title: Italians

text: National symbols of Italy are the symbols that uniquely identify Italy reflecting its history and culture. They are used to represent the Nation through emblems, metaphors, personifications, allegories, which are shared by the entire Italian people. Some of them are official, i.e. they are recognized by the Italian state authorities, while others are part of the identity of the country without being defined by law.


title: Italians

text: Traditions of Italy are sets of traditions, beliefs, values, and customs that belongs within the culture of Italian people. These traditions have influenced life in Italy for centuries, and are still practiced in modern times. Italian traditions are directly connected to Italy's ancestors, which says even more about Italian history. Folklore of Italy refers to the folklore and urban legends of Italy. Within the Italian territory, various peoples have followed one another over time, each of which has left its mark on current culture. Some tales also come from Christianization, especially those concerning demons, which are sometimes recognized by Christian demonology. Italian folklore also includes Italian folk dance, Italian folk music and folk heroes.


title: Italians

text: Women in Italy refers to females who are from (or reside in) Italy. The legal and social status of Italian women has undergone rapid transformations and changes during the past decades. This includes family laws, the enactment of anti-discrimination measures, and reforms to the penal code (in particular with regard to crimes of violence against women). After World War II, women were given the right to vote in 1946 Italian institutional referendum. The new Italian Constitution of 1948 affirmed that women had equal rights. It was not however until the 1970s that women in Italy scored some major achievements with the introduction of laws regulating divorce (1970), abortion (1978), and the approval in 1975 of the new family code. Today, women have the same legal rights as men in Italy, and have mainly the same job, business, and education opportunities.


title: Italians

text: Italian cuisine is a Mediterranean cuisine consisting of the ingredients, recipes and cooking techniques developed across the Italian Peninsula since antiquity, and later spread around the world together with waves of Italian diaspora. Italian cuisine includes deeply rooted traditions common to the whole country, as well as all the regional gastronomies, different from each other, especially between the north, the centre and the south of Italy, which are in continuous exchange. Many dishes that were once regional have proliferated with variations throughout the country. Italian cuisine offers an abundance of taste, and has influenced several other cuisines around the world, chiefly that of the United States. The most popular dishes and recipes, over the centuries, have often been created by ordinary people more so than by chefs, which is why many Italian recipes are suitable for home and daily cooking, respecting regional specificities, privileging only raw materials and ingredients from the region of origin of the dish and preserving its seasonality.


title: Italians

text: Over the ages, Italian literature had a vast influence on Western philosophy, beginning with the Greeks and Romans, and going onto Renaissance, The Enlightenment and modern philosophy.


title: Italians

text: Italian Medieval philosophy was mainly Christian, and included several important philosophers and theologians such as St Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas was the student of Albert the Great, a brilliant Dominican experimentalist, much like the Franciscan, Roger Bacon of Oxford in the 13th century. Aquinas reintroduced Aristotelian philosophy to Christianity. He believed that there was no contradiction between faith and secular reason. He believed that Aristotle had achieved the pinnacle in the human striving for truth and thus adopted Aristotle's philosophy as a framework in constructing his theological and philosophical outlook. He was a professor at the prestigious University of Paris.


title: Italians

text: Italy was also affected by the Enlightenment, a movement which was a consequence of the Renaissance and changed the road of Italian philosophy. Followers of the group often met to discuss in private salons and coffeehouses, notably in the cities of Milan, Rome and Venice. Cities with important universities such as Padua, Bologna and Naples, however, also remained great centres of scholarship and the intellect, with several philosophers such as Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) (who is widely regarded as being the founder of modern Italian philosophy) and Antonio Genovesi. Italian society also dramatically changed during the Enlightenment, with rulers such as Leopold II of Tuscany abolishing the death penalty. The church's power was significantly reduced, and it was a period of great thought and invention, with scientists such as Alessandro Volta and Luigi Galvani discovering new things and greatly contributing to Western science. Cesare Beccaria was also one of the greatest Italian Enlightenment writers and is now considered one of the fathers of classical criminal theory as well as modern penology. Beccaria is famous for his masterpiece "On Crimes and Punishments" (1764), a treatise (later translated into 22 languages) that served as one of the earliest prominent condemnations of torture and the death penalty and thus a landmark work in anti-death penalty philosophy.


title: Italians

text: Some of the most prominent philosophies and ideologies in Italy during the late 19th and 20th centuries include anarchism, communism, socialism, futurism, fascism, and Christian democracy. Antonio Rosmini, instead, was the founder of Italian idealism. Both futurism and fascism (in its original form, now often distinguished as Italian fascism) were developed in Italy at this time. From the 1920s to the 1940s, Italian Fascism was the official philosophy and ideology of the Italian government led by Benito Mussolini. Giovanni Gentile was one of the most significant 20th-century Idealist/Fascist philosophers. Meanwhile, anarchism, communism, and socialism, though not originating in Italy, took significant hold in Italy during the early 20th century, with the country producing numerous significant Italian anarchists, socialists, and communists. In addition, anarcho-communism first fully formed into its modern strain within the Italian section of the First International. Antonio Gramsci remains an important philosopher within Marxist and communist theory, credited with creating the theory of cultural hegemony.


title: Italians

text: Early Italian feminists include Sibilla Aleramo, Alaide Gualberta Beccari, and Anna Maria Mozzoni, though proto-feminist philosophies had previously been touched upon by earlier Italian writers such as Christine de Pizan, Moderata Fonte, and Lucrezia Marinella. Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori is credited with the creation of the philosophy of education that bears her name, an educational philosophy now practiced throughout the world. Giuseppe Peano was one of the founders of analytic philosophy and contemporary philosophy of mathematics. Recent analytic philosophers include Carlo Penco, Gloria Origgi, Pieranna Garavaso and Luciano Floridi.


title: Italians

text: Formal Latin literature began in 240 BC, when the first stage play was performed in Rome. Latin literature was, and still is, highly influential in the world, with numerous writers, poets, philosophers, and historians, such as Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger, Virgil, Horace, Propertius, Ovid and Livy. The Romans were also famous for their oral tradition, poetry, drama and epigrams. In early years of the 13th century, St. Francis of Assisi was considered the first Italian poet by literary critics, with his religious song "Canticle of the Sun".


title: Italians

text: Italian literature may be unearthed back to the Middle Ages, with the most significant poets of the period being Dante Alighieri, Petrarch, and Giovanni Boccaccio. During the Renaissance, humanists such as Leonardo Bruni, Coluccio Salutati and Niccolò Machiavelli were great collectors of antique manuscripts. Many worked for the organized Church and were in holy orders (like Petrarch), while others were lawyers and chancellors of Italian cities, like Petrarch's disciple, Salutati, the Chancellor of Florence, and thus had access to book copying workshops.


title: Italians

text: In the 18th century, the political condition of the Italian states began to improve, and philosophers disseminated their writings and ideas throughout Europe during the Age of Enlightenment. Apostolo Zeno and Metastasio are two of the notable figures of the age. Carlo Goldoni, a Venetian playwright and librettist, created the comedy of character. The leading figure of the 18th-century Italian literary revival was Giuseppe Parini.


title: Italians

text: One of the most remarkable poets of the early 19th and 20th century writers was Giacomo Leopardi, who is widely acknowledged to be one of the most radical and challenging thinkers of the 19th century. The main instigator of the reform was the Italian poet and novelist Alessandro Manzoni, notable for being the author of the historical novel "I promessi sposi" ("The Betrothed", 1827–1842). Italo Svevo, the author of "La coscienza di Zeno" (1923), and Luigi Pirandello (winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature), who explored the shifting nature of reality in his prose fiction and such plays as "Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore" ("Six Characters in Search of an Author", 1921). Federigo Tozzi and Giuseppe Ungaretti were well-known novelists, critically appreciated only in recent years, and regarded one of the forerunners of existentialism in the European novel.


title: Italians

text: Modern literary figures and Nobel laureates are Gabriele D'Annunzio from 1889 to 1910, nationalist poet Giosuè Carducci in 1906, realist writer Grazia Deledda in 1926, modern theatre author Luigi Pirandello in 1936, short stories writer Italo Calvino in 1960, poets Salvatore Quasimodo in 1959 and Eugenio Montale in 1975, Umberto Eco in 1980, and satirist and theatre author Dario Fo in 1997.


title: Italians

text: Italian theatre originates from the Middle Ages, with its backgroud dating back to the times of the ancient Greek colonies of Magna Graecia, in Southern Italy, the theater of the Italic peoples and the theatre of ancient Rome. It can therefore be assumed that there were two main lines of which the ancient Italian theatre developed in the Middle Ages. The first, consisting of the dramatization of Catholic liturgies and of which more documentation is retained, and the second, formed by pagan forms of spectacle such as the staging for city festivals, the court preparations of the jesters and the songs of the troubadours. The Renaissance theatre marked the beginning of the modern theatre due to the rediscovery and study of the classics, the ancient theatrical texts were recovered and translated, which were soon staged at the court and in the curtensi halls, and then moved to real theatre. In this way the idea of theatre came close to that of today: a performance in a designated place in which the public participates. In the late 15th century two cities were important centers for the rediscovery and renewal of theatrical art: Ferrara and Rome. The first, vital center of art in the second half of the fifteenth century, saw the staging of some of the most famous Latin works by Plautus, rigorously translated into Italian.


title: Italians

text: During the 16th century and on into the 18th century, "Commedia dell'arte" was a form of improvisational theatre, and it is still performed today. Travelling troupes of players would set up an outdoor stage and provide amusement in the form of juggling, acrobatics and, more typically, humorous plays based on a repertoire of established characters with a rough storyline, called "canovaccio". Plays did not originate from written drama but from scenarios called lazzi, which were loose frameworks that provided the situations, complications, and outcome of the action, around which the actors would improvise. The characters of the "commedia" usually represent fixed social types and stock characters, each of which has a distinct costume, such as foolish old men, devious servants, or military officers full of false bravado. The main categories of these characters include servants, old men, lovers, and captains.


