title: Iron Curtain

text: Churchill's "Sinews of Peace" address strongly criticised the Soviet Union's exclusive and secretive tension policies along with the Eastern Europe's state form, Police State ("Polizeistaat"). He expressed the Allied Nations' distrust of the Soviet Union after the World War II. In September 1946, US-Soviet cooperation collapsed due to the US disavowal of the Soviet Union's opinion on the German problem in the Stuttgart Council, and then followed the announcement by US President Harry S. Truman of a hard line anti-Soviet, anticommunist policy. After that the phrase became more widely used as an anti-Soviet term in the West.


title: Iron Curtain

text: Additionally, Churchill mentioned in his speech that regions under the Soviet Union's control were expanding their leverage and power without any restriction. He asserted that in order to put a brake on this ongoing phenomenon, the commanding force and strong unity between the UK and the US was necessary.


title: Iron Curtain

text: Stalin took note of Churchill's speech and responded in "Pravda" soon afterward. He accused Churchill of warmongering, and defended Soviet "friendship" with eastern European states as a necessary safeguard against another invasion. Stalin further accused Churchill of hoping to install right-wing governments in eastern Europe with the goal of agitating those states against the Soviet Union. Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin's chief propagandist, used the term against the West in an August 1946 speech:


title: Iron Curtain

text: While the Iron Curtain remained in place, much of Eastern Europe and parts of Central Europe (except West Germany, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, and Austria) found themselves under the hegemony of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union annexed:


title: Iron Curtain

text: Germany effectively gave Moscow a free hand in much of these territories in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, signed before Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.


title: Iron Curtain

text: Soviet-installed governments ruled the Eastern Bloc countries, with the exception of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which changed its orientation away from the Soviet Union in the late 1940s to a progressively independent worldview.


title: Iron Curtain

text: The majority of European states to the east of the Iron Curtain developed their own international economic and military alliances, such as Comecon and the Warsaw Pact.


title: Iron Curtain

text: To the west of the Iron Curtain, the countries of Western Europe, Northern Europe, and Southern Europe – along with Austria, West Germany, Liechtenstein and Switzerland – operated market economies. With the exception of a period of fascism in Spain (until 1975) and Portugal (until 1974) and a military dictatorship in Greece (1967–1974), democratic governments ruled these countries.


title: Iron Curtain

text: Most of the states of Europe to the west of the Iron Curtain – with the exception of neutral Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, Sweden, Finland, Malta and the Republic of Ireland – allied themselves with Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States within NATO. Spain was a unique anomaly in that it stayed neutral and non-aligned until 1982, when, following democracy's return, it joined NATO. Economically, the European Community (EC) and the European Free Trade Association represented Western counterparts to COMECON. Most of the nominally neutral states were economically closer to the United States than they were to the Warsaw Pact.


title: Iron Curtain

text: In January 1947, Harry Truman appointed General George Marshall as Secretary of State, scrapped Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) directive 1067 (which embodied the Morgenthau Plan), and supplanted it with JCS 1779, which decreed that an orderly and prosperous Europe requires the economic contributions of a stable and productive Germany." Officials met with Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and others to press for an economically self-sufficient Germany, including a detailed accounting of the industrial plants, goods and infrastructure already removed by the Soviets.


title: Iron Curtain

text: After five and a half weeks of negotiations, Molotov refused the demands and the talks were adjourned. Marshall was particularly discouraged after personally meeting with Stalin, who expressed little interest in a solution to German economic problems. The United States concluded that a solution could not wait any longer. In a 5 June 1947 speech, Marshall announced a comprehensive program of American assistance to all European countries wanting to participate, including the Soviet Union and those of Eastern Europe, called the Marshall Plan.


title: Iron Curtain

text: Stalin opposed the Marshall Plan. He had built up the Eastern Bloc protective belt of Soviet-controlled nations on his Western border, and wanted to maintain this buffer zone of states combined with a weakened Germany under Soviet control. Fearing American political, cultural and economic penetration, Stalin eventually forbade Soviet Eastern bloc countries of the newly formed Cominform from accepting Marshall Plan aid. In Czechoslovakia, that required a Soviet-backed Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948, the brutality of which shocked Western powers more than any event so far and set in a motion a brief scare that war would occur and swept away the last vestiges of opposition to the Marshall Plan in the United States Congress.


