Italy

Italy is a democratic republic in southern Europe on the Mediterranean Sea.

Italy has been the home of many European cultures, such as the Etruscans and the Romans, who built a great empire, and later was the birthplace of the University, the Renaissance, modern science and astronomy, heliocentrism and Opera. Italy's capital, Rome, was for centuries the center of Western civilization. Italy possessed a colonial empire from the second half of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century.

In the 1920s, Italy birthed Fascism, arguably a backlash against all that Italy had produced in the centuries before. It entered World War II as a founding member of the Axis, and was defeated.

In the years following the war, Italy voted to end its status as a monarchy, and officially became a republic.

Italy in Agent of Byzantium
In the 7th century, Constans II succeeded in regaining Italia from the Lombards including the holy city of Rome and replacing the Bishop of Rome with one of his choosing.

Italy in Crosstime Traffic
In the Home timeline, Italy was a member of the European Union, and a functional democratic state with a thriving economy. Crosstime Traffic had businesses in the Home timeline, as well as in several alternates.

Italy in The Disunited States of America
Italy was one of the world's great powers in the late 21st Century.

Italy in The Gladiator
In the late 20th century, popular fronts in Italy brought country under the sway of the Soviet Union and Communism, which re-established it as the Italian People's Republic. The country was built on the Soviet model, with the General Secretary of the Italian Communist Party acting as the country's de facto leader. Although the Security Police operated in Italy and the country was set up along Soviet lines, the Italians didn't take Communism as seriously as the Russians and tended to mock the Russians whenever they could get away with it.

Crosstime Traffic chose Italy as the location for two gaming shops designed to quietly introduce ideas of capitalism into Italy in the year 2097. While they were detected, and had to close down the gaming shops, they did eventually return with new fronts.

Italy in In High Places
Italy fell under Muslim rule in the wake of the Great Black Deaths. In Naples, there was a major slave market where Christian captives from far away ended up being sold.

Italy in Days of Infamy
Italy was fighting the British for control of the Mediterranean and North Africa when Japan invaded Hawaii in late 1941. Although the major force in that theatre, the Germans quickly overshadowed all their efforts, pushing them into the background.

As 1942 drew to a close, the British, along with their US allies, defeated the combined Italian and German armies at El Alamein, forcing them to retreat.

Italy in "The Horse of Bronze"
The Italian Peninsula was home to many dangers, including Scylla and Charbydis, along with the Sirens. On his voyage to the Tin Isle, Cheiron just barely made it past these dangers, forcing him to take the southern route around the peninsula during the return voyage.

Italy in In the Presence of Mine Enemies
Italy was allied with Germany in the Axis during World War II. They assisted the Reich in defeating British and Commonwealth forces in North Africa. When the Axis emerged victorious at the end of the war, Italy controlled an empire that was centered on the Mediterranean Sea, and included parts of the Middle East and North Africa. In the 21st Century, Italy was ruled by primarily by the Duce; the monarch, King Umberto, wielded only symbolic power, but the government still listened to his advice.

Germany compelled the Italian government to perpetrate large-scale massacres of Arabs in their Middle East empire, much as they had enacted anti-Jewish race laws in 1938, which were not part of Mussolini's original Fascist program.

Italy had an excellent football team, and was dependent on revenue from matches against visiting teams. Italian tourists also visited the Reich's capital of Berlin.

Despite the alliance between the Italian Empire and the Reich, there were disputes between the two nations sometimes. Italian fans rioted after the German team Leipzig won a football match against Italy in Milan because the hometeam's goal was blocked on an offside call. The German Federation of Sport reacted by demanding an apology from their Italian counterparts and withdrew from competition with teams from the Italian Empire until the issue was resolved.

King Umberto and the Duce supported the SS' attempted putsch against reformist Führer Heinz Buckliger.

Italy in Joe Steele
After the German defeat at Trotskygrad, the war on the Eastern Front began to bog down. Soviet leader Leon Trotsky kept screaming at the Western Allies for a second front in Italy. President Joe Steele, who wanted the Germans and the Russians to bleed each other to death, flatly refused to invade Italy.

Italy in "Lure"
Harvey Cutter had traveled back ten million years to Miocene Italy to capture live specimens of primates for the San Diego Cenozoic Zoo.

Italy in "Miss Manners' Guide to Greek Missology"
The warrior woman Andromeda encountered and humilitated Victoria and the Gorgons in Italy near Mount Vesuvius.

Italy in "Ready for the Fatherland"
Italy and its ally, Nazi Germany, fought off the Allied invasion of Italy in 1943. Britain retained control of Sicily after World War II ended.

Italy in Southern Victory
Italy was a founding member of the Central Powers alliance system with Germany, Austria-Hungary and the United States. However, when Austria-Hungary invoked this alliance in 1914 in preparation for a war against Russia (which developed into the Great War), Italy refused to participate, claiming the war was not a defensive war on Vienna's part.