title: Italians

text: The Ballet dance genre also originated in Italy. It began during the Italian Renaissance court as an outgrowth of court pageantry, where aristocratic weddings were lavish celebrations. Court musicians and dancers collaborated to provide elaborate entertainment for them. At first, ballets were woven in to the midst of an opera to allow the audience a moment of relief from the dramatic intensity. By the mid-seventeenth century, Italian ballets in their entirety were performed in between the acts of an opera. Over time, Italian ballets became part of theatrical life: ballet companies in Italy's major opera houses employed an average of four to twelve dancers; in 1815 many companies employed anywhere from eighty to one hundred dancers.


title: Italians

text: Since the Roman Empire, most western contributions to Western legal culture was the emergence of a class of Roman jurists. During the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas, the most influential Western scholar of the period, integrated the theory of natural law with the notion of an eternal and Biblical law. During the Renaissance, Prof. Alberico Gentili, the founder of the science of international law, authored the first treatise on public international law and separated secular law from canon law and Catholic theology. Enlightenment's greatest legal theorists, Cesare Beccaria, Giambattista Vico and Francesco Mario Pagano, are well remembered for their legal works, particularly on criminal law.


title: Italians

text: Francesco Carrara, an advocate of abolition of the death penalty, was one of the foremost European criminal lawyers of the 19th century. During the last periods, numerous Italians have been recognised as the prominent prosecutor magistrates.


title: Italians

text: Italians have been the central figures of countless inventions and discoveries and they made many predominant contributions to various fields. During the Renaissance, Italian polymaths such as Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Michelangelo (1475–1564) and Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72) made important contributions to a variety of fields, including biology, architecture, and engineering. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), a physicist, mathematician and astronomer, played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His achievements include the invention of the thermometer and key improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations, and ultimately the triumph of Copernicanism over the Ptolemaic model. Other astronomers such as Giovanni Domenico Cassini (1625–1712) and Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835–1910) made many important discoveries about the Solar System.


title: Italians

text: In biology, Francesco Redi was the first to challenge the theory of spontaneous generation by demonstrating that maggots come from eggs of flies and he described 180 parasites in detail; Marcello Malpighi founded microscopic anatomy; Lazzaro Spallanzani conducted important research in bodily functions, animal reproduction, and cellular theory; Camillo Golgi, whose many achievements include the discovery of the Golgi complex, paved the way to the acceptance of the Neuron doctrine; Rita Levi-Montalcini discovered the nerve growth factor (awarded 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine); Angelo Ruffini first described the Ruffini endings and was known for his work in histology and embryology; Filippo Pacini discovered the Pacinian corpuscles and was the first to isolate the cholera bacillus "Vibrio cholerae" in 1854, before Robert Koch's more widely accepted discoveries 30 years later.


title: Italians

text: Prominent scientists, engineers and inventors were: Amedeo Avogadro (most noted for his contributions to molecular theory, in particular Avogadro's law and the Avogadro constant), Evangelista Torricelli (inventor of the barometer), Alessandro Volta (inventor of the electric battery), Guglielmo Marconi (inventor of radio), Antonio Meucci (known for developing a voice-communication apparatus, often credited as the inventor of the first telephone before even Alexander Graham Bell), Galileo Ferraris (one of the pioneers of AC power system, invented the first induction motor), Eugenio Barsanti and Felice Matteucci (as inventors of the first version of the internal combustion engine in 1853).


title: Italians

text: In chemistry, Giulio Natta, the inventor of the first catalyst for the production of isotactic propylene and among the fathers of macromolecular chemistry, in 1963 received the Nobel prize for chemistry, along with Karl Ziegler, for work on high polymers.


title: Italians

text: In physics, Enrico Fermi, a Nobel prize laureate, led the team in Chicago that built the first nuclear reactor and is also noted for his many other contributions to physics, including the co-development of the quantum theory. He and a number of Italian physicists were forced to leave Italy in the 1930s by Fascist laws against Jews, including Emilio G. Segrè (1905–89) (who discovered the elements technetium and astatine, and the antiproton), and Bruno Rossi (1905–93), a pioneer in Cosmic Rays and X-ray astronomy.


title: Italians

text: Other notable physicists were also Ettore Majorana (who discovered the Majorana fermions), Giuseppe Occhialini (who received the Wolf Prize in Physics for the discovery of the pion or pi-meson decay in 1947) and Carlo Rubbia (1984 Nobel Prize in Physics for work leading to the discovery of the W and Z particles at CERN).


title: Italians

text: During the Middle Ages, Leonardo Fibonacci, the most talented Western mathematician of the Middle Ages, introduced the Hindu–Arabic numeral system to the Western world. He also introduced the sequence of Fibonacci numbers, which he used as an example in "Liber Abaci". Gerolamo Cardano established the foundation of probability and introduced the binomial coefficients and the binomial theorem; he also invented several mechanical devices. During the Renaissance, Luca Pacioli introduced accounting to the world, publishing the first work on Double-entry bookkeeping system. Galileo Galilei made several significant advances in mathematics. Bonaventura Cavalieri's works partially anticipated integral calculus and popularized logarithms in Italy.


title: Italians

text: Jacopo Riccati, who was also a jurist, invented the Riccati equation. Maria Gaetana Agnesi, the first woman to write a mathematics handbook, become the first woman mathematics professor at a university. Gian Francesco Malfatti, posed the problem of carving three circular columns out of a triangular block of marble, using as much of the marble as possible, and conjectured that three mutually-tangent circles inscribed within the triangle would provide the optimal solution, which are now known as Malfatti circles. Paolo Ruffini is credited for his innovative work in mathematics, creating Ruffini's rule and co-creating the Abel–Ruffini theorem. Joseph-Louis Lagrange, who was one of the most influential mathematicians of his time, made essential contributions to analysis, number theory, and both classical and celestial mechanics.


title: Italians

text: Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro invented tensor calculus and absolute differential calculus, which were popularized in a work he co-wrote with Tullio Levi-Civita, and used in the development of the theory of relativity; Ricci-Curbastro also wrote meaningful works on algebra, infinitesimal analysis, and papers on the theory of real numbers. Giuseppe Peano, was a founder of mathematical logic and set theory; alongside John Venn, he drew the first Venn diagram. Beniamino Segre is one of the major contributors to algebraic geometry and one of the founders of finite geometry. Ennio de Giorgi, a Wolf Prize in Mathematics recipient in 1990, solved Bernstein's problem about minimal surfaces and the 19th Hilbert problem on the regularity of solutions of elliptic partial differential equations.


title: Italians

text: The history of Italian visual arts is significant to the history of Western painting. Roman art was influenced by Greece and can in part be taken as a descendant of ancient Greek painting. Roman painting does have its own unique characteristics. The only surviving Roman paintings are wall paintings, many from villas in Campania, in Southern Italy. Such paintings can be grouped into four main "styles" or periods and may contain the first examples of trompe-l'œil, pseudo-perspective, and pure landscape.


title: Italians

text: Panel painting becomes more common during the Romanesque period, under the heavy influence of Byzantine icons. Towards the middle of the 13th century, Medieval art and Gothic painting became more realistic, with the beginnings of interest in the depiction of volume and perspective in Italy with Cimabue and then his pupil Giotto. From Giotto onwards, the treatment of composition in painting became much more free and innovative.


title: Italians

text: The Italian Renaissance is said by many to be the golden age of painting; roughly spanning the 14th through the mid-17th centuries with a significant influence also out of the borders of modern Italy. In Italy artists like Paolo Uccello, Fra Angelico, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Andrea Mantegna, Filippo Lippi, Giorgione, Tintoretto, Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Giovanni Bellini, and Titian took painting to a higher level through the use of perspective, the study of human anatomy and proportion, and through their development of refined drawing and painting techniques. Michelangelo was active as a sculptor from about 1500 to 1520; works include his "David", "Pietà", "Moses". Other Renaissance sculptors include Lorenzo Ghiberti, Luca Della Robbia, Donatello, Filippo Brunelleschi and Andrea del Verrocchio.


title: Italians

text: In the 15th and 16th centuries, the High Renaissance gave rise to a stylised art known as Mannerism. In place of the balanced compositions and rational approach to perspective that characterised art at the dawn of the 16th century, the Mannerists sought instability, artifice, and doubt. The unperturbed faces and gestures of Piero della Francesca and the calm Virgins of Raphael are replaced by the troubled expressions of Pontormo and the emotional intensity of El Greco.


title: Italians

text: In the 17th century, among the greatest painters of Italian Baroque are Caravaggio, Annibale Carracci, Artemisia Gentileschi, Mattia Preti, Carlo Saraceni and Bartolomeo Manfredi. Subsequently, in the 18th century, Italian Rococo was mainly inspired by French Rococo, since France was the founding nation of that particular style, with artists such as Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and Canaletto. Italian Neoclassical sculpture focused, with Antonio Canova's nudes, on the idealist aspect of the movement.


title: Italians

text: In the 19th century, major Italian Romantic painters were Francesco Hayez, Giuseppe Bezzuoli and Francesco Podesti. Impressionism was brought from France to Italy by the "Macchiaioli", led by Giovanni Fattori, and Giovanni Boldini; Realism by Gioacchino Toma and Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo. In the 20th century, with Futurism, primarily through the works of Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla, Italy rose again as a seminal country for artistic evolution in painting and sculpture. Futurism was succeeded by the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, who exerted a strong influence on the Surrealists and generations of artists to follow like Bruno Caruso and Renato Guttuso.


title: Italians

text: As Italy is home to the greatest number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites (58) to date and it is home to half the world's great art treasures, Italians are known for their significant architectural achievements, such as the construction of arches, domes and similar structures during ancient Rome, the founding of the Renaissance architectural movement in the late-14th to 16th centuries, and being the homeland of Palladianism, a style of construction which inspired movements such as that of Neoclassical architecture, and influenced the designs which noblemen built their country houses all over the world, notably in the UK, Australia and the US during the late 17th to early 20th centuries. Several of the finest works in Western architecture, such as the Colosseum, the Milan Cathedral and Florence cathedral, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the building designs of Venice are found in Italy.


title: Italians

text: Italian architecture has also widely influenced the architecture of the world. British architect Inigo Jones, inspired by the designs of Italian buildings and cities, brought back the ideas of Italian Renaissance architecture to 17th-century England, being inspired by Andrea Palladio. Additionally, Italianate architecture, popular abroad since the 19th century, was used to describe foreign architecture which was built in an Italian style, especially modelled on Renaissance architecture.


