Italian people

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Italians
Italiani

From top left:
Galileo • Michelangelo • Leonardo da Vinci • Alessandro Volta • Guglielmo Marconi • Maria Gaetana Agnesi • Maria Montessori • Giordano Bruno
Total population
140,000,000^{Sum of following totals}

Regions with significant populations
 Italy        60,100,000[1]
 Brazil 25 million [2]
 Argentina 20 million [3]
 United States 17.8 million [4]
 France 5,000,000 [5]
 Uruguay 1,500,000 [6]
 Canada 1,445,335 [7]
 Venezuela 900,000 [8]
 Peru 860,000 [9]
 Australia 852,418 [10]
 Switzerland 527,817^b [11]
 Germany 611,000 [12]
 Belgium 290,000 [13]
 Chile 150,000 [9]
 United Kingdom 133,500 [14]
 Paraguay 100,000 [9]
 Spain 153,700^c [15]
 Mexico 50,000 [16]
 Romania 40,000 [17]
 South Africa 35,000 [14]
 Croatia 19,636 [18]
 Ecuador 15,000 [19]
 Monaco 10,000 [20]
Languages

Italian and Italian dialects
(Sicilian · Southern Italian languages · Corsican · Sardinian · Northern Italian languages · Friulian)
languages of resident countries

Religion

predominantly Roman Catholic, others

Footnotes
^a Italians by birth, not including an indeterminable number of Frenchmen of Italian ancestry numbering as much as five million.[21]

^b includes 291,200 permanent residents;[22] not including about 500.000 Italian-speaking Swiss people,
^c Italian citizens, many of which are Latin American nationals with Italian citizenship.

The Italian people (Italian: italiani) are an ethnic group, in the sense of sharing a common Italian culture, descent, and speaking the Italian language as a mother tongue. Because of the wide-ranging and long-lasting diaspora, over 70 million people of Italian or part Italian ancestry live outside of Italy. Nearly two-thirds of the Italian diaspora live in South America (primarily Brazil and Argentina). About 20 million live in North America and nearly 1 million live in Oceania.

History

The Italian people have somewhat varied European origins apart from the original Ancient Italic peoples: Northern Italy had a strong Celtic presence in Cisalpine Gaul until the Romans conquered and colonized the area in the second century; the central portion of the Italian peninsula was inhabited by the Etruscans and Italic people; and southern Italy and Sicily was settled significantly by Greeks (see Magna Graecia).

The Romans romanized the entire peninsula and preserved common unity until the fifth century AD. In the later centuries of the Western Roman Empire, the Italian peninsula was infiltered by Germanic peoples crossing the Alps, establishing settlements in north-central Italy and to a much lesser degree in the south. The Germanic tribes underwent rapid Romanization.

The Byzantine Greeks were an important power in southern Italy for five centuries, fighting for supremacy first against the Ostrogoths and later against the Lombards of Benevento. Greek speakers were fairly common throughout Southern Italy and Sicily until the eleventh century when Byzantine rule ended: a few small Greek-speaking communities still exist in Calabria and Apulia [23]

In 827 AD, the island of Sicily was invaded starting a period of Arab influence in Sicily. Arabs controlled Sicily until the Norman Christians conquered much of southern Italy and all of Sicily in 1091 AD.[24]

For more than 500 years (12th to 17th centuries) after Norman rule, Swabian (German) and Angevin (French) swapped control of regions in Italy, predominately southern Italy and Sicily. During the 11th through 16th century the majority of city-states from Northern and Central Italy remained independent, nurturing the era now known as the Renaissance. Habsburg Spain and Bourbon Spain dominated in southern Italy. From the 16th C. right through to unification, most of the Italian states were controlled by the emerging European political powers, most notably the Austrian Habsburgs, Spain, and by the 19th C., Napoleonic France.

In 1720, Sicily came under Austrian Habsburg rule and was swapped between various European powers until Giuseppe Garibaldi conquered Sicily and southern Italy, allowing for the annexation of the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies into the new Italian state in 1860 (see Risorgimento).

Since the 19th century, the economic conditions of the agrarian southern and north-eastern regions resulted in mass migration from these regions to the Americas, industrial parts of northern Italy, and to other parts of Western Europe such as France and Belgium. By the 1970s economic conditions in the poorer regions of Italy improved to the point that even the less-developed regions of South Italy received more immigrants than it sent outwards.

Today, the population of Italy is less concentrated in large cities than in other European countries, with 67% of Italians living in a major urban area- compared to 76% of French, 88% of Germans and 90% of Britons. The vast majority of Italians live outside of the large (over 1,000,000 population) cities.[25]

Culture

From the Lombard invasion until the mid-nineteenth century, Italy was not the nation-state it is today. The Italian regions were fractured into various kingdoms, duchies, and domains. As a result, Italian dialects or regional minority languages and customs evolved independently. While all Italian states were similar and they retained basic elements of Roman language and culture, each developed its own regional culture and identity. As a result, even to this day, Italians define themselves primarily by their home region, province or city, and many still speak a local dialect or regional language in addition to standard Italian. Regional diversity is important to many Italians, and some regions also have strong local identities.