Italy remained neutral throughout the war, much to the frustration of the Germans and Austro-Hungarians who wanted access to its strategic locations. Italy was briefly courted by the Entente, but remained neutral.

Despite its neutrality, Italy granted full diplomatic recognition to the Republic of Quebec upon that nation's inception in 1917.

During the interwar years, Italy faced many of the same economic problems the rest of the world did. Benito Mussolini ran a failed bid for office on the promise that he would make the trains run on time.

Italy remained neutral when the Second Great War erupted in 1941.

Italy in The Two Georges
Soon after the fall of the Roman Empire, Italy broke up into numerous principalities and independent city states (including the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies) which often went to war with each other, a situation which remained unchanged a millennium and half later, and persisted throughout the 20th Century. While some intellectuals might argue that all Italians shared a common cultural heritage and spoke essentially the same language (though with a great multitude of dialects), there was little chance of their ever uniting politically into a single state. Not only was there a great deal of mutual hostility and jealousy among the various Italian mini-states, but any project of Italian unification would run directly against the interests of Austria - which, though a second-rate power on the global scale, was still far more powerful than any Italian state or combination thereof.

Italy in The War That Came Early
Although the Fascist government of Italy had supported Marshal José Sanjurjo's Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War, Benito Mussolini was hesitant to follow Adolf Hitler and Germany into a wider European war. Nonetheless, when the Munich Conference ended in 1938 with a German declaration of war against Czechoslovakia, Italy sided with Germany and officially went to war against France, Britain, and the Soviet Union.

However, Italy did very little in the first year of the war. It made no significant contribution to the invasions of Czechoslovakia, the Low Countries, France, Denmark, or Norway. When Germany suffered setbacks in both France and Poland during 1939-1940, Italy did not provide any useful aid to its supposed ally.

Italy did continue to support Sanjuro's forces, contributing troops and tanks to the attack on Gibraltar. Even amongst the Nationalists, Italian troops were viewed with disdain, with a reputation for fighting half-heartedly and fleeing when the opportunity arose. As the wider war continued, Germany's support of the Nationalists dwindled, and Italy followed suit.

By 1940, Italy's involvement in the war was limited to a desultory conflict with Britain in Somaliland. Later that year the Hess Agreement saw Italy make peace with its foes, before Britain resumed its war with the fascist powers in late 1941. To punish Britain, Italy created a new theater of war in North Africa by launching an invasion of Egypt out of Libya.

While some Italian soldiers fought effectively, poor morale among the rest, combined with obsolescent equipment, led to the Italians being driven back into Libya. In the autumn of 1941 the British began laying siege to Tobruk in the face of half-hearted Italian resistance. Two days before the slow-moving British were due to begin their assault on the port, Luftwaffe fighters and dive bombers intervened. Shortly after, the British were driven back into Egypt by Walther Model's Afrika Korps.

Italy continued to participate in a limited capacity in the war, ultimately to its detriment. In the second half of 1943, Marshal Sanjurjo was killed by a sniper, and the Nationalists were finally defeated the following year. In April, 1944, Hitler himself was overthrown, and the Nazis removed from power. In short order, Mussolini himself was struggling to keep the reins of power in his own country.

Literary Note
The series ends with Mussolini still in his precarious position.

Italy in Worldwar
Under Benito Mussolini, Italy was allied with Germany in the Axis in 1942. During World War II, it fought British forces in North Africa and had also contributed troops to Germany's 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union.

When the Race's Conquest Fleet landed in 1942, Italy surrendered to the alien invaders less than three months later, and Mussolini was overthrown. He was imprisoned, but was later freed in a raid by Otto Skorzeny and eventually went to the United States. During the fighting the Italian government, along with Pope Pius XII and the Vatican, grew very cooperative with the occupying Race, a state of affairs that angered most Italian citizens. Rioting began in 1943.

The Race used Italy as a base from which to invade German-held territory, including Croatia in mid-1943. The Germans retaliated by destroying the city of Rome with an atomic bomb smuggled into the city, causing heavy military and administrative casualties for the Race and killing Pius XII.

At the Peace of Cairo Conference, German representative Joachim von Ribbentrop demanded that the Race cede Italy to Germany, and Italy became a vassal of the Greater German Reich.

Literary Note
Italy's postwar fate is ambiguous within the Colonization series. In Second Contact Sam Yeager notices an Italian embassy in Little Rock among those of Germany's vassals, indicating that like Romania and Hungary Italy was not annexed into the Reich. Yet in the novel's world map and throughout the rest of the series, especially during the Race-German War of 1965, Italy is not mentioned as being among Germany's 'independent' allies.