title: Italians

text: Italian modern and contemporary architecture refers to architecture in Italy during 20th and 21st centuries. During the Fascist period the so-called "Novecento movement" flourished, with figures such as Gio Ponti, Peter Aschieri, Giovanni Muzio. This movement was based on the rediscovery of imperial Rome. Marcello Piacentini, who was responsible for the urban transformations of several cities in Italy, and remembered for the disputed Via della Conciliazione in Rome, devised a form of "simplified Neoclassicism".


title: Italians

text: The fascist architecture (shown perfectly in the EUR buildings) was followed by the "Neoliberty" style (seen in earlier works of Vittorio Gregotti) and Brutalist architecture (Torre Velasca in Milan group BBPR, a residential building via Piagentina in Florence, Leonardo Savioli and works by Giancarlo De Carlo).


title: Italians

text: From folk music to classical, music has always played an important role in Italian culture. Instruments associated with classical music, including the piano and violin, were invented in Italy, and many of the prevailing classical music forms, such as the symphony, concerto, and sonata, can trace their roots back to innovations of 16th- and 17th-century Italian music.


title: Italians

text: Most notable Italians composers include the Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Claudio Monteverdi, the Baroque composers Scarlatti, Corelli and Vivaldi, the Classical composers Paganini and Rossini, and the Romantic composers Verdi and Puccini, whose operas, including "La bohème", "Tosca", "Madama Butterfly", and "Turandot", are among the most frequently worldwide performed in the standard repertoire. Modern Italian composers such as Berio and Nono proved significant in the development of experimental and electronic music. While the classical music tradition still holds strong in Italy, as evidenced by the fame of its innumerable opera houses, such as La Scala of Milan and San Carlo of Naples, and performers such as the pianist Maurizio Pollini and the late tenor Luciano Pavarotti, Italians have been no less appreciative of their thriving contemporary music scene.


title: Italians

text: Italians are amply known as the mothers of opera. Italian opera was believed to have been founded in the early 17th century, in Italian cities such as Mantua and Venice. Later, works and pieces composed by native Italian composers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi and Puccini, are among the most famous operas ever written and today are performed in opera houses across the world. La Scala operahouse in Milan is also renowned as one of the best in the world. Famous Italian opera singers include Enrico Caruso and Alessandro Bonci.


title: Italians

text: Introduced in the early 1920s, jazz took a particularly strong foothold among Italians, and remained popular despite the xenophobic cultural policies of the Fascist regime. Today, the most notable centres of jazz music in Italy include Milan, Rome, and Sicily. Later, Italy was at the forefront of the progressive rock movement of the 1970s, with bands like PFM and Goblin. Italy was also an important country in the development of disco and electronic music, with Italo disco, known for its futuristic sound and prominent usage of synthesizers and drum machines, being one of the earliest electronic dance genres, as well as European forms of disco aside from Euro disco (which later went on to influence several genres such as Eurodance and Nu-disco).


title: Italians

text: Producers and songwriters such as Giorgio Moroder, who won three Academy Awards for his music, were highly influential in the development of EDM (electronic dance music). Today, Italian pop music is represented annually with the Sanremo Music Festival, which served as inspiration for the Eurovision song contest, and the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto. Singers such as pop diva Mina, classical crossover artist Andrea Bocelli, Grammy winner Laura Pausini, and European chart-topper Eros Ramazzotti have attained international acclaim.


title: Italians

text: Since the development of the Italian film industry in the early 1900s, Italian filmmakers and performers have, at times, experienced both domestic and international success, and have influenced film movements throughout the world. The history of Italian cinema began a few months after the Lumière brothers began motion picture exhibitions. The first Italian director is considered to be Vittorio Calcina, a collaborator of the Lumière Brothers, who filmed Pope Leo XIII in 1896. In the 1910s the Italian film industry developed rapidly. "Cabiria", a 1914 Italian epic film directed by Giovanni Pastrone, is considered the most famous Italian silent film. It was also the first film in history to be shown in the White House. The oldest European avant-garde cinema movement, Italian futurism, took place in the late 1910s.


title: Italians

text: After a period of decline in the 1920s, the Italian film industry was revitalized in the 1930s with the arrival of sound film. A popular Italian genre during this period, the Telefoni Bianchi, consisted of comedies with glamorous backgrounds. Calligrafismo was instead in a sharp contrast to Telefoni Bianchi-American style comedies and is rather artistic, highly formalistic, expressive in complexity and deals mainly with contemporary literary material.


title: Italians

text: A new era took place at the end of World War II, with the Italian film that was widely recognised and exported until an artistic decline around the 1980s. Notable Italian film directors from this period include Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini, Sergio Leone, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, Dussio Tessari and Roberto Rossellini; some of these are recognised among the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time. Movies include world cinema treasures such as "Bicycle Thieves", "La dolce vita", "8½", "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly", and "Once Upon a Time in the West". The mid-1940s to the early 1950s was the heyday of neorealist films, reflecting the poor condition of post-war Italy. Actresses such as Sophia Loren, Giulietta Masina and Gina Lollobrigida achieved international stardom during this period.


title: Italians

text: Since the early 1960s they also popularized a large number of genres and subgenres, such as Peplum, Macaroni Combat, Musicarello, Poliziotteschi and Commedia sexy all'italiana. The Spaghetti Western achieved popularity in the mid-1960s, peaking with Sergio Leone's "Dollars Trilogy", which featured enigmatic scores by composer Ennio Morricone. Erotic Italian thrillers, or Giallos, produced by directors such as Mario Bava and Dario Argento in the 1970s, influenced the horror genre worldwide. In recent years, directors such as Ermanno Olmi, Bernardo Bertolucci, Giuseppe Tornatore, Gabriele Salvatores, Roberto Benigni, Matteo Garrone, Paolo Sorrentino and Luca Guadagnino brought critical acclaim back to Italian cinema.


title: Italians

text: The Venice International Film Festival, awarding the "Golden Lion" and held annually since 1932, is the oldest film festival in the world and one of the "Big Three" alongside Cannes and Berlin. The country is also famed for its prestigious David di Donatello. Italy is the most awarded country at the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film, with 14 awards won, 3 Special Awards and 28 nominations. , Italian films have also won 12 Palmes d'Or (the second-most of any country), 11 Golden Lions and 7 Golden Bears.


title: Italians

text: Italian fashion has a long tradition. Milan, Florence and Rome are Italy's main fashion capitals. According to "Top Global Fashion Capital Rankings" 2013 by Global Language Monitor, Rome ranked sixth worldwide when Milan was twelfth. Previously, in 2009, Milan was declared as the "fashion capital of the world" by Global Language Monitor itself. Currently, Milan and Rome, annually compete with other major international centres, such as Paris, New York, London, and Tokyo.


title: Italians

text: The Italian fashion industry is one of the country's most important manufacturing sectors. The majority of the older Italian couturiers are based in Rome. However, Milan is seen as the fashion capital of Italy because many well-known designers are based there and it is the venue for the Italian designer collections. Major Italian fashion labels, such as Gucci, Armani, Prada, Versace, Valentino, Dolce & Gabbana, Missoni, Fendi, Moschino, Max Mara, Trussardi, Benetton, and Ferragamo, to name a few, are regarded as among the finest fashion houses in the world.


title: Italians

text: Accessory and jewelry labels, such as Bulgari, Luxottica, Buccellati have been founded in Italy and are internationally acclaimed, and Luxottica is the world's largest eyewear company. Also, the fashion magazine Vogue Italia, is considered one of the most prestigious fashion magazines in the world. The talent of young, creative fashion is also promoted, as in the ITS young fashion designer competition in Trieste.


title: Italians

text: Italy is also prominent in the field of design, notably interior design, architectural design, industrial design, and urban design. The country has produced some well-known furniture designers, such as Gio Ponti and Ettore Sottsass, and Italian phrases such as "Bel Disegno" and "Linea Italiana" have entered the vocabulary of furniture design. Examples of classic pieces of Italian white goods and pieces of furniture include Zanussi's washing machines and fridges, the "New Tone" sofas by Atrium, and the post-modern bookcase by Ettore Sottsass, inspired by Bob Dylan's song "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again".


title: Italians

text: Italy is recognized as being a worldwide trendsetter and leader in design. Italy today still exerts a vast influence on urban design, industrial design, interior design, and fashion design worldwide. Today, Milan and Turin are the nation's leaders in architectural design and industrial design. The city of Milan hosts the FieraMilano, Europe's biggest design fair. Milan also hosts major design and architecture-related events and venues, such as the "Fuori Salone" and the Salone del Mobile, and has been home to the designers Bruno Munari, Lucio Fontana, Enrico Castellani, and Piero Manzoni.


title: Italians

text: Italians have a long tradition in sport. In numerous sports, both individual and team, Italy has been very successful.


title: Italians

text: Italy is one of the most successful national teams in association football having four FIFA World Cups, two UEFA European Championship and one Olympic tournament.


title: Italians

text: Amongst the players who won the FIFA World Cup there are Giuseppe Meazza, Silvio Piola (to date the highest goalscorer in Italian first league history), Dino Zoff, Paolo Rossi, Marco Tardelli, Bruno Conti, Gianluigi Buffon, Fabio Cannavaro, Alessandro Del Piero, Andrea Pirlo and Francesco Totti.


title: Italians

text: Amongst those who did not win the World Cup but laureated as European champions are Gianni Rivera, Luigi Riva (to date Italy's leading scorer of all time), Sandro Salvadore, Giacomo Bulgarelli, Pietro Anastasi and Giacinto Facchetti.


title: Italians

text: Other prominent players who achieved success at club level are Giampiero Boniperti, Romeo Benetti, Roberto Boninsegna, Roberto Bettega, Roberto Baggio and Paolo Maldini.


title: Italians

text: Of the above-mentioned, the goalkeeper Dino Zoff, who served in the National team from 1968 to 1983, is to date the only Italian player to have won both the European championship (in 1968) and the FIFA World Cup (in 1982), apart from being the oldest winner ever of the World Cup.


title: Italians

text: At club level, to date Italy has won a total of 12 European Cup / Champions' Leagues, 9 UEFA Cups / UEFA Europa League and 7 UEFA Cup Winners' Cup.


