwhelmed the former civilization in the following years, Northern Italy became one of the most developed and rich areas of the western half of the empire with the construction of a wide array of roads and the development of agriculture and trade. In late antiquity the strategic role of Northern Italy was emphasized by the moving of the capital of the Western Empire from Rome to Mediolanum in 286 and to Ravenna from 402 until the empire collapsed in 476. After the fall of the Western Empire, Northern Italy suffered from destruction brought about by migration from Germanic peoples and from the Gothic War. In the 570s the Germanic Lombards, or Longobardi, entered Northern Italy from Friuli and founded a long-lasting reign that gave the medieval name to the whole Northern Italy and the current name to the Lombardy region. After the initial struggles, relationships between the Lombard people and the Latin-speaking people improved. In the end, the Lombard language and culture assimilated with the Latin culture, leaving evidence in many names, the legal code and laws, other things.
The end of Lombard rule came in 774, when the Frankish king Charlemagne conquered Pavia, deposed Desiderius, the last Lombard king, annexed the Lombard Kingdom to his empire changing the name in Kingdom of Italy. The former Lombard dukes were replaced by Frankish counts, prince-bishops or marquises. In the 10th century Northern Italy was formally under the rule of the Holy Roman Empire but was in fact divided in a multiplicity of small, autonomous city-states, the medieval communes and maritime republic; the 11th century marked a significant boom in Northern Italy's economy, due to improved trading and agricultural innovations, culture flourished as well with many universities founded, among them the University of Bologna, the oldest university in Europe. The increasing richness of the city-states made them able to defy the traditional feudal supreme power, represented by the German emperors and their local vassals; this process led to the creation of different Lombard Leagues formed by allied cities of Lombardy that defeated the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick I, at Legnano, his grandson Frederick II, at Parma, becoming independent from the German emperors.
The Leagues failed to develop from an
De Agostini
De Agostini S.p. A. is an Italian holding company that coordinates the strategic operating companies - De Agostini Editore, De Agostini Communications, IGT and DeA Capital - and makes financial investments, among which the main investment is a minority stake in Assicurazioni Generali. It was founded in 1901 by the geographer Giovanni De Agostini in Rome and moved to Novara, Italy. De Agostini Editore S.p. A. is the sub-holding company active in the publishing sector in 30 countries with publications in 13 languages and organised into areas by product: De Agostini Publishing, DeA Planeta Libri, De Agostini Scuola and Digital De Agostini, as well as Spanish publisher Planeta DeAgostini. De Agostini Communications is the media and communication sector sub-holding comprising the Group's interests in content production and distribution of content for television, new media and cinema. DeAgostini owns a 31% stake in producer Banijay Group. Shareholder of Atresmedia, the Spanish radio and television group, held in partnership with Spanish Planeta Corporation and listed on the Madrid Stock Exchange, is a co-leader in the Spanish television market.
It operates in the following sectors: Atresmedia Televisión, Atresmedia Radio, Atresmedia Digital, Atresmedia Publicidad and Atresmedia Cine. The company De Agostini S.p. A. publishes a regular magazine series, which offers every fortnight a one retro model. Among them you can find the brand Škoda. De Agostini manufactures models of Škoda in the Chinese factory the Czech company Abrex. Partwork Corporate site
Nuragic civilization
The Nuragic civilization known as the Nuragic culture was a civilization or culture on the island of Sardinia, the second largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, which lasted from the 18th century BCE to 238 BCE when the Romans colonized the island. Others date the culture as lasting at least until the 2nd century CE or even to the 6th century CE; the adjective "Nuragic" derives from the island's most characteristic monument, the nuraghe, a tower-fortress type of construction the ancient Sardinians built in large numbers starting from about 1800 BCE. Today more than 7,000 nuraghes dot the Sardinian landscape. No written records of this civilization have been discovered, apart from a few possible short epigraphic documents belonging to the last stages of the Nuragic civilization; the only written information there comes from classical literature of the Greeks and Romans, may be considered more mythological than historical. In the Stone Age the island was first inhabited by people who had arrived there in the Paleolithic and Neolithic ages from Europe and the Mediterranean area.