title: Iron Curtain

text: Relations further deteriorated when, in January 1948, the U.S. State Department also published a collection of documents titled "Nazi-Soviet Relations, 1939 – 1941: Documents from the Archives of The German Foreign Office", which contained documents recovered from the Foreign Office of Nazi Germany revealing Soviet conversations with Germany regarding the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, including its secret protocol dividing eastern Europe, the 1939 German-Soviet Commercial Agreement, and discussions of the Soviet Union potentially becoming the fourth Axis Power. In response, one month later, the Soviet Union published "Falsifiers of History", a Stalin-edited and partially re-written book attacking the West.


title: Iron Curtain

text: After the Marshall Plan, the introduction of a new currency to Western Germany to replace the debased Reichsmark and massive electoral losses for communist parties, in June 1948, the Soviet Union cut off surface road access to Berlin, initiating the Berlin Blockade, which cut off all non-Soviet food, water and other supplies for the citizens of the non-Soviet sectors of Berlin. Because Berlin was located within the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany, the only available methods of supplying the city were three limited air corridors. A massive aerial supply campaign was initiated by the United States, Britain, France, and other countries, the success of which caused the Soviets to lift their blockade in May 1949.


title: Iron Curtain

text: One of the conclusions of the Yalta Conference was that the western Allies would return all Soviet citizens who found themselves in their zones to the Soviet Union. This affected the liberated Soviet prisoners of war (branded as traitors), forced laborers, anti-Soviet collaborators with the Germans, and anti-communist refugees.


title: Iron Curtain

text: Migration from east to west of the Iron Curtain, except under limited circumstances, was effectively halted after 1950. Before 1950, over 15 million people (mainly ethnic Germans) emigrated from Soviet-occupied eastern European countries to the west in the five years immediately following World War II. However, restrictions implemented during the Cold War stopped most east–west migration, with only 13.3 million migrations westward between 1950 and 1990. More than 75% of those emigrating from Eastern Bloc countries between 1950 and 1990 did so under bilateral agreements for "ethnic migration."


title: Iron Curtain

text: About 10% were refugees permitted to emigrate under the Geneva Convention of 1951. Most Soviets allowed to leave during this time period were ethnic Jews permitted to emigrate to Israel after a series of embarrassing defections in 1970 caused the Soviets to open very limited ethnic emigrations. The fall of the Iron Curtain was accompanied by a massive rise in European East-West migration.


title: Iron Curtain

text: The Iron Curtain took physical shape in the form of border defences between the countries of western and eastern Europe. There were some of the most heavily militarised areas in the world, particularly the so-called "inner German border" – commonly known as "die Grenze" in German – between East and West Germany.


title: Iron Curtain

text: Elsewhere along the border between West and East, the defence works resembled those on the intra-German border. During the Cold War, the border zone in Hungary started from the border. Citizens could only enter the area if they lived in the zone or had a passport valid for traveling out. Traffic control points and patrols enforced this regulation.


title: Iron Curtain

text: Those who lived within the border-zone needed special permission to enter the area within of the border. The area was very difficult to approach and heavily fortified. In the 1950s and 1960s, a double barbed-wire fence was installed from the border. The space between the two fences was laden with land mines. The minefield was later replaced with an electric signal fence (about from the border) and a barbed wire fence, along with guard towers and a sand strip to track border violations. Regular patrols sought to prevent escape attempts. They included cars and mounted units. Guards and dog patrol units watched the border 24/7 and were authorised to use their weapons to stop escapees. The wire fence nearest the actual border was irregularly displaced from the actual border, which was marked only by stones. Anyone attempting to escape would have to cross up to before they could cross the actual border. Several escape attempts failed when the escapees were stopped after crossing the outer fence.


title: Iron Curtain

text: The creation of these highly militarised no-man's lands led to "de facto" nature reserves and created a wildlife corridor across Europe; this helped the spread of several species to new territories. Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, several initiatives are pursuing the creation of a European Green Belt nature preserve area along the Iron Curtain's former route. In fact, a long-distance cycling route along the length of the former border called the Iron Curtain Trail (ICT) exists as a project of the European Union and other associated nations. The trail is long and spans from Finland to Greece.


title: Iron Curtain

text: The term "Iron Curtain" was only used for the fortified borders in Europe; it was not used for similar borders in Asia between socialist and capitalist states (these were, for a time, dubbed the Bamboo Curtain). The border between North Korea and South Korea is very comparable to the former inner German border, particularly in its degree of militarisation, but it has never conventionally been considered part of any Iron Curtain.


title: Iron Curtain

text: The Soviet Union built a fence along the entire border towards Norway and Finland. It is located one or a few kilometres from the border, and has automatic alarms detecting if someone climbs over it.