title: Italians

text: Motorcycle racers such as Giacomo Agostini and Valentino Rossi are recognized as some of the greatest sportstars of all time. Federica Pellegrini, one of the few female swimmers to have set world records in more than one event has been one of the world's most successful swimmers. Italian athletes have won 549 medals at the Summer Olympic Games, and another 114 medals at the Winter Olympic Games. Jessica Rossi scored a Shooting sport world record of 75 in the qualification and a world record of 99. As for Olympic games, 663 Italians won medals, particularly in Swordsmanship, which makes them the 6th most successful ethnic group in Olympic history. There are more than 2,000,000 Italian skiers in the world, most of them, thanks to the presence of the Alps and the Apennines, in Northern and in Central Italy. Italian skiers received good results in the Winter Olympic Games, World Cup, and World Championships.


title: Italians

text: Italians are the second of the most who have won the World Cycling Championship more than any other country after Belgium. The Giro d'Italia is a world-famous long-distance cycling race held every May, and constitutes one of the three Grand Tours, along with the Tour de France and the Vuelta a España, each of which last approximately three weeks.


title: Italians

text: Tennis has a significant following near courts and on television. Italian professional tennis players are almost always in the top 100 world ranking of male and female players. Beach tennis with paddle racquet was invented by Italians, and is practised by many people across the country.


title: Italians

text: Volleyball is played by a lot of amateur players and professional players compete in the Italian Volleyball League, regarded as the best and most difficult volleyball league in the world. The male and female national teams are often in the top 4 ranking of teams in the world.


title: Italians

text: Athletics is a popular sport for Italians, as the Italian World and Olympic champions are very celebrated people.


title: Italians

text: In wrestling, one of the most remarkable wrestlers is Bruno Sammartino, who held the record of the WWWF (World) Heavyweight Championship for over 11 years across two reigns, the first of which is the longest single reign in the promotion's history.


title: Italians

text: Rugby union was imported from France in the 1910s and has been regularly played since the 1920s; the National team has progressed slowly but significantly during the decades and thanks to the good results achieved in the second half of the 1990s, when they managed to beat historical teams like Scotland, Ireland and eventually France, Italy gained the admission to the Five Nation Championship, later renamed Six Nations; Italy has taken part to the Rugby World Cup since its inauguration in 1987 and never missed an edition though to date has never gone past the group stage.


title: Italians

text: Due to historic demographic shifts in the Italian peninsula throughout history, its geographical position in the center of the Mediterranean Sea, as well as Italy's regional ethnic diversity since ancient times, modern Italians are genetically diverse. The Iron Age tribes of Italy are pre-Indo-European-speaking peoples, such as the Etruscans, Rhaetians, Camuni, Nuragics, Sicani, Elymians and the Ligures, and pre-Roman Indo-European-speaking peoples, like the Celts (Gauls and Lepontii) mainly in Northern Italy, and Iapygians, the Italic peoples throughout the peninsula (such as the Latino-Faliscans, the Osco-Umbrians, the Sicels and the Veneti), and a significant number of Greeks in Southern Italy and Sicily (Magna Graecia). Sicilians were also influenced by the Arabs, specially during the Emirate of Sicily.


title: Italians

text: Italians originate mostly from these primary elements and, like the rest of Romance-speaking Southern Europe, share a common Latin heritage and history. There are also elements like the Bronze and Iron Age Middle Eastern admixture, characterized by high frequencies of Iranian and Anatolian Neolithic ancestries, including several other ancient signatures derived ultimately from the Caucasus, with a lower incidence in Northern Italy compared to Central and Southern Italy. Ancient and Medieval North African admixture is also found in mainland Southern Italy and Sardinia, with the highest incidence being in Sicily. In their admixtures, Sicilians and Southern Italians are closest to modern Greeks (as the historical region of "Magna Graecia", "Greater Greece", bears witness to), while Northern Italians are closest to the Spaniards and southern French.


title: Italians

text: The earliest modern humans inhabiting Italy are believed to have been Paleolithic peoples that may have arrived in the Italian Peninsula as early as 35,000 to 40,000 years ago. Italy is believed to have been a major Ice Age refuge from which Paleolithic humans later colonized Europe.


title: Italians

text: The Neolithic colonization of Europe from Western Asia and the Middle East beginning around 10,000 years ago reached Italy, as most of the rest of the continent although, according to the demic diffusion model, its impact was most in the southern and eastern regions of the European continent.


title: Italians

text: Starting in the early Bronze Age, the first wave of migrations into Italy of Indo-European-speaking peoples occurred from Central Europe, with the appearance of the Bell Beaker culture. These were later (from the 14th century BC) followed by others that can be identified as Italo-Celts, with the appearance of the Celtic-speaking Canegrate culture and the Italic-speaking Proto-Villanovan culture, both deriving from the Proto-Italo-Celtic Urnfield culture. Recent DNA studies confirmed the arrival of Steppe-related ancestry in Northern Italy to at least 2000 BCE and in Central Italy by 1600 BCE, with this ancestry component increasing through time.


title: Italians

text: In the Iron Age and late Bronze Age, Celtic-speaking La Tène and Hallstatt cultures spread over a large part of Italy, with related archeological artifacts found as far south as Apulia. Italics occupied northeastern, southern and central Italy: the "West Italic" group (including the Latins) were the first wave. They had cremation burials and possessed advanced metallurgical techniques. Major tribes included the Latins and Falisci in Lazio; the Oenotrians and Italii in Calabria; the Ausones, Aurunci and Opici in Campania; and perhaps the Veneti in Veneto and the Sicels in Sicily. They were followed, and largely displaced by the East Italic (Osco-Umbrians) group.


title: Italians

text: By the beginning of the Iron Age the Etruscans emerged as the dominant civilization on the Italian peninsula. The Etruscans, whose primary home was in Etruria, expanded over a large part of Italy, covering a territory, at its greatest extent, of roughly what is now Tuscany, western Umbria, and northern Lazio, as well as what are now the Po Valley, Emilia-Romagna, south-eastern Lombardy, southern Veneto, and western Campania. On the origins of the Etruscans, the ancient authors report several hypotheses, one of which claims that the Etruscans come from the Aegean Sea. Modern archaeological and genetic research concluded that the Etruscans were autochthonous and they had a genetic profile similar to their Latin neighbors. Both Etruscans and Latins joined firmly the European cluster lacking recent admixture with Anatolia or the Eastern Mediterranean.


title: Italians

text: The Ligures are said to have been one of the oldest populations in Italy and Western Europe, possibly of Pre-Indo-European origin. According to Strabo they were not Celts, but later became influenced by the Celtic culture of their neighbours, and thus are sometimes referred to as Celticized Ligurians or Celto-Ligurians. Their language had affinities with both Italic (Latin and the Osco-Umbrian languages) and Celtic (Gaulish). They primarily inhabited the regions of Liguria, Piedmont, northern Tuscany, western Lombardy, western Emilia-Romagna and northern Sardinia, but are believed to have once occupied an even larger portion of ancient Italy as far south as Sicily. They were also settled in Corsica and in the Provence region along the southern coast of modern France.


title: Italians

text: During the Iron Age, prior to Roman rule, the peoples living in the area of modern Italy and the islands were:


title: Italians

text: Italy was, throughout the pre-Roman period, predominantly inhabited by Italic tribes who occupied the modern regions of Lazio, Umbria, Marche, Abruzzo, Molise, Campania, Basilicata, Calabria, Apulia and Sicily. Sicily, in addition to having an Italic population in the Sicels, also was inhabited by the Sicani and the Elymians, of uncertain origin. The Veneti, most often regarded as an Italic tribe, chiefly inhabited the Veneto, but extended as far east as Friuli-Venezia Giulia and Istria, and had colonies as far south as Lazio.


title: Italians

text: Beginning in the 8th century BC, Greeks arrived in Italy and founded cities along the coast of southern Italy and eastern Sicily, which became known as Magna Graecia ("Greater Greece"). The Greeks were frequently at war with the native Italic tribes, but nonetheless managed to Hellenize and assimilate a good portion of the indigenous population located along eastern Sicily and the Southern coasts of the Italian mainland. According to Beloch the number of Greek citizens in south Italy at its greatest extent reached only 80,000–90,000, while the local people subjected by the Greeks were between 400,000 and 600,000. By the 4th and 3rd century BC, Greek power in Italy was challenged and began to decline, and many Greeks were pushed out of peninsular Italy by the native Oscan, Brutti and Lucani tribes.


title: Italians

text: The Gauls crossed the Alps and invaded northern Italy in the 4th and 3rd centuries BC, settling in the area that became known as Cisalpine Gaul ("Gaul on this side of the Alps"). Although named after the Gauls, the region was mostly inhabited by indigenous tribes, namely the Ligures, Etruscans, Veneti and Euganei. Estimates by Beloch and Brunt suggest that in the 3rd century BC the Gaulish settlers of north Italy numbered between 130,000 and 140,000 out of a total population of about 1.4 million. The Northern half of Cisalpine Gaul was already inhabited by the Celtic Lepontii since the Bronze Age. Speaking about the Alpine region, the Greek historian Strabo, wrote:


title: Italians

text: According to Pliny and Livy, after the invasion of the Gauls, some of the Etruscans living in the Po Valley sought refuge in the Alps and became known as the Raeti. The Raeti inhabited the region of Trentino-Alto Adige, as well as eastern Switzerland and Tyrol in western Austria. The Ladins of north-eastern Italy and the Romansh people of Switzerland are said to be descended from the Raeti.


title: Italians

text: The Romans—who according to legend originally consisted of three ancient tribes: Latins, Sabines and Etruscans—would go on to conquer the whole Italian peninsula. During the Roman period hundreds of cities and colonies were established throughout Italy, including Florence, Turin, Como, Pavia, Padua, Verona, Vicenza, Trieste and many others. Initially many of these cities were colonized by Latins, but later also included colonists belonging to the other Italic tribes who had become Latinized and joined to Rome. After the Roman conquest of Italy "the whole of Italy had become Latinized".


