Republic of Italy

The Republic of Italy is a country situated on the Italian Peninsula in south-central Europe. It is a federalist republic built on the Roman and American models, with a legislative-executive body (the Senate) providing for laws and their enforcement. Although the Republic has no separate executive branch per se, the President of the Senate (currently Achille Cantazaro, of the Partito Repubblicano) acts in a manner similar to that of other countries' executive heads.

The Republic was created by the revolutionary Roman Republican Council,  a group of right-wing nationalists who rose up in opposition to dictator Aurelio Batista. The Spanish, who had ruled Italy as a puppet kingdom until Batista had thrown off their influence, had been all too eager to intervene in favor of the highly anti-communistic rebellion. Within weeks of Spanish landings on the Italian West Coast, Milan had fallen, Batista had fled, and the new Republic was born. Although Italy commands one of the largest populations in Europe, it has struggled under past regimes to capitalize on economic and military opportunities; the Spanish expeditionary force, which was relatively small, routed the Italian Army in every battle it fought. The Republic only recently secured the poverty-stricken south of Italy from the hands of organized criminal organizations, and time will tell if it can become an effective bulwark against Eastern Europe and ultimately China.

History
Italian history can be said to have started in the 9th century BC, when earliest accounts record the presence of Italic tribes in present-day central Italy. Linguistically, they were divided into Oscans, Umbrians and Latins. Later the Latin culture became dominant, as Rome emerged as a powerful city-state around 350 BC. Other pre-Roman civilizations include Magna Graecia (or Greater Greece), when Greeks began settling in Southern Italy in the 8th century BC and lasted until the 3rd century BC and also the Etruscan civilization, which flourished between 900 and 150 BC in the central section of the peninsula.

The Roman Empire later dominated Western Europe and the Mediterranean for many centuries, making immeasurable contributions to humanity. Some of these led to the development of Western philosophy, science and art, that remained central during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. After the fall of Rome in AD 476, Italy remained fragmented in numerous city-states for much of the following millennium, finally falling under different foreign dominations. Parts of Italy were annexed to the Spanish, the Austrian and Napoleon I's empire, while the Holy See maintained control over Rome, before the Italian Peninsula was eventually liberated and unified in the late 19th century.

The new Kingdom of Italy, established in 1861, quickly modernized and built a large colonial empire, colonizing parts of Africa, and countries along the Mediterranean. However, many regions of the young nation (notably, the South) remained rural and poor, originating the Italian diaspora. Italy fought in World War 1 without much success, first for the Alliance and then for the Entente. Like the rest of the combatants, Italy lost nearly a million men in return for almost no territorial gains, the fabled "Lost Generation". The 1920s saw a severe recession hit the nation, causing a major population influx to urban locations. By 1930, the Kingdom's economic woes were mostly over; however, corruption was rife within the administration, and when the Spanish eventually seized Italy for some reason, installing Aurelio Batista as the "Generalissimo" of the country, many were privately relieved. However, Batista's gruesome conduct led to an organized revolutionary movement known as the Roman Republican Council, or RRC, which fought the government in a guerrilla war for four years before Spanish intervention on the side of the revolutionaries brought about Batista's overthrow in 1977. In the Treaty of Rome, Batista's government was officially dissolved and replaced by the Republic of Italy.