title: Iron Curtain

text: The inner German border was marked in rural areas by double fences made of steel mesh (expanded metal) with sharp edges, while near urban areas a high concrete barrier similar to the Berlin Wall was built. The installation of the Wall in 1961 brought an end to a decade during which the divided capital of divided Germany was one of the easiest places to move west across the Iron Curtain.


title: Iron Curtain

text: The barrier was always a short distance inside East German territory to avoid any intrusion into Western territory. The actual borderline was marked by posts and signs and was overlooked by numerous watchtowers set behind the barrier. The strip of land on the West German side of the barrier – between the actual borderline and the barrier – was readily accessible but only at considerable personal risk, because it was patrolled by both East and West German border guards.


title: Iron Curtain

text: Several villages, many historic, were destroyed as they lay too close to the border, for example Erlebach. Shooting incidents were not uncommon, and several hundred civilians and 28 East German border guards were killed between 1948 and 1981 (some may have been victims of "friendly fire" by their own side).


title: Iron Curtain

text: The Helmstedt–Marienborn border crossing (), named "Grenzübergangsstelle Marienborn" (GÜSt) by the German Democratic Republic (GDR), was the largest and most important border crossing on the Inner German border during the division of Germany. Due to its geographical location, allowing for the shortest land route between West Germany and West Berlin, most transit traffic to and from West Berlin used the Helmstedt-Marienborn crossing. Most travel routes from West Germany to East Germany and Poland also used this crossing. The border crossing existed from 1945 to 1990 and was situated near the East German village of Marienborn at the edge of the Lappwald. The crossing interrupted the Bundesautobahn 2 (A 2) between the junctions "Helmstedt-Ost" and "Ostingersleben".


title: Iron Curtain

text: In parts of Czechoslovakia, the border strip became hundreds of meters wide, and an area of increasing restrictions was defined as the border was approached. Only people with the appropriate government permissions were allowed to get close to the border.


title: Iron Curtain

text: The Hungarian outer fence became the first part of the Iron Curtain to be dismantled. After the border fortifications were dismantled, a section was rebuilt for a formal ceremony. On 27 June 1989, the foreign ministers of Austria and Hungary, Alois Mock and Gyula Horn, ceremonially cut through the border defences separating their countries.


title: Iron Curtain

text: The Yugoslav-Bulgarian border became closed in 1948 after the Tito–Stalin split. The area around the border was restructured, with land ownership on both sides no longer legal. Loudspeakers were installed for spreading propaganda and insults. The installations were not as impressive as the one on for example the inner-German border, but they resembled the same system. In the GDR, there was a long time rumor that the border of Bulgaria was easier to cross than the inner German border for escaping the East Bloc.


title: Iron Curtain

text: In Greece, a highly militarized area called the "Επιτηρούμενη Ζώνη" ("Surveillance Area") was created by the Greek Army along the Greek-Bulgarian border, subject to significant security-related regulations and restrictions. Inhabitants within this wide strip of land were forbidden to drive cars, own land bigger than , and had to travel within the area with a special passport issued by Greek military authorities. Additionally, the Greek state used this area to encapsulate and monitor a non-Greek ethnic minority, the Pomaks, a Muslim and Bulgarian-speaking minority which was regarded as hostile to the interests of the Greek state during the Cold War because of its familiarity with their fellow Pomaks living on the other side of the Iron Curtain.


title: Iron Curtain

text: Following a period of economic and political stagnation under Brezhnev and his immediate successors, the Soviet Union decreased its intervention in Eastern Bloc politics. Mikhail Gorbachev (General Secretary from 1985) decreased adherence to the Brezhnev Doctrine, which held that if socialism were threatened in any state then other socialist governments had an obligation to intervene to preserve it, in favor of the "Sinatra Doctrine". He also initiated the policies of "glasnost" (openness) and "perestroika" (economic restructuring). A wave of revolutions occurred throughout the Eastern Bloc in 1989.


title: Iron Curtain

text: Speaking at the Berlin Wall on 12 June 1987, Reagan challenged Gorbachev to go further, saying "General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"


title: Iron Curtain

text: In February 1989, the Hungarian politburo recommended to the government led by Miklós Németh to dismantle the iron curtain. Nemeth first informed Austrian chancellor Franz Vranitzky. He then received an informal clearance from Gorbachev (who said "there will not be a new 1956") on 3 March 1989, on 2 May of the same year the Hungarian government announced and started in Rajka (in the locality known as the "city of three borders", on the border with Austria and Czechoslovakia) the destruction of the Iron Curtain. For public relation Hungary reconstructed 200m of the iron curtain so it could be cut during an official ceremony by Hungarian foreign minister Gyula Horn, and Austrian foreign minister Alois Mock, on 27 June 1989, which had the function of calling all European peoples still under the yoke of the national-communist regimes to freedom. However, the dismantling of the old Hungarian border facilities did not open the borders, nor did the previous strict controls be removed, and the isolation by the Iron Curtain was still intact over its entire length. Despite dismantling the already technically obsolete fence, the Hungarians wanted to prevent the formation of a green border by increasing the security of the border or to technically solve the security of their western border in a different way. After the demolition of the border facilities, the stripes of the heavily armed Hungarian border guards were tightened and there was still a firing order.


