Why Italy

How did the nation of Italy form and how did the Italian language form?

Even though the regions of Italy didn't unify until the 1860s, how old is the Italian nation and how did the nation of Italy come into existence? How did the Italian language form and why does it sound a lot like Spanish when French doesn't sound at all like Spanish? What type of money was used in Italy before the lira?

Public Comments

1. Italy *still* doesn't have a single language. There's the same problem in Spain, but it's worse in Italy. Sicilian is not the same as spoken in Naples and neither is the same as the Italian of Rome, etc. It's not like comparing USA's Chesapeake Bay to Gulf coast, it's almost like comparing Seminole to Apache.
2. The Roman Empire split in two and the power shifted away from the Italian peninsila around 476 ad. This threw Italy as well as the areas of the Empire on the western devide into the dark ages for about 324 years untill 800ad when the Holy Roman Empire began. In that span of time the latin that was spoken developed into different regional dialects untill seperate languages emerged. The end of the Holy Roman empire was in 1806. During the riegn of the last empire Italy was largly on the outside and defended itself with small areas known as The Papal States, which comprised those territories over which the Pope was the ruler in a civil as well as a spiritual sense before 1870. The relationship between the Popes and Emperors — and between the Papal States and the Empire — was not clear. The Kingdom of Sicily was a state that existed in modern-day Italy from its founding by Roger II of Sicily in 1130 until 1861. The Kingdom of Sicily covered not only the island of Sicily itself, but also the whole Mezzogiorno region of southern Italy and, until 1530, the islands of Malta and Gozo. It is difficult to pin down exact dates for the beginning and end of Italian reunification, but most scholars agree that it began with the end of Napoleonic rule and the Congress of Vienna in 1815, and largely ended with the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, though the last "città irredente" did not join the Kingdom of Italy until the Treaty of Saint-Germain after World War I.
3. Garibaldi overthrew the papal states and united Italy and turned it over to the House of Savoy.
4. Italy DOES have a single langauge. Non mutually intelligible dialiects occur in all languages. The written form of Italian is standardised so it is a single language. French,Spanish and Italian are all romance languages.They derived from latin as the German tribes lived alongside the latin inhabitants of the roman empire. Languages such as German and English are Germanic languages as they derived from the original spoken venecular of the German tribes. The Italian states used the lira even before unification.