Italy Portait by Istituto professionale di Stato per I Servizi Albe made due to their participation in the Comenius project 'Intercultural Dialogue through Music'.

1. Welcome to Italy...

3. Italy, or Italian Republic, is located in southern Europe. It is traditionally called the Peninsula or the Boot, because of its characteristic shape. The Italian Republic, with capital Rome, borders with France to the west, Switzerland and Austria to the north and with Slovenia to the east. Inside its territory there are two enclaves: the Republic of St Marino and the Vatican City. The Italian Republic is representative of the whole population in the Italian territory. The republic was chosen by a referendum on 2 June 1946, when the Italian people abolished the monarchy in favour of the republic. The Constitution, fundamental law of the Italian Republic, entered in vigor on 1 January 1948. Italy is a huge peninsula extending from the south of the alpine arcade and protending into the Mediterranean Sea. Its territory includes also Sardinia and Sicily, two big islands, and a series of smaller islands.

4. From a climatic point of view, Italy is conditioned by the great water masses of the Mediterranean Sea that surround it. Such geographical characteristics guarantee to our peninsula beneficial humidity and a sort of heat tank. They produce the so called Mediterranean climate, which is mild and moderated. Climate

5. Mountains and Rivers The physical conformation of Italy, with a great number of mountains, allows the territory to be crossed by many rivers, even if none of them is very long. The longest and most important is the River Po. in summer southern regions often suffer from partial water lack that creates remarkable uneasiness to the population and the cultivations. The greatest part of icy mountains is concentrated in the north of the peninsula. In fact the central part of the country is crossed by the Appennines, including relatively low mountains and therefore small rivers, whose capacity is so reduced that

6. Approaching the Italian cooking means to take into account various types of cooking according to each Italian region; often a regional cooking is deeply various from the others’, but what matters is that in them there is more than mere cooked food, because in the cooking of a region you can find its culture and the history of its people. Italian cousine therefore does not mean only spaghetti and pizza, but its roots are much deeper. In order to describe the Italian cousine one has to consider all Italian regions, each so different from the other and each with its own history. It is not easy to try to group all the recipes of the Italian cooking. In fact, some of them are really famous in the world but others are also worth tasting even if they are so varied.

7. With the First war of independence Carlo Alberto from Savoy decided to adopt for its troops a flag composed of the Italian flag with the coat of arms of his own house bordered in blue in the centre. After the Second world war, and the proclamation of the Republic the Italian flag lost the coat of arms of the Savoy and assumes its current shape. The importance of this change is witnessed by the presence of an article - the 12 - in the Constitution – describing it: “The flag of the Republic is the Italian tricolour : green, white and red in three vertical bands of equal dimensions”. Green represents our plains, white symbolizes instead the candour of Alp snow, and red indicates the blood of our dead fellowcitizens.

8. Welcome to Sardinia

9. WE ARE HERE