title: Iron Curtain

text: In April 1989, the People's Republic of Poland legalised the Solidarity organisation, which captured 99% of available parliamentary seats in June. These elections, in which anti-communist candidates won a striking victory, inaugurated a series of peaceful anti-communist revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe that eventually culminated in the fall of communism.


title: Iron Curtain

text: The opening of a border gate between Austria and Hungary at the Pan-European Picnic on 19 August 1989 then set in motion a chain reaction, at the end of which there was no longer a GDR and the Eastern Bloc had disintegrated. The idea of opening the border at a ceremony came from Otto von Habsburg and was brought up by him to Miklós Németh, the then Hungarian Prime Minister, who promoted the idea. The Paneuropa Picnic itself developed from a meeting between Ferenc Mészáros of the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) and the President of the Paneuropean Union Otto von Habsburg in June 1989. The local organization in Sopron took over the Hungarian Democratic Forum, the other contacts were made via Habsburg and the Hungarian Minister of State Imre Pozsgay. Extensive advertising for the planned picnic was made by posters and flyers among the GDR holidaymakers in Hungary. The Austrian branch of the Paneuropean Union, which was then headed by Karl von Habsburg, distributed thousands of brochures inviting them to a picnic near the border at Sopron. The local Sopron organizers knew nothing of possible GDR refugees, but thought of a local party with Austrian and Hungarian participation. More than 600 East Germans attending the "Pan-European Picnic" on the Hungarian border broke through the Iron Curtain and fled into Austria. The refugees went through the iron curtain in three big waves during the picnic under the direction of Walburga Habsburg. Hungarian border guards had threatened to shoot anyone crossing the border, but when the time came, they did not intervene and allowed the people to cross.


title: Iron Curtain

text: It was the largest escape movement from East Germany since the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. The patrons of the picnic, Otto Habsburg and the Hungarian Minister of State Imre Pozsgay, who were not present at the event, saw the planned event as an opportunity to test Mikhail Gorbachev's reaction to an opening of the border on the Iron Curtain. In particular, it was examined whether Moscow would give the Soviet troops stationed in Hungary the command to intervene. After the pan-European picnic, Erich Honecker dictated the " Daily Mirror " of 19 August 1989: "Habsburg distributed leaflets far into Poland, on which the East German holidaymakers were invited to a picnic. When they came to the picnic, they were given gifts, food and Deutsche Mark, and then they were persuaded to come to the West". But with the mass exodus at the Pan-European Picnic, the subsequent hesitant behavior of the Socialist Unity Party of East Germany and the non-intervention of the Soviet Union broke the dams. Thus the bracket of the Eastern Bloc was broken. Now tens of thousands of the media-informed East Germans made their way to Hungary, which was no longer ready to keep its borders completely closed or to oblige its border troops to use force of arms. The leadership of the GDR in East Berlin did not dare to completely lock the borders of their own country.


title: Iron Curtain

text: In a historic session from 16 to 20 October, the Hungarian parliament adopted legislation providing for multi-party parliamentary elections and a direct presidential election.


title: Iron Curtain

text: The legislation transformed Hungary from a People's Republic into the Republic, guaranteed human and civil rights, and created an institutional structure that ensured separation of powers among the judicial, legislative, and executive branches of government. In November 1989, following mass protests in East Germany and the relaxing of border restrictions in Czechoslovakia, tens of thousands of East Berliners flooded checkpoints along the Berlin Wall, crossing into West Berlin.


title: Iron Curtain

text: In the People's Republic of Bulgaria, the day after the mass crossings across the Berlin Wall, leader Todor Zhivkov was ousted. In the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, following protests of an estimated half-million Czechoslovaks, the government permitted travel to the west and abolished provisions guaranteeing the ruling Communist party its leading role, preceding the Velvet Revolution.