title: Italians

text: After the Roman conquest of Cisalpine Gaul and the widespread confiscations of Gallic territory, some of the Gaulish population was either killed or expelled. Many colonies were established by the Romans in the former Gallic territory of Cisalpine Gaul, which was then settled by Roman and Italic people. These colonies included Bologna, Modena, Reggio Emilia, Parma, Piacenza, Cremona and Forlì. According to Strabo:


title: Italians

text: The Boii, the most powerful and numerous of the Gallic tribes, were expelled by the Romans after 191 BC and settled in Bohemia, while the Insubres still lived in Mediolanum in the 1st century BC.


title: Italians

text: Population movement and exchange among people from different regions was not uncommon during the Roman period. Latin colonies were founded at Ariminum in 268 and at Firmum in 264, while large numbers of Picentes, who previously inhabited the region, were moved to Paestum and settled along the river Silarus in Campania. Between 180 and 179 BC, 47,000 Ligures belonging to the Apuani tribe were removed from their home along the modern Ligurian-Tuscan border and deported to Samnium, an area corresponding to inland Campania, while Latin colonies were established in their place at Pisa, Lucca and Luni. Such population movements contributed to the rapid Romanization and Latinization of Italy.


title: Italians

text: A large Germanic confederation of Sciri, Heruli, Turcilingi and Rugians, led by Odoacer, invaded and settled Italy in 476. They were preceded by Alemanni, including 30,000 warriors with their families, who settled in the Po Valley in 371, and by Burgundians who settled between Northwestern Italy and Southern France in 443. The Germanic tribe of the Ostrogoths led by Theoderic the Great conquered Italy and presented themselves as upholders of Latin culture, mixing Roman culture together with Gothic culture, in order to legitimize their rule amongst Roman subjects who had a long-held belief in the superiority of Roman culture over foreign "barbarian" Germanic culture. Since Italy had a population of several million, the Goths did not constitute a significant addition to the local population. At the height of their power, there were several thousand Ostrogoths in a population of 6 or 7 million. Before them, Radagaisus led tens of thousands of Goths in Italy in 406, though figures may be too high as ancient sources routinely inflated the numbers of tribal invaders. After the Gothic War, which devastated the local population, the Ostrogoths were defeated. Nevertheless, according to Roman historian Procopius of Caesarea, the Ostrogothic population was allowed to live peacefully in Italy with their Rugian allies under Roman sovereignty.


title: Italians

text: But in the sixth century, another Germanic tribe known as the Longobards invaded Italy, which in the meantime had been reconquered by the East Roman or Byzantine Empire. The Longobards were a small minority compared to the roughly four million people in Italy at the time. They were later followed by the Bavarians and the Franks, who conquered and ruled most of Italy. Some groups of Slavs settled in parts of the northern Italian peninsula between the 7th and the 8th centuries, while Bulgars led by Alcek settled in Sepino, Bojano and Isernia. These Bulgars preserved their speech and identity until the late 8th century.


title: Italians

text: Following Roman rule, Sicily, Corsica and Sardinia were conquered by the Vandals, then by the Ostrogoths, and finally by the Byzantines. At one point, Sardinia grew increasingly autonomous from the Byzantine rule to the point of organizing itself into four sovereign Kingdoms, known as "Judicates", that would last until the Aragonese conquest in the 15th century. Corsica came under the influence of the Kingdom of the Lombards and later under the maritime Republics of Pisa and Genoa. In 687, Sicily became the Byzantine Theme of Sicily; during the course of the Arab–Byzantine wars, Sicily gradually became the Emirate of Sicily (831–1072). Later, a series of conflicts with the Normans would bring about the establishment of the County of Sicily, and eventually the Kingdom of Sicily. The Lombards of Sicily (not to be confused with the "Longobards"), coming from Northern Italy, settled in the central and eastern part of Sicily. After the marriage between the Norman Roger I of Sicily and Adelaide del Vasto, descendant of the Aleramici family, many Northern Italian colonisers (known collectively as "Lombards") left their homeland, in the Aleramici's possessions in Piedmont and Liguria (then known as "Lombardy"), to settle on the island of Sicily.


title: Italians

text: Before them, other "Lombards" arrived in Sicily, with an expedition departed in 1038, led by the Byzantine commander George Maniakes, which for a very short time managed to snatch Messina and Syracuse from Arab rule. The Lombards who arrived with the Byzantines settled in Maniace, Randazzo and Troina, while a group of Genoese and other "Lombards" from Liguria settled in Caltagirone.


title: Italians

text: During the subsequent Swabian rule under the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, who spent most of his life as king of Sicily in his court in Palermo, Moors were progressively eradicated until the massive deportation of the last Muslims of Sicily. As a result of the Arab expulsion, many towns across Sicily were left depopulated. By the 12th century, Swabian kings granted immigrants from northern Italy (particularly Piedmont, Lombardy and Liguria), Latium and Tuscany in central Italy, and French regions of Normandy, Provence and Brittany (all collectively known as "Lombards".) settlement into Sicily, re-establishing the Latin element into the island, a legacy which can be seen in the many Gallo-Italic dialects and towns found in the interior and western parts of Sicily, brought by these settlers. It is believed that the Lombard immigrants in Sicily over a couple of centuries were a total of about 200,000.


title: Italians

text: An estimated 20,000 Swabians and 40,000 Normans settled in the southern half of Italy during this period. Additional Tuscan migrants settled in Sicily after the Florentine conquest of Pisa in 1406.


title: Italians

text: Some of the expelled Muslims were deported to Lucera (Lugêrah, as it was known in Arabic). Their numbers eventually reached between 15,000 and 20,000, leading Lucera to be called "Lucaera Saracenorum" because it represented the last stronghold of Islamic presence in Italy. The colony thrived for 75 years until it was sacked in 1300 by Christian forces under the command of the Angevin Charles II of Naples. The city's Muslim inhabitants were exiled or sold into slavery, with many finding asylum in Albania across the Adriatic Sea. After the expulsions of Muslims in Lucera, Charles II replaced Lucera's Saracens with Christians, chiefly Burgundian and Provençal soldiers and farmers, following an initial settlement of 140 Provençal families in 1273. A remnant of the descendants of these Provençal colonists, still speaking a Franco-Provençal dialect, has survived until the present day in the villages of Faeto and Celle di San Vito.


title: Italians

text: Substantial migrations of Lombards to Naples, Rome and Palermo, continued in the 16th and 17th centuries, driven by the constant overcrowding in the north. Beside that, minor but significant settlements of Slavs (the so-called Schiavoni) and Arbereshe in Italy have been recorded, while Scottish soldiers - the "Garde Ecossaise" - who served the French King, Francis I, settled in the mountains of Piedmont.


title: Italians

text: The geographical and cultural proximity with Southern Italy pushed Albanians to cross the Strait of Otranto, especially after Skanderbeg's death and the conquest of the Balkans by the Ottomans. In defense of the Christian religion and in search of soldiers loyal to the Spanish crown, Alfonso V of Aragon, also king of Naples, invited Arbereshe soldiers to move to Italy with their families. In return the king guaranteed to Albanians lots of land and a favourable taxation.


title: Italians

text: Arbereshe and Schiavoni were used to repopulate abandoned villages or villages whose population had died in earthquakes, plagues and other catastrophes. Albanian soldiers were also used to quell rebellions in Calabria. Slavic colonies were established in eastern Friuli, Sicily and Molise (Molise Croats).


title: Italians

text: Between the Late Middle Ages and the early modern period, there were several waves of immigration of Albanians into Italy, in addition to another in the 20th century. The descendants of these Albanian emigrants, many still retaining the Albanian language, the Arbëresh dialect, have survived throughout southern Italy, numbering about 260,000 people, with roughly 80,000 to 100,000 speaking the Albanian language.


title: Italians

text: Most of Italy's surnames ("cognomi"), with the exception of a few areas marked by linguistic minorities, derive from Italian and arose from an individual's peculiar (physical, etc.) qualities (e.g. "Rossi", "Bianchi", "Quattrocchi", "Mancini", "Grasso", etc.), occupation ("Ferrari", "Auditore", "Sartori", "Tagliabue", etc.), relation of fatherhood or lack thereof ("De Pretis", "Orfanelli", "Esposito", "Trovato", etc.), and geographic location ("Padovano", "Pisano", "Leccese", "Lucchese", etc.). Some of them also indicate a remote foreign origin ("Greco", "Tedesco", "Moro", "Albanese", etc.).


title: Italians

text: Italian migration outside Italy took place, in different migrating cycles, for centuries. A diaspora in high numbers took place after Italy's unification in 1861 and continued through 1914 with the beginning of the First World War. This rapid outflow and migration of Italian people across the globe can be attributed to factors such as the internal economic slump that emerged alongside Italy's unification, family, and the industrial boom that occurred in the world surrounding Italy.


title: Italians

text: Italy after its unification did not seek nationalism but sought work instead. However, a unified state did not automatically constitute a sound economy. The global economic expansion, ranging from Britain's Industrial Revolution in the late 18th and through mid 19th century, to the use of slave labor in the Americas did not hit Italy until much later (with the exception of the "industrial triangle" between Milan, Genoa and Turin) This lag resulted in a deficit of work available in Italy and the need to look for work elsewhere. The mass industrialization and urbanization globally resulted in higher labor mobility and the need for Italians to stay anchored to the land for economic support declined.


title: Italians

text: Moreover, better opportunities for work were not the only incentive to move; family played a major role and the dispersion of Italians globally. Italians were more likely to migrate to countries where they had family established beforehand. These ties are shown to be stronger in many cases than the monetary incentive for migration, taking into account a familial base and possibly an Italian migrant community, greater connections to find opportunities for work, housing etc. Thus, thousands of Italian men and women left Italy and dispersed around the world and this trend only increased as the First World War approached.


title: Italians

text: Notably, it was not as if Italians had never migrated before; internal migration between North and Southern Italy before unification was common. Northern Italy caught on to industrialization sooner than Southern Italy, therefore it was considered more modern technologically, and tended to be inhabited by the bourgeoisie. Alternatively, rural and agro-intensive Southern Italy was seen as economically backward and was mainly populated by lower class peasantry. Given these disparities, prior to unification (and arguably after) the two sections of Italy, North and South were essentially seen by Italians and other nations as separate countries. So, migrating from one part of Italy to next could be seen as though they were indeed migrating to another country or even continent.


