Greater Italy (Seven Roman States)

Greater Italy (i /ˈɪtəli/; Italian: Italia [iˈtaːlja]), officially the Greater Italian Republic, is a country located in south-central Europe. To the north it borders Frankistan, Austria and Illyria along the Alps. To the south it consists of the northernmost Italian Peninsula and several small islands. The independent nations of the Papal State and the Roman Republic occupy the rest of traditional Italy. The territory of Italy covers some 162,201 km2 and is influenced by a temperate seasonal climate.

Pre-Italian Revolution
Between the 17th to the 11th century BC Mycenaean Greeks established contacts with Italy and in the 8th and 7th centuries BC Greek colonies were established all along the coast of Sicily and the southern part of the Italian Peninsula became known as Magna Graecia. Ancient Rome was at first a small agricultural community founded c. the 8th century BC that grew over the course of the centuries into a colossal empire encompassing the whole Mediterranean Sea, in which Ancient Greek and Roman cultures merged into one civilization. This civilization was so influential that parts of it survive in modern law, administration, philosophy and arts, forming the ground that Western civilization is based upon. In a slow decline since the mid 4th century AD, the empire finally broke into four parts in the 300's AD. After the emperor Constantine had united the Western provinces under a sole emperor, Italy became part of the united Western Roman Empire.

In the 6th century the the Western emperors reconquered much of Italy from the Ostrogoths. The invasion of a new wave of Germanic tribes, the Lombards, doomed their attempt to restore all of Italy under the imperial administration. For the next 13th centuries, whilst new nation-states arose in the lands north of the Alps, the Italian political landscape was a patchwork of feuding city states, petty tyrannies, and foreign invaders, even in the territories of the Roman emperor.

The history of Greater Italy in the Early Modern period was characterized by foreign domination: following the Bohemian Wars of Aggression, the Western Roman Empire saw a long period of relative peace, mainly under the influence of the Prazskys of Bohemia.

The creation of the Republic of Greater Italy was the result of efforts by Italian nationalists and republicans to establish a new united republic encompassing the entire northern Italian Peninsula. In the context of the 1800's liberal revolutions that were sweeping through Europe, an unsuccessful rebellion was declared on the Western Roman emperor. The revived republican movement successfully challenged the Western Roman Empire in the Second Italian Revolution, liberating the Lombardy-Venetia. It established Florence as capital of the newly formed state. In 1861 the capital was moved to Ravenna.