Italy
Italy is a long peninsula reaching into the Mediterranean, with nearly 800 islands, Sicily and Sardinia the largest. The Alps guard its north, and the Apennine mountains run the whole length of the peninsula.
“I'd test one of Leonardo's flying machines.”
- Around 1505 Leonardo da Vinci filled a small notebook, the Codex on the Flight of Birds, with how birds fly and ideas for flying machines.
- The University of Bologna, founded in 1088, is the oldest university still running in the Western world.
The land
The Po is Italy's longest river. It runs about 652 km from the foot of Monviso in the Alps east to the Adriatic Sea. On Sicily, Mount Etna is about 3,400 metres high and is the most active volcano in Europe. Vatican City, the smallest country in the world, lies inside Rome. It covers about 44 hectares and became independent under the Lateran Treaty of 11 February 1929.
Getting around
The Appian Way, begun in 312 BC, ran about 540 km from Rome to Brindisi. The Romans called it the queen of roads, and UNESCO listed it in 2024. Italy's first railway opened on 3 October 1839 and ran 7.25 km from Naples to Portici. The first part of the high-speed line from Rome to Florence opened in 1977, and fast trains now link Rome and Milan in about three hours. Rome's main airport, Fiumicino, is named after Leonardo da Vinci and is the busiest in Italy.
Food
In 2025 UNESCO added Italian cooking to its list of the world's living heritage. In 2017 it had already listed the art of the Neapolitan pizza maker, the pizzaiuolo. The craft has four stages, from making the dough to baking it in a wood-fired oven, and about 3,000 pizza makers practise it in Naples.
Visitors
Italy has more UNESCO World Heritage Sites than any other country. The historic centre of Rome was added in 1980.
Fly over Italy.
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City 9 of 21Rome
The Colosseum
“Crowds cheered here two thousand years ago. Today the only one cheering was me, up in the sky.”
I'd fly one slow lap around the top rim. Its keepers are The Capitoline Lion and the Freed Gladiator.
The plane reaches Rome from Cairo. Clear it and the map opens the way to Istanbul and Barcelona.
