ITALY

ITALY

INTRODUCTION

Italy ( officially the Italian Republic) is a unitary parliamentary republic in Southern Europe. Italy covers an area of 301,338 km2 and has a largely temperate climate. With 61 million inhabitants, it is the 5th most populous country in Europe. Italy is a very highly developed country and has the third largest economy in the Eurozone and the eighth-largest in the world.

1. LOCATION

Located in southern Europe, Italy is a peninsula extending into the Central Mediterranean Sea. It is shaped like a high-heeled boot kicking a "triangle"—the island of Sicily. Italy borders France to the west, Switzerland and Austria to the north, and Slovenia to the east. The country also shares a border with 2 tiny independent states, San Marino and the Vatican, both of which are entirely surrounded by Italian territory. Rome, the capital city, is on the country's western coast at the heart of the peninsula. Other major cities include Milan, Naples, Genoa, Florence, Venice, Palermo, Bologna, and Bari.

2. AREA

Italy has an area of 301,230 square kilometers (116,304 square miles) and a coastline of 7,600 kilometers (4,722 miles), including the islands of Sicily and Sardinia. Comparatively, Italy is slightly larger than the state of Arizona.

3. POPULATION

In July 2000 the population of Italy was estimated at 57,634,327. In the same year the birth rate stood at 9.13 per 1,000 people while the death rate was 9.99 per 1,000 people. Thanks to the annual arrival of immigrants, the projected growth rate is 0.09 percent. The data clearly show that without the influx of foreign immigrants the Italian population would suffer a steady decline. More restrictive immigration policies are being adopted, and it is expected that by 2010 the population will decrease to 56,484,000.

According to 1996 statistics, just over 67 percent of Italians live in an urban setting; the rest live in the countryside. The regions with the highest density are Campania (with 426 people per square kilometer, or 1,103 per square mile, in 1998) and Lombardy (378 people per square kilometer, or 979 per square mile). The regions with the lowest density are Val d'Aosta (37 people per square kilometer, or 96 per square mile) and Basilicata (61 people per square kilometer, or 158 per square mile). The biggest city is Rome, with 2,646,000 inhabitants, followed by Milan (1,308,000), Naples (1,020,000), Turin (910,000), Palermo (687,000), and Genoa (641,000).

Ethnic Italians form 97 percent of the population, but there are small ethnic minorities such as German-Italian, French-Italian, Slovene-Italian, and Albanian-Italian, while foreign immigrants make up 1.8 percent of the population. The largest immigrant groups are Moroccans, Albanians, Filipinos, Americans, Tunisians, and Chinese. Italy—home to Vatican City, the seat of the Pope—is a predominantly Roman Catholic country, even though church attendance has been progressively falling. There are small Protestant and Jewish communities, but, as a consequence of the growing number of North African, Bosnian, and Albanian immigrants, the second religion of Italy today is Islam. With 18 percent of people over 65 and only 14 percent below the age of 14, there is widespread concern about the rapid rate at which Italy's population is aging. With average life expectancy at 79.03 years, the government is worried about the financial costs, such as health care and pensions, associated with an aging population.

Contrary to popular perception, Italian families are no longer as large as they once were, and it is becoming common for couples to have only 1 child. Economic well-being, a high cost of living, and the entrance of women into the workforce have had a tremendous influence on family structure. In 1961, about 14.4 percent of families had 4 or more children, compared to 1998 when only 1.4 percent of families had 4 or more. Without the arrival of immigrants, the Italian population would have fallen over the last decade. To reverse the negative trend, the government has adopted family-friendly policies. The government encourages families to have more children through tax breaks and direct grants. The policy has not been too successful, however, because people do not consider the financial incentives to be enough.

4. CAPITAL CITY

Rome is a city and special comune (named "Roma Capitale") in Italy. Rome is the capital of Italy and also of the Province of Rome and of the region of Lazio. With 2.9 million residents in 1,285.3 km2 (496.3 sq mi), it is also the country's largest and most populated comune and fourth-most populous city in the European Union by population within city limits. The urban area of Rome extends beyond the administrative city limits with a population of around 3.8 million. Between 3.2 and 4.2 million people live in Rome metropolitan area. The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, within Lazio (Latium), along the shores of Tiber river. Vatican City is an independent country within the city boundaries of Rome, the only existing example of a country within a city: for this reason Rome has been often defined as capital of two states.

5. LANGUAGE

Italy's official language is Italian, It is estimated that there are about 64 million native Italian speakers while the total number of Italian speakers, incluiding those who use it as a second language, is about 85 million. Italy has numerous regional dialects, however, the establishment of a national education system has led to decrease in variation in the languages spoken across the country during the 20th century. Standardisation was further expanded in the 1950s and 1960s thanks to economic growth and the rise of mass media and television (the state broadcaster RAI helped set a standard Italian).

Because of significant recent immigration, Italy has sizeable populations whose native language is not Italian. According to the Italian National Institute of Statistics, Romanian is the most common mother tongue among foreign residents in Italy: almost 800,000 people speak Romanian as their first language (21.9% of the foreign residents aged 6 and over). Other prevalent mother tongues are Arabic (spoken by over 475,000 people; 13.1% of foreign residents),Albanian (380 thousand people) and Spanish (255,000 people). Other languages spoken in Italy are Ukrainian, Hindi, Polish,