The most ancient settlements have been discovered both in northern Sardinia. Several cultures developed on the island, such as the Ozieri culture; the economy was based on agriculture, animal husbandry and trading with the mainland. With the diffusion of metallurgy and copper objects and weapons appeared on the island. Remains from this period include hundreds of menhirs and dolmens, more than 2,400 hypogeum tombs called domus de Janas, the statue menhirs, representing warriors or female figures, the stepped pyramid of Monte d'Accoddi, near Sassari, which show some similarities with the monumental complex of Los Millares and the talaiots in the Balearic Islands. According to some scholars, the similarity between this structure and those found in Mesopotamia are due to cultural influxes coming from the Eastern Mediterranean; the altar of Monte d'Accoddi fell out of use starting from c. 2000 BCE, when the Beaker culture, which at the time was widespread in all western Europe, appeared on the island.
The beakers arrived in Sardinia from two different regions: firstly from Spain and southern France, secondly from Central Europe, through the Italian Peninsula. The Bonnanaro culture was the last evolution of the Beaker culture in Sardinia, displayed several similarities with the contemporary Polada culture of northern Italy; these two cultures shared common features in the material culture such as undecorated pottery with axe-shaped handles. These influences may have spread to Sardinia via Corsica, where they absorbed new architectural techniques that were widespread on the island. New peoples coming from the mainland arrived on the island at that time, bringing with them new religious philosophies, new technologies and new ways of life, making obsolete the previous ones or reinterpreting them, it is in virtue of stimuli and models from the Central European and Polada-Rhone areas, that the culture of Bonnanaro I gives a jolt to the known and produces in step with the times. From the severe, practical character and essentiality of the material equipment, we understand the nature and the warlike habit of the newcomers and the conflictual thrust that they give to life on the island.
This is confirmed by the presence of metal weapons. The metal spreads in objects of use, ornamental objects It seems to feel a fall of ideologies of the old pre-nuragic world corresponding to a new historical turning point The widespread diffusion of bronze brought numerous improvements. With the new alloy of copper and tin, or arsenic, a harder and more resistant metal was obtained, suitable for manufacturing tools used in agriculture and warfare. From this period dates the construction of the so-called proto-nuraghe, a platformlike structure that marks the first phase of the Nuragic Age; these buildings are different from the classical nuraghe having an irregular planimetry and a stocky appearance. Dating to the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE, the nuraghe, which evolved from the previous proto-nuraghe, are megalithic towers with a truncated cone shape, they are widespread in the whole of Sardinia, about one nuraghe every three square kilometers. Early Greek historians and geographers speculated about their builders.
They described the presence of fabulous edifices, called daidaleia, from the name of Daedalus, after building his labyrinth in Crete, would have moved to Sicily and to Sardinia. Modern theories about their use have included social, religious, or astronomical roles, as furnaces, or as tombs. Although the question has long been contentious among scholars, the modern consensus is that they were built as defensible homesites, that included barns and silos. In the second half of the 2nd millennium BCE, archaeological studies have proved the increasing size of the settlements built around some of these structures, which were located at the summit of hills. For protection reasons, new towers were added to the original ones, connected by walls provided with slits forming a complex nuraghe. Among the most famous of the numerous existing nuraghe, are the Su Nuraxi at Barumini, Santu Antine at Torralba, Nuraghe Losa at Abbasanta, Nuraghe Palmavera at Alghero, Nuraghe Genna Maria at Villanovaforru, Nuraghe
Central Italian
Central Italian is a group of Italo-Dalmatian Romance lects spoken in central Italy in Lazio, central Marche, the far south of Tuscany, a small part of Abruzzo. The differences between these dialects are slight in inflection and stress of certain words. Central Italian dialects are related and mutually intelligible to Tuscan, on which Standard Italian was based. Although a few isoglosses cross the area, no firm demarcating lines have been established between them making them a one wider dialect continuum; the following dialects are part of the Central Italian group: Marchigiano Umbrian dialects Sabino Tuscia dialect Romanesco Castelli Romani dialect Ciociaro Languages of Italy Pellegrini's map
Etruscan civilization
The Etruscan civilization is the modern name given to a powerful and wealthy civilization of ancient Italy in the area corresponding to Tuscany, south of the Arno river, western Umbria and central Lazio, with offshoots to the north in the Po Valley, in the current Emilia-Romagna, south-eastern Lombardy and southern Veneto, to the south, in some areas of Campania. As distinguished by its unique language, this civilization endured from before the time of the earliest Etruscan inscriptions until its assimilation into the Roman Republic, beginning in the late 4th century BC with the Roman–Etruscan Wars. Culture, identifiably Etruscan developed in Italy after about 900 BC with the Iron Age Villanovan culture, regarded as the oldest phase of Etruscan civilization; the latter gave way in the 7th century BCE to a culture, influenced by Ancient Greek culture, during the Archaic and the Hellenistic period. At its maximum extent, during the foundational period of Rome and the Roman Kingdom, Etruscan civilization flourished in three confederacies of cities: of Etruria, of the Po Valley with the eastern Alps, of Campania.
