The Geography of Italy

The achievement, when it eventually came, was, however, a remarkable one. The most formidable obstacle to successful domination has been a mountain range, the Apennines. The Apennines stretch down the peninsula for 1,000 kilometres rising to nearly 3,000 metres in places and are often between 50 and 100 kilometres wide. There are pockets of fertile land high in the Apennines so a reasonably sized population can be supported, but the range breaks up and isolates communities. Italy, as a result, has always been a country of unexpected diversity, strong regional loyalties, and well-established local languages. Even in the twentieth century Italian remained a second language for many ‘Italians’.

Around the Apennines lie the coastal plains. The richest is the Po valley in northern Italy that makes up 70 per cent of the lowland of Italy. Further north the Alps appear to close the peninsula off from Europe. In fact they are not as impassable as they look. The extraordinary find of ‘The Ice Man’, a body dating from 3300 BC, high in the Alps in 1991 shows that individuals were crossing by foot in the earliest times, and ‘Celtic’ tribes, driven by overpopulation or tribal rivalry, successfully migrated

Across the Alps in the sixth and fifth centuries Bc and settled in the Po valley. It was these resilient peoples (Gauls to the Romans) rather than the Alps that were to provide the main barrier to Roman expansion in the north.

The Romans had other people to subdue before they could achieve their ‘destiny. The most fertile land along the Apennines is that along the west coast. The soil is volcanic and the rainfall good, while between the rivers Tiber and Arno are to be found some of the richest mineral deposits in the central Mediterranean. The coast is indented and so provides a safe haven for seafarers. From the eighth century, easterners, Greeks and Phoenicians in particular, were trading inland for minerals. Their suppliers were the native peoples of Etruria, the Etruscans, who grew rich on the pickings of the trade.