title: Italians

text: Furthermore, large-scale migrations phenomena did not recede until the late 1920s, well into the Fascist regime, and a subsequent wave can be observed after the end of the Second World War. Another wave is currently happening due to the ongoing debt crisis.


title: Italians

text: Over 80 million people of full or part Italian descent live outside Europe, with about 50 million living in South America (mostly in Brazil, which has the largest number of Italian descendants outside Italy, and Argentina, where over 62.5% of the population have at least one Italian ancestor), about 23 million living in North America (United States and Canada) and 1 million in Oceania (Australia and New Zealand). Others live in other parts of Europe (primarily the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Switzerland).


title: Italians

text: A historical Italian community has also existed in Gibraltar since the 16th century. To a lesser extent, people of full or partial Italian descent are also found in Africa (most notably in the former Italian colonies of Eritrea, which has 100,000 descendants, Somalia, Libya, Ethiopia, and in others countries such as South Africa, with 77,400 descendants, Tunisia and Egypt), in the Middle East (in recent years the United Arab Emirates has maintained a desirable destination for Italian immigrants, with currently 10,000 Italian immigrants), and Asia (Singapore is home to a sizeable Italian community).


title: Italians

text: Regarding the diaspora, there are many individuals of Italian descent who are possibly eligible for Italian citizenship by method of jus sanguinis, which is from the Latin meaning "by blood." However, just having Italian ancestry is not enough to qualify for Italian citizenship. To qualify, one must have at least one Italian-born citizen ancestor who, after emigrating from Italy to another country, had passed citizenship onto their children before they naturalized as citizens of their newly adopted country. The Italian government does not have a rule regarding on how many generations born outside of Italy can claim Italian nationality.


title: Italians

text: The majority of Italian nationals are native speakers of the country's official language, Italian, or a variety thereof, that is regional Italian. However, many of them also speak a regional or minority language native to Italy, the existence of which predates the national language. Although there is disagreement on the total number, according to UNESCO, there are approximately 30 languages native to Italy, although many are often misleadingly referred to as "Italian dialects".


title: Italians

text: Italian is an official language of Italy and San Marino and is spoken fluently by the majority of the countries' populations. Italian is the third most spoken language in Switzerland (after German and French), though its use there has moderately declined since the 1970s. It is official both on the national level and on regional level in two cantons: Ticino and the Grisons. In the latter canton, however, it is only spoken by a small minority, in the Italian Grisons. Ticino, which includes Lugano, the largest Italian-speaking city outside Italy, is the only canton where Italian is predominant. Italian is also used in administration and official documents in Vatican City.


title: Italians

text: Italian is also spoken by a minority in Monaco and France, especially in the southeastern part of the country. Italian was the official language in Savoy and in Nice until 1860, when they were both annexed by France under the Treaty of Turin, a development that triggered the "Niçard exodus", the emigration of a quarter of the Niçard Italians to Italy. Italian was the official language of Corsica until 1859. Italian is generally understood in Corsica by the population resident therein who speak Corsican, which is an Italo-Romance idiom similar to Tuscan. Italian was the official language in Monaco until 1860, when it was replaced by the French. This was due to the annexation of the surrounding County of Nice to France following the Treaty of Turin (1860).


title: Italians

text: It formerly had official status in Montenegro (because of the Venetian Albania), parts of Slovenia and Croatia (because of the Venetian Istria and Venetian Dalmatia), parts of Greece (because of the Venetian rule in the Ionian Islands and by the Kingdom of Italy in the Dodecanese). Italian is widely spoken in Malta, where nearly two-thirds of the population can speak it fluently. Italian served as Malta's official language until 1934, when it was abolished by the British colonial administration amid strong local opposition. Italian language in Slovenia is an officially recognized minority language in the country. The official census, carried out in 2002, reported 2,258 ethnic Italians (Istrian Italians) in Slovenia (0.11% of the total population). Italian language in Croatia is an official minority language in the country, with many schools and public announcements published in both languages. The 2001 census in Croatia reported 19,636 ethnic Italians (Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians) in the country (some 0.42% of the total population). Their numbers dropped dramatically after World War II following the Istrian–Dalmatian exodus, which caused the emigration of between 230,000 and 350,000 Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians. Italian was the official language of the Republic of Ragusa from 1492 to 1807.


title: Italians

text: It formerly had official status in Albania due to the annexation of the country to the Kingdom of Italy (1939–1943). Albania has a large population of non-native speakers, with over half of the population having some knowledge of the Italian language. The Albanian government has pushed to make Italian a compulsory second language in schools. The Italian language is well-known and studied in Albania, due to its historical ties and geographical proximity to Italy and to the diffusion of Italian television in the country.


title: Italians

text: Due to heavy Italian influence during the Italian colonial period, Italian is still understood by some in former colonies. Although it was the primary language in Libya since colonial rule, Italian greatly declined under the rule of Muammar Gaddafi, who expelled the Italian Libyan population and made Arabic the sole official language of the country. A few hundred Italian settlers returned to Libya in the 2000s.


title: Italians

text: Italian was the official language of Eritrea during Italian colonisation. Italian is today used in commerce, and it is still spoken especially among elders; besides that, Italian words are incorporated as loan words in the main language spoken in the country (Tigrinya). The capital city of Eritrea, Asmara, still has several Italian schools, established during the colonial period. In the early 19th century, Eritrea was the country with the highest number of Italians abroad, and the Italian Eritreans grew from 4,000 during World War I to nearly 100,000 at the beginning of World War II. In Asmara there are two Italian schools, the Italian School of Asmara (Italian primary school with a Montessori department) and the Liceo Sperimentale "G. Marconi" (Italian international senior high school).


title: Italians

text: Italian was also introduced to Somalia through colonialism and was the sole official language of administration and education during the colonial period but fell out of use after government, educational and economic infrastructure were destroyed in the Somali Civil War.


title: Italians

text: Italian is also spoken by large immigrant and expatriate communities in the Americas and Australia. Although over 17 million Americans are of Italian descent, only a little over one million people in the United States speak Italian at home. Nevertheless, an Italian language media market does exist in the country. In Canada, Italian is the second most spoken non-official language when varieties of Chinese are not grouped together, with 375,645 claiming Italian as their mother tongue in 2016.


title: Italians

text: Italian immigrants to South America have also brought a presence of the language to that continent. According to some sources, Italian is the second most spoken language in Argentina after the official language of Spanish, although its number of speakers, mainly of the older generation, is decreasing. Italian bilingual speakers can be found in the Southeast of Brazil as well as in the South, corresponding to 2.07% of the total population of the country. In Venezuela, Italian is the most spoken language after Spanish and Portuguese, with around 200,000 speakers. In Uruguay, people that speak Italian as their home language is 1.1% of the total population of the country. In Australia, Italian is the second most spoken foreign language after Chinese, with 1.4% of the population speaking it as their home language.


title: Italians

text: The main Italian-language newspapers published outside Italy are the "L'Osservatore Romano" (Vatican City), the "L'Informazione di San Marino" (San Marino), the "Corriere del Ticino" and the "laRegione Ticino" (Switzerland), the "La Voce del Popolo" (Croatia), the "Corriere d'Italia" (Germany), the "L'italoeuropeo" (United Kingdom), the "Passaparola" (Luxembourg), the "America Oggi" (United States), the "Corriere Canadese" and the "Corriere Italiano" (Canada), the "Il punto d'incontro" (Mexico), the "L'Italia del Popolo" (Argentina), the "Fanfulla" (Brazil), the "Gente d'Italia" (Uruguay), the "La Voce d'Italia" (Venezuela), the "Il Globo" (Australia) and the "La gazzetta del Sud Africa" (South Africa).


title: Second

text: The second (symbol: s) is the unit of time in the International System of Units (SI), historically defined as of a day – this factor derived from the division of the day first into 24 hours, then to 60 minutes and finally to 60 seconds each (24 × 60 × 60 = 86400).


title: Second

text: The current and formal definition in the International System of Units (SI) is more precise:The second [...] is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the caesium frequency, Δ"ν", the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium 133 atom, to be when expressed in the unit Hz, which is equal to s.


title: Second

text: This current definition was adopted in 1967 when it became feasible to define the second based on fundamental properties of nature with caesium clocks. Because the speed of Earth's rotation varies and is slowing ever so slightly, a leap second is added at irregular intervals to civil time to keep clocks in sync with Earth's rotation.


title: Second

text: Analog clocks and watches often have sixty tick marks on their faces, representing seconds (and minutes), and a "second hand" to mark the passage of time in seconds. Digital clocks and watches often have a two-digit seconds counter.


title: Second

text: SI prefixes are frequently combined with the word "second" to denote subdivisions of the second: milliseconds (thousandths), microseconds (millionths), nanoseconds (billionths), and sometimes smaller units of a second. Multiples of seconds are usually counted in hours and minutes. Though SI prefixes may also be used to form multiples of the second such as kiloseconds (thousands of seconds), such units are rarely used in practice. An everyday experience with small fractions of a second is a 1-gigahertz microprocessor which has a cycle time of 1 nanosecond. Camera shutter speeds are often expressed in fractions of a second, such as second or second.


title: Second

text: Sexagesimal divisions of the day from a calendar based on astronomical observation have existed since the third millennium BC, though they were not seconds as we know them today. Small divisions of time could not be measured back then, so such divisions were mathematically derived. The first timekeepers that could count seconds accurately were pendulum clocks invented in the 17th century. Starting in the 1950s, atomic clocks became better timekeepers than Earth's rotation, and they continue to set the standard today.


title: Second

text: A mechanical clock, one which does not depend on measuring the relative rotational position of the Earth, keeps uniform time called "mean time", within whatever accuracy is intrinsic to it. That means that every second, minute and every other division of time counted by the clock will be the same duration as any other identical division of time. But a sundial which measures the relative position of the Sun in the sky called "apparent time", does not keep uniform time. The time kept by a sundial varies by time of year, meaning that seconds, minutes and every other division of time is a different duration at different times of the year. The time of day measured with mean time versus apparent time may differ by as much as 15 minutes, but a single day will differ from the next by only a small amount; 15 minutes is a cumulative difference over a part of the year. The effect is due chiefly to the obliqueness of Earth's axis with respect to its orbit around the Sun.


