The city of
Venice, built on 117 islands
For centuries divided by politics and geography until its eventual
unification in 1861, Italy has developed a unique culture, shaped by a
multitude of regional customs and local centres of power and
patronage.
[242] During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, a number of magnificent
courts
competed for attracting the best architects, artistis and scholars,
thus producing an immense legacy of monuments, paintings, music and
literature.
[243]
Italy has more
UNESCO World Heritage Sites (
51)
than any other country in the world, and has rich collections of art,
culture and literature from many different periods. The country has had a
broad cultural influence worldwide, also because numerous Italians
emigrated to other places during the
Italian diaspora.
Furthermore, the nation has, overall, an estimated 100,000 monuments of
any sort (museums, palaces, buildings, statues, churches, art
galleries, villas, fountains, historic houses and archaeological
remains).
[244]
Architecture
Italy has a very broad and diverse architectural style, which cannot
be simply classified by period, but also by region, because of Italy's
division into several regional states until 1861. This has created a
highly diverse and eclectic range in architectural designs.
Italy is known for its considerable architectural achievements,
[245] 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.
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.
[246] 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.
Visual art
The history of Italian visual art is part of
Western painting history.
Roman art
was influenced by Greece and can in part be taken as a descendant of
ancient Greek painting. However, Roman painting does have important
unique characteristics. The only surviving Roman paintings are wall
paintings, many from villas in
Campania, in Southern Italy. Such painting can be grouped into 4 main "styles" or periods
[247] and may contain the first examples of
trompe-l'œil, pseudo-perspective, and pure landscape.
[248]
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 on, the treatment of composition by the best painters also
became much more free and innovative. They are considered to be the two
great medieval masters of painting in western culture.
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 Buonarroti,
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 an unprecedented
refinement in drawing and painting techniques. Michelangelo was an
active sculptor from about 1500 to 1520, and his great masterpieces
including his
David,
Pietà,
Moses. Other prominent Renaissance sculptors include
Lorenzo Ghiberti,
Luca Della Robbia,
Donatello,
Filippo Brunelleschi and
Andrea del Verrocchio.
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. 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.
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.
Literature and theatre
The basis of the modern
Italian language was established by the
Florentine poet
Dante Alighieri, whose greatest work, the
Divine Comedy, is considered among the foremost literary statements produced in Europe during the
Middle Ages. There is no shortage of celebrated literary figures in Italy:
Giovanni Boccaccio,
Giacomo Leopardi,
Alessandro Manzoni,
Torquato Tasso,
Ludovico Ariosto and
Petrarch, whose best-known vehicle of expression, the
sonnet, was created in Italy.
[249]
Prominent
Italian philosophers include
Giordano Bruno,
Marsilio Ficino,
Niccolò Machiavelli and
Giambattista Vico. Modern literary figures and Nobel laureates are nationalist poet
Giosuè Carducci in 1906, realist writer
Grazia Deledda in 1926, modern theatre author
Luigi Pirandello in 1936, poets
Salvatore Quasimodo in 1959 and
Eugenio Montale in 1975, satirist and theatre author
Dario Fo in 1997.
[250]
Carlo Collodi's 1883 novel
The Adventures of Pinocchio is the most celebrated children's classic by an Italian author and the most translated non-religious book in the world.
[251]
Italian theatre can be traced back to the Roman tradition which was
heavily influenced by the Greek; as with many other literary genres,
Roman dramatists tended to adapt and translate from the Greek. For
example, Seneca's
Phaedra was based on that of
Euripides, and many of the comedies of
Plautus were direct translations of works by
Menander. 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.
Music
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.
Italy's most famous composers include the
Renaissance composers Palestrina and
Monteverdi, the
Baroque composers Scarlatti,
Corelli and
Vivaldi, the
Classical composers Paganini and
Rossini, and the
Romantic composers Verdi and
Puccini. 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.
Italy is widely known for being the birthplace of opera.
[254] Italian opera was believed to have been founded in the early 17th century, in Italian cities such as
Mantua and
Venice.
[254] 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.
Introduced in the early 1920s,
jazz
took a particularly strong foothold in Italy, 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 synthesisers 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).
Producers such as
Giorgio Moroder, who won three
Academy Awards for his music, were highly influential in the development of
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
Mina,
Andrea Bocelli,
Grammy winner
Laura Pausini,
Eros Ramazzotti and
Tiziano Ferro have attained international acclaim.
