QUIET hamlets in the mountain valleys, spacious pastures on the slopes, lakes upheld in the chalice of the hills, fields green or yellow verging toward blue seas, villages and towns drowsy under the noon sun and then alive with passion, cities in which, amid dust and dirt, everything from cottage to cathedral seems beautiful—this for two thousand years has been Italy. “Throughout the whole earth, and wherever the vault of heaven spreads, there is no country so fair”: thus even the prosaic elder Pliny spoke of his fatherland.1 “Here is eternal spring,” sang Virgil, “and summer even in months not her own. Twice in the year the cattle breed, twice the trees serve us with fruit.”2 Twice a year the roses bloomed at Paestum, and in the north lay many a fertile plain like Mantua’s, “feeding the white swans with grassy stream.”3 Like a spine along the great peninsula ran the Apennines, shielding the west coast from the northeast winds, and blessing the soil with rivers that hurried to lose themselves in captivating bays. On the north the Alps stood guard; on every other side protecting waters lapped difficult and often precipitous shores. It was a land well suited to reward an industrious population, and strategically placed athwart the Mediterranean to rule the classic world.
The mountains brought death as well as splendor, for earthquakes and eruptions now and then embalmed the labor of centuries in ashes. But here, as usually, death was a gift to life; the lava mingled with organic matter to enrich the earth for a hundred generations.4 Part of the terrain was too steep for cultivation, and part of it was malarial marsh; the rest was so fertile that Polybius marveled at the abundance and cheapness of food in ancient Italy,5 and suggested that the quantity and quality of its crops might be judged from the vigor and courage of its men. Alfieri thought that the “man-plant” had flourished better in Italy than anywhere else.6 Even today the timid student is a bit frightened by the intense feelings of these fascinating folk—their taut muscles, swift love and anger, smoldering or blazing eyes; the pride and fury that made Italy great, and tore her to pieces, in the days of Marius and Caesar and the Renaissance, still run in Italian blood, only awaiting a good cause or argument. Nearly all the men are virile and handsome, nearly all the women beautiful, strong, and brave; what land can match the dynasty of genius that the mothers of Italy have poured forth through thirty centuries? No other country has been so long the hub of history—at first in government, then in religion, then in art. For seventeen hundred years, from Cato Censor to Michelangelo, Rome was the center of the Western world.
“Those who are the best judges in that country,” says Aristotle, “report that when Italus became king of Oenotria, the people changed their name, and called themselves no longer Oenotrians but Italians.”7 Oenotria was the toe of the Italian boot, so teeming with grapes that the word meant “land of wine.” Italus, says Thucydides, was a king of the Sicels, who had occupied Oenotria on the way to conquer and name Sicily.8 Just as the Romans called all Hellenes Graeci, Greeks, from a few Graii who had emigrated from north Attica to Naples, so the Greeks gradually extended the name Italia to all the peninsula south of the Po.
Doubtless many chapters of Italy’s story lie silent under her crowded soil. Remains of an Old Stone Age culture indicate that for at least 30,000 years before Christ the plains were inhabited by man. Between 10,000 and 6000 B.C. a neolithic culture appeared: a longheaded race called by ancient tradition Liguri and Siceli fashioned rude pottery with linear ornament, made tools and weapons of polished stone, domesticated animals, hunted and fished, and buried their dead. Some lived in caves, others in round huts of wattle and daub; from these cylindrical cottages architecture pursued a continuous development to the round “House of Romulus” on the Palatine, the Temple of Vesta in the Forum, and the Mausoleum of Hadrian—the Castel Sant’ Angelo of today.
About 2000 B.C. northern Italy was invaded—presumably not for the first time—by tribes from central Europe. They brought with them the custom of building their villages upon piles sunk in water, for safety from animal or human attack. They settled on Garda, Como, Maggiore, and the other enchanted lakes that still lure aliens to Italy. Later they moved south and, finding fewer lakes, built their homes upon land, but still upon a foundation of piles. Their habit of surrounding these settlements with rampart and moat passed down to form features of Roman camps and medieval châteaux. They pastured flocks and herds, tilled the soil, wove clothing, fired pottery; and out of bronze, which had appeared in Italy toward the end of the Neolithic Age (about 2500 B.C.), they forged a hundred varieties of tools and weapons, including combs, hairpins, razors, tweezers, and other timeless implements.9 They allowed their rubbish to accumulate so lavishly around the villages that their culture has received the name of terramare—earth marl—from the fertilizing potency of these remains. So far as we know, they were the direct ancestors of the basic population of Italy in historical times.
In the valley of the Po the descendants of these terramaricoli, about 1000 B.C., learned from Germany the use of iron, made from it improved implements, and, so armed, spread their “Villanovan” culture from its center at Villanova, near Bologna, far down into Italy. From them, we may believe, came the blood, languages, and essential arts of the Umbrians, Sabines, and Latins. Then, about 800 B.C.., a new flood of immigrants arrived, subjugated the Villanovan population, and established between the Tiber and the Alps one of the strangest civilizations in the records of mankind.