title: Second

text: The difference between apparent solar time and mean time was recognized by astronomers since antiquity, but prior to the invention of accurate mechanical clocks in the mid-17th century, sundials were the only reliable timepieces, and apparent solar time was the only generally accepted standard.


title: Second

text: Fractions of a second are usually denoted in decimal notation, for example 2.01 seconds, or two and one hundredth seconds. Multiples of seconds are usually expressed as minutes and seconds, or hours, minutes and seconds of clock time, separated by colons, such as 11:23:24, or 45:23 (the latter notation can give rise to ambiguity, because the same notation is used to denote hours and minutes). It rarely makes sense to express longer periods of time like hours or days in seconds, because they are awkwardly large numbers. For the metric unit of second, there are decimal prefixes representing 10 to 10 seconds.


title: Second

text: Some common units of time in seconds are: a minute is 60 seconds; an hour is 3,600 seconds; a day is 86,400 seconds; a week is 604,800 seconds; a year (other than leap years) is 31,536,000 seconds; and a (Gregorian) century averages 3,155,695,200 seconds; with all of the above excluding any possible leap seconds.


title: Second

text: Some common events in seconds are: a stone falls about 4.9 meters from rest in one second; a pendulum of length about one meter has a swing of one second, so pendulum clocks have pendulums about a meter long; the fastest human sprinters run 10 meters in a second; an ocean wave in deep water travels about 23 meters in one second; sound travels about 343 meters in one second in air; light takes 1.3 seconds to reach Earth from the surface of the Moon, a distance of 384,400 kilometers.


title: Second

text: A second is directly part of other units, such as frequency measured in hertz (inverse seconds or second), speed in meters per second, and acceleration in meters per second squared. The metric system unit becquerel, a measure of radioactive decay, is measured in inverse seconds. Though many derivative units for everyday things are reported in terms of larger units of time, not seconds, they are ultimately defined in terms of the SI second; this includes time expressed in hours and minutes, velocity of a car in kilometers per hour or miles per hour, kilowatt hours of electricity usage, and speed of a turntable in rotations per minute.


title: Second

text: Moreover, most other SI base units are defined by their relationship to the second: the metre is defined by setting the speed of light (in a vacuum) to be 299 792 458 m/s, exactly; definitions of the SI base units kilogram, ampere, kelvin, and candela also depend on the second. The only base unit whose definition does not depend on the second is the mole, and only two of the 22 named derived units, radian and steradian, do not depend on the second either.


title: Second

text: A set of atomic clocks throughout the world keeps time by consensus: the clocks "vote" on the correct time, and all voting clocks are steered to agree with the consensus, which is called International Atomic Time (TAI). TAI "ticks" atomic seconds.


title: Second

text: Civil time is defined to agree with the rotation of the Earth. The international standard for timekeeping is Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). This time scale "ticks" the same atomic seconds as TAI, but inserts or omits leap seconds as necessary to correct for variations in the rate of rotation of the Earth.


title: Second

text: A time scale in which the seconds are not exactly equal to atomic seconds is UT1, a form of universal time. UT1 is defined by the rotation of the Earth with respect to the Sun, and does not contain any leap seconds. UT1 always differs from UTC by less than a second.


title: Second

text: While they are not yet part of any timekeeping standard, optical lattice clocks with frequencies in the visible light spectrum now exist and are the most accurate timekeepers of all. A strontium clock with frequency 430 THz, in the red range of visible light, now holds the accuracy record: it will gain or lose less than a second in 15 billion years, which is longer than the estimated age of the universe. Such a clock can measure a change in its elevation of as little as 2 cm by the change in its rate due to gravitational time dilation.


title: Second

text: There have only ever been three definitions of the second: as a fraction of the day, as a fraction of an extrapolated year, and as the microwave frequency of a caesium atomic clock, which have each realized a sexagesimal division of the day from ancient astronomical calendars.


title: Second

text: Civilizations in the classic period and earlier created divisions of the calendar as well as arcs using a sexagesimal system of counting, so at that time the second was a sexagesimal subdivision of the day (ancient second=), not of the hour like the modern second (=). Sundials and water clocks were among the earliest timekeeping devices, and units of time were measured in degrees of arc. Conceptual units of time smaller than realisable on sundials were also used.


title: Second

text: There are references to 'second' as part of a lunar month in the writings of natural philosophers of the Middle Ages, which were mathematical subdivisions that could not be measured mechanically.


title: Second

text: The earliest mechanical clocks, which appeared starting in the 14th century, had displays that divided the hour into halves, thirds, quarters and sometimes even 12 parts, but never by 60. In fact, the hour was not commonly divided in 60 minutes as it was not uniform in duration. It was not practical for timekeepers to consider minutes until the first mechanical clocks that displayed minutes appeared near the end of the 16th century. Mechanical clocks kept the "mean time", as opposed to the "apparent time" displayed by sundials.


title: Second

text: The earliest clocks to display seconds appeared during the last half of the 16th century. The second became accurately measurable with the development of mechanical clocks. The earliest spring-driven timepiece with a second hand which marked seconds is an unsigned clock depicting Orpheus in the Fremersdorf collection, dated between 1560 and During the 3rd quarter of the 16th century, Taqi al-Din built a clock with marks every 1/5 minute.


title: Second

text: In 1579, Jost Bürgi built a clock for William of Hesse that marked seconds. In 1581, Tycho Brahe redesigned clocks that had displayed only minutes at his observatory so they also displayed seconds, even though those seconds were not accurate. In 1587, Tycho complained that his four clocks disagreed by plus or minus four seconds.


title: Second

text: In 1656, Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens invented the first pendulum clock. It had a pendulum length of just under a meter which gave it a swing of one second, and an escapement that ticked every second. It was the first clock that could accurately keep time in seconds. By the 1730s, 80 years later, John Harrison's maritime chronometers could keep time accurate to within one second in 100 days.


title: Second

text: In 1832, Gauss proposed using the second as the base unit of time in his millimeter–milligram–second system of units. The British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in 1862 stated that "All men of science are agreed to use the second of mean solar time as the unit of time." BAAS formally proposed the CGS system in 1874, although this system was gradually replaced over the next 70 years by MKS units. Both the CGS and MKS systems used the same second as their base unit of time. MKS was adopted internationally during the 1940s, defining the second as of a mean solar day.


title: Second

text: Sometime in the late 1940s, quartz crystal oscillator clocks with an operating frequency of ~100 kHz advanced to keep time with accuracy better than 1 part in 10 over an operating period of a day. It became apparent that a consensus of such clocks kept better time than the rotation of the Earth. Metrologists also knew that Earth's orbit around the Sun (a year) was much more stable than Earth's rotation. This led to proposals as early as 1950 to define the second as a fraction of a year.


title: Second

text: The Earth's motion was described in Newcomb's "Tables of the Sun" (1895), which provided a formula for estimating the motion of the Sun relative to the epoch 1900 based on astronomical observations made between 1750 and 1892. This resulted in adoption of an ephemeris time scale expressed in units of the sidereal year at that epoch by the IAU in 1952. This extrapolated timescale brings the observed positions of the celestial bodies into accord with Newtonian dynamical theories of their motion. In 1955, the tropical year, considered more fundamental than the sidereal year, was chosen by the IAU as the unit of time. The tropical year in the definition was not measured but calculated from a formula describing a mean tropical year that decreased linearly over time.


title: Second

text: In 1956, the second was redefined in terms of a year relative to that epoch. The second was thus defined as "the fraction of the tropical year for 1900 January 0 at 12 hours ephemeris time". This definition was adopted as part of the International System of Units in 1960.


title: Second

text: Even the best mechanical, electric motorized and quartz crystal-based clocks develop discrepancies from environmental conditions; far better for timekeeping is the natural and exact "vibration" in an energized atom. The frequency of vibration (i.e., radiation) is very specific depending on the type of atom and how it is excited. Since 1967, the second has been defined as exactly "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom". This length of a second was selected to correspond exactly to the length of the ephemeris second previously defined. Atomic clocks use such a frequency to measure seconds by counting cycles per second at that frequency. Radiation of this kind is one of the most stable and reproducible phenomena of nature. The current generation of atomic clocks is accurate to within one second in a few hundred million years. Since 1967, atomic clocks based on atoms other than caesium-133 have been developed with increased precision by a factor of 100. Therefore a new definition of the second is planned.


title: Second

text: In 2022, the best realisation of the second is done with caesium primary standard clocks such as IT-CsF2, NIST-F2, NPL-CsF2, PTB-CSF2, SU–CsFO2 or SYRTE-FO2. These clocks work by laser-cooling a cloud of Cs atoms to a microkelvin in a magneto-optic trap. These cold atoms are then launched vertically by laser light. The atoms then undergo Ramsey excitation in a microwave cavity. The fraction of excited atoms are then detected by laser beams. These clocks have systematic uncertainty, which is equivalent to 50 picoseconds per day. A system of several fountains worldwide contribute to International Atomic Time. These caesium clocks also underpin optical frequency measurements.


title: Second

text: Optical clocks are based on forbidden optical transitions in ions or atoms. They have frequencies around , with a natural linewidth formula_1 of typically 1 Hz, so the Q-factor is about , or even higher. They have better stabilities than microwave clocks, which means that they can facilitate evaluation of lower uncertainties. They also have better time resolution, which means the clock "ticks" faster. Optical clocks use either a single ion, or an optical lattice with – atoms.


title: Second

text: A definition based on the Rydberg constant would involve fixing the value to a certain value: formula_2. The Rydberg constant describes the energy levels in a hydrogen atom with the nonrelativistic approximation formula_3.


title: Second

text: The only viable way to fix the Rydberg constant involves trapping and cooling hydrogen. Unfortunately, this is difficult because it is very light and the atoms move very fast, causing Doppler shifts. The radiation needed to cool the hydrogen –– is also difficult. Another hurdle involves improving the uncertainty in QED calculations.


title: Second

text: A redefinition must include improved optical clock reliability. TAI must be contributed to by optical clocks before the BIPM affirms a redefinition. A consistent method of sending signals must be developed before the second is redefined, such as fiber-optics.


