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The History of Italy From 16th-19th Centuries

From 1500 to 1800 Italy was on the political sidelines and, in fact, was merely an object of division between foreign powers (France and Spain in the first place, and to a lesser degree Austria and England).

Thus while its great artists were stupefying the world and its explorers (Columbus, Vespucci, Verrazzano, Cabot, Pigafetta) were discovering new ones, and while Galileo was founding modern science and focusing his telescope on Jupiter, Italy continued to shrink, battered above all by violent internal conflicts between the little city-states that made it up.

The end of the era of the maritime republics left Italy without political subjects of any importance.The South was for a long time simply the Kingdom of Naples, under the dominion of the King of Spain, and then of the Bourbons; the Centre of the country continued under the power of the Papacy; in the North the Lombard/Veneto region was continuously contested by France, Span and Austria, and the ancient seignories were having difficulty everywhere.

After the brief but intense revolutionary and Napoleonic era that gave Italy a flag and its first prefectorial administration, the country went to the Vienna Congress still divided into states and city-states (the strongest of these, the Savoy State, would soon come the Kingdom of Italy).

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