The league in northern Italy is mentioned in Livy. The decline was gradual, but by 500 BCE the political destiny of Italy had passed out of Etruscan hands; the last Etruscan cities were formally absorbed by Rome around 100 BCE. Although the Etruscans developed a system of writing, the Etruscan language remains only understood, only a handful of texts of any length survive, making modern understanding of their society and culture dependent on much and disapproving Roman and Greek sources. Politics was based on the small city and the family unit. In their heyday, the Etruscan elite grew rich through trade with the Celtic world to the north and the Greeks to the south and filled their large family tombs with imported luxuries. Archaic Greece had a huge influence on their art and architecture, Greek mythology was evidently familiar to them; the Etruscans called themselves Rasenna, syncopated to Rasna or Raśna, while the ancient Romans referred to the Etruscans as the Tuscī or Etruscī. Their Roman name is the origin of the terms "Toscana", which refers to their heartland, "Etruria", which can refer to their wider region.
In Attic Greek, the Etruscans were known as Tyrrhenians, from which the Romans derived the names Tyrrhēnī, Tyrrhēnia, Mare Tyrrhēnum, prompting some to associate them with the Teresh. The origins of the Etruscans are lost in prehistory, although Greek historians as early as the 5th century BC associated the Tyrrhenians with Pelasgians, which could both be broad descriptive terms. Strabo and the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus make mention of the Tyrrhenians as pirates. Thucydides and Strabo all denote Lemnos as settled by Pelasgians, whom Thucydides identifies as "belonging to the Tyrrhenians". Although both Strabo and Herodotus agree that Tyrrhenus / Tyrsenos, son of Atys, king of Lydia, led the migration, Strabo specifies that it was the Pelasgians of Lemnos and Imbros who followed Tyrrhenus to the Italian Peninsula. A link between Lemnos and the Tyrrhenians was further manifested by the discovery of the Lemnos Stele, whose inscriptions were written in a language which shows strong structural resemblances to the language of the Etruscans.
This has led to the suggestion of a "Tyrrhenian language group" comprising Etruscan and the Raetic spoken in the Alps. Hellanicus of Lesbos records a Pelasgian migration from Thessaly to the Italian peninsula, noting that "the Pelasgi made themselves masters of some of the lands belonging to the Umbri". By contrast, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek writer living in Rome, dismisses many of the ancient theories of the other Greek historians and postulates that the Etruscans were indigenous people who had always lived in Etruria. For this reason, therefore, I am persuaded that the Pelasgians are a different people from the Tyrrhenians, and I do not believe, that the Tyrrhenians were a colony of the Lydians. For they neither worship the same gods as the Lydians nor make use of similar laws or institutions, but in these respects they differ more from the Lydians than from the Pelasgians. Indeed, those come nearest to the truth who declare that the nation migrated from nowhere else, but was native to the country, since it is found to be a ancient nation and to agree with no other either in its language or in its manner of living.
Furthermore, Dionysius of Halicarnassus is the first ancient writer who reports the endonym of the Etruscans: Rasenna. The Romans, give them other names: from the country they once inhabited, named Etruria, they call them Etruscans, from their knowledge of the ceremonies relating to divine worship, in which they excel others, they now call them, rather inaccurately, but with the same accuracy as the Greeks, they called them Thyoscoï, their own name for themselves, however, is the same as that of one of Rasenna. Livy in his Ab Urbe Condita Libri says the Rhaetians were Etruscans driven into the mountains by the invading Gauls, asserts that the inhabitants of Raetia were of Etruscan origin; the Alpine tribes have no doubt, the same origin the Raetians.