title: Second

text: SI prefixes are commonly used for times shorter than one second, but rarely for multiples of a second. Instead, certain non-SI units are permitted for use in SI: minutes, hours, days, and in astronomy Julian years.


title: Vidkun Quisling

text: Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonssøn Quisling (, ; 18 July 1887 – 24 October 1945) was a Norwegian military officer, politician and Nazi collaborator who nominally headed the government of Norway during the country's occupation by Nazi Germany during World War II.


title: Vidkun Quisling

text: He first came to international prominence as a close collaborator of the explorer Fridtjof Nansen, and through organising humanitarian relief during the Russian famine of 1921 in Povolzhye. He was posted as a Norwegian diplomat to the Soviet Union and for some time also managed British diplomatic affairs there. He returned to Norway in 1929 and served as Minister of Defence in the governments of Peder Kolstad (1931–32) and Jens Hundseid (1932–33) in representing the Farmers' Party.


title: Vidkun Quisling

text: In 1933, Quisling left the Farmers' Party and founded the fascist "Nasjonal Samling" (National Union). Although he gained some popularity after his attacks on the political left, his party failed to win any seats in the Storting, and by 1940, it was still little more than peripheral. On 9 April 1940, with the German invasion of Norway in progress, he attempted to seize power in the world's first radio-broadcast "coup d'état" but failed since the Germans refused to support his government. From 1942 to 1945, he served as Prime Minister of Norway and headed the Norwegian state administration jointly with the German civilian administrator, Josef Terboven. His pro-Nazi puppet government, known as the Quisling regime, was dominated by ministers from Nasjonal Samling. The collaborationist government participated in Germany's war efforts, and sent Jews out of the country to concentration camps in Poland.


title: Vidkun Quisling

text: Quisling was put on trial during the legal purge in Norway after World War II. He was found guilty of charges including embezzlement, murder and high treason against the Norwegian state, and was sentenced to death. He was executed by firing squad at Akershus Fortress, Oslo, on 24 October 1945.


title: Vidkun Quisling

text: Since his death, Quisling has become one of history's most infamous traitors due to his collaboration with Nazi Germany. The term "quisling" has become a byword for "collaborator" or "traitor" in several languages and reflects the contempt with which Quisling's conduct has been regarded both at the time and in the present day.


title: Vidkun Quisling

text: Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonssøn Quisling () was born on 18 July 1887 in Fyresdal, in the Norwegian county of Telemark. He was the son of Church of Norway pastor and genealogist Jon Lauritz Qvisling (1844–1930) and his wife Anna Caroline Bang (1860–1941), the daughter of Jørgen Bang, ship-owner and at the time the richest man in the town of Grimstad in South Norway. The elder Quisling had lectured in Grimstad in the 1870s; one of his pupils was Bang, whom he married on 28 May 1886, following a long engagement. The newly-wed couple promptly moved to Fyresdal, where Vidkun and his younger siblings were born.


title: Vidkun Quisling

text: The family name derives from "Quislinus," a Latinised name invented by Quisling's ancestor Lauritz Ibsen Quislin (1634–1703), based on the village of Kvislemark near Slagelse, Denmark, whence he had emigrated. Having two brothers and a sister, the young Quisling was "shy and quiet but also loyal and helpful, always friendly, occasionally breaking into a warm smile." Private letters later found by historians also indicate a warm and affectionate relationship between the family members. From 1893 to 1900, his father was a chaplain for the Strømsø borough in Drammen. Here, Vidkun went to school for the first time. He was bullied by other students at the school for his Telemark dialect, but proved a successful student. In 1900, the family moved to Skien when his father was appointed provost of the city.


title: Vidkun Quisling

text: Academically Quisling proved talented in humanities, particularly history, and natural sciences; he specialised in mathematics. At this point, however, his life had no clear direction. In 1905, Quisling enrolled at the Norwegian Military Academy, having received the highest entrance examination score of the 250 applicants that year. Transferring in 1906 to the Norwegian Military College, he graduated with the highest score since the college's inception in 1817, and was rewarded by an audience with the King. On 1 November 1911, he joined the army General Staff. Norway was neutral in the First World War; Quisling detested the peace movement, though the high human cost of the war did temper his views. In March 1918, he was sent to Russia as an attaché at the Norwegian legation in Petrograd, to take advantage of the five years he had spent studying the country. Though dismayed at the living conditions he experienced, Quisling nonetheless concluded that "the Bolsheviks have got an extraordinarily strong hold on Russian society" and marvelled at how Leon Trotsky had managed to mobilise the Red Army forces so well; by contrast, in granting too many rights to the people of Russia, the Russian Provisional Government under Alexander Kerensky had brought about its own downfall. When the legation was recalled in December 1918, Quisling became the Norwegian military's expert on Russian affairs.


title: Vidkun Quisling

text: In September 1919, Quisling departed Norway to become an intelligence officer with the Norwegian delegation in Helsinki, a post that combined diplomacy and politics. In the autumn of 1921, Quisling left Norway once again, this time at the request of explorer and humanitarian Fridtjof Nansen, and in January 1922 arrived in the Ukrainian capital Kharkiv to help with the League of Nations humanitarian relief effort there. Highlighting the massive mismanagement of the area and the death toll of approximately ten thousand a day, Quisling produced a report that attracted aid and demonstrated his administrative skills, as well as his dogged determination to get what he wanted.


title: Vidkun Quisling

text: On 21 August 1922, he married the Russian Alexandra Andreevna Voronina. Alexandra wrote in her memoirs that Quisling declared his love for her, but from his letters home and investigations undertaken by his cousins, it appeared that there was no romantic involvement between the two, Quisling merely seemed to have wanted to lift the girl out of poverty by providing her with a Norwegian passport and financial security.


title: Vidkun Quisling

text: Having left Ukraine in September 1922, Quisling and Alexandra returned to Kharkiv in February 1923 to prolong aid efforts, with Nansen describing Quisling's work as "absolutely indispensable." In March 1923, Alexandra was pregnant, and Quisling insisted on her having an abortion, which greatly distressed her. Quisling found the situation much improved and, with no fresh challenges, found it a more boring trip than his last. He did however meet Maria Vasiljevna Pasetchnikova (), a Ukrainian more than ten years his junior. Her diaries from the time "indicate a blossoming love affair" during the summer of 1923, despite Quisling's marriage to Alexandra the year before. She recalled that she was impressed by his fluent command of the Russian language, his Aryan appearance, and his gracious demeanour. Quisling later claimed to have married Pasetchnikova in Kharkiv on 10 September 1923, although no legal documentation has been discovered. Quisling's biographer, Dahl, believes that in all likelihood the second marriage was never official. Regardless, the couple behaved as though they were married, claimed Alexandra was their daughter, and celebrated their wedding anniversary. Soon after September 1923, the aid mission came to an end and the trio left Ukraine, planning to spend a year in Paris. Maria wanted to see Western Europe; Quisling wanted to get some rest following bouts of stomach pain that had lasted all winter.


title: Vidkun Quisling

text: The stay in Paris required a temporary discharge from the army, which Quisling slowly grew to understand was permanent: army cutbacks meant that there would be no position available for him when he returned. Quisling devoted much of his time in the French capital to study, reading works of political theory and working on his philosophical project, which he called "Universism". On 2 October 1923, he persuaded the Oslo daily newspaper "Tidens Tegn" to publish an article he had written calling for diplomatic recognition of the Soviet government. Quisling's stay in Paris did not last as long as planned, and in late 1923 he started work on Nansen's new repatriation project in the Balkans, arriving in Sofia in November.


title: Vidkun Quisling

text: The next two months he spent traveling constantly with his wife Maria. In January, Maria returned to Paris to look after Alexandra, who took on the role of the couple's foster-daughter; Quisling joined them in February. In the summer of 1924, the trio returned to Norway where Alexandra subsequently left to live with an aunt in Nice and never returned. Although Quisling promised to provide for her well-being, his payments were irregular, and over the coming years he would miss a number of opportunities to visit.


title: Vidkun Quisling

text: Back in Norway, and to his later embarrassment, Quisling found himself drawn into the communist Norwegian labour movement. Among other policies, he fruitlessly advocated a people's militia to protect the country against reactionary attacks, and asked members of the movement whether they would like to know what information the General Staff had on them, but he got no response. Although this brief attachment to the far-left seems unlikely given Quisling's later political direction, Dahl suggests that, following a conservative childhood, he was by this time "unemployed and dispirited ... deeply resentful of the General Staff ... [and] in the process of becoming politically more radical." Dahl adds that Quisling's political views at this time could be summarised as "a fusion of socialism and nationalism," with definite sympathies for the Soviets in Russia.


title: Vidkun Quisling

text: In June 1925, Nansen once again provided Quisling with employment. The pair began a tour of Armenia, where they hoped to help repatriate native Armenians via a number of projects proposed for funding by the League of Nations. Despite Quisling's substantial efforts, however, the projects were all rejected. In May 1926, Quisling found another job with long-time friend and fellow Norwegian Frederik Prytz in Moscow, working as a liaison between Prytz and the Soviet authorities who owned half of Prytz's firm Onega Wood. He stayed in the job until Prytz prepared to close down the business in early 1927, when Quisling found new employment as a diplomat. British diplomatic affairs in Russia were being managed by Norway, and he became their new legation secretary; Maria joined him late in 1928. A massive scandal broke when Quisling and Prytz were accused of using diplomatic channels to smuggle millions of roubles onto the black markets, a much-repeated claim that was later used to support a charge of "moral bankruptcy," but neither it nor the charge that Quisling spied for the British has ever been substantiated.


title: Vidkun Quisling

text: The harder line now developing in Russian politics led Quisling to distance himself from Bolshevism. The Soviet government had rejected outright his Armenian proposals, and obstructed an attempt by Nansen to help with the 1928 Ukrainian famine. Quisling took these rebuffs as a personal insult; in 1929, with the British now keen to take back control of their own diplomatic affairs, he left Russia. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his services to Britain, an honour revoked by King George VI in 1940. By this time, Quisling had also been awarded the Romanian Crown Order and the Yugoslav Order of St. Sava for his earlier humanitarian efforts.