Italien

Everything begins here: the Roman Republic and Empire, Latin, praetorian law codified by Justinian, the Christian basilica born of the civic basilica. Rome holds the tomb of Peter; Ravenna preserves Byzantine mosaic; fifteenth-century Florence reopens the dialogue with Plato and Greek statuary.

Founded by tradition in 753 BC, Rome moved from city-state to Mediterranean empire. It bequeathed to Europe a language, a written law, a road network and a conception of citizenship detached from ethnicity — the Edict of Caracalla extended citizenship in 212 to almost all free men.

After the fall of the Western Empire in 476 the peninsula fragmented but remained the spiritual centre of Latin Christendom and, from the eleventh century, the laboratory of merchant communes: Venice, Genoa and Florence invented banking, double-entry bookkeeping and permanent diplomacy.

The Renaissance there explicitly renewed ties with Greco-Roman antiquity. Political unification came late, completed in 1870 with the capture of Rome. A founding member of the Communities, Italy signed in 1957 the treaties that bear the name of its capital.