title: Iron Curtain

text: In the Socialist Republic of Romania, on 22 December 1989, the Romanian military sided with protesters and turned on Communist ruler Nicolae Ceauşescu, who was executed after a brief trial three days later. In the People's Socialist Republic of Albania, a new package of regulations went into effect on 3 July 1990 entitling all Albanians over the age of 16 to own a passport for foreign travel. Meanwhile, hundreds of Albanian citizens gathered around foreign embassies to seek political asylum and flee the country.


title: Iron Curtain

text: The Berlin Wall officially remained guarded after 9 November 1989, although the inter-German border had become effectively meaningless. The official dismantling of the Wall by the East German military did not begin until June 1990. On 1 July 1990, the day East Germany adopted the West German currency, all border-controls ceased and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl convinced Gorbachev to drop Soviet objections to a reunited Germany within NATO in return for substantial German economic aid to the Soviet Union.


title: Iron Curtain

text: There is an Iron Curtain monument in the southern part of the Czech Republic at approximately . A few hundred meters of the original fence, and one of the guard towers, has remained installed. There are interpretive signs in Czech and English that explain the history and significance of the Iron Curtain. This is the only surviving part of the fence in the Czech Republic, though several guard towers and bunkers can still be seen. Some of these are part of the Communist Era defences, some are from the never-used Czechoslovak border fortifications in defence against Adolf Hitler, and some towers were, or have become, hunting platforms.


title: Iron Curtain

text: Another monument is located in Fertőrákos, Hungary, at the site of the Pan-European Picnic. On the eastern hill of the stone quarry stands a metal sculpture by Gabriela von Habsburg. It is a column made of metal and barbed wire with the date of the Pan-European Picnic and the names of participants. On the ribbon under the board is the Latin text: "In necessariis unitas – in dubiis libertas – in omnibus caritas" ("Unity in unavoidable matters – freedom in doubtful matters – love in all things"). The memorial symbolises the Iron Curtain and recalls forever the memories of the border breakthrough in 1989.


title: Iron Curtain

text: Another monument is located in the village of Devín, now part of Bratislava, Slovakia, at the confluence of the Danube and Morava rivers.


title: Iron Curtain

text: There are several open-air museums in parts of the former inner German border, as for example in Berlin and in Mödlareuth, a village that has been divided for several hundred years. The memory of the division is being kept alive in many places along the "Grenze".


title: Iron Curtain

text: Throughout the Cold War the term "curtain" would become a common euphemism for boundaries – physical or ideological – between socialist and capitalist states.


title: Merlin (2008 TV series)

text: Merlin (also known as The Adventures of Merlin) is a British fantasy-adventure drama television programme, loosely based on the Arthurian legends regarding the close relations of Merlin and King Arthur. Created by Julian Jones, Jake Michie, Johnny Capps and Julian Murphy for the BBC, it was broadcast for five series on BBC One between 20 September 2008 and 24 December 2012. The programme starred Colin Morgan, Bradley James, Katie McGrath, Angel Coulby, Richard Wilson, Anthony Head, and John Hurt.


title: Merlin (2008 TV series)

text: The programme is a reimagining of the legend, in which young warlock Merlin is sent to the kingdom of Camelot by his mother because of his "special gift". After saving Prince Arthur's life in the first episode, he becomes Arthur's manservant. Merlin soon learns that the reason for his gift is to protect Arthur, but Merlin must hide his powers because magic was banned in Camelot by Arthur's father, King Uther Pendragon, and those caught practising it are executed. Over the years and after several adventures together, Merlin and Arthur become trusted friends and companions, with the former doing his best to influence the latter into becoming the king he is destined to be.


title: Merlin (2008 TV series)

text: "Merlin" was nominated for several awards, winning the 2011 British Academy Television Award for best visual effects. Broadcasting rights were sold to over 180 countries.


title: Merlin (2008 TV series)

text: Merlin (Colin Morgan) is a young, powerful warlock who arrives in the kingdom of Camelot after his mother arranges for him to stay with the court physician, Gaius (Richard Wilson). He discovers that the king, Uther Pendragon (Anthony Head), outlawed magic twenty years earlier in an event known as the Great Purge and imprisoned the last dragon, Kilgharrah (voice of John Hurt), in the caves beneath the castle. After hearing a mysterious voice inside his head, Merlin makes his way to the cavern beneath the keep to find that he was hearing the dragon's voice. The Great Dragon tells Merlin that he has an important destiny: to protect Uther's only son, Prince Arthur (Bradley James), who will return magic to Camelot and unite the land of Albion.


title: Merlin (2008 TV series)

text: When Merlin meets Arthur, Merlin considers him to be an arrogant bully, and Arthur, likewise, is less than impressed with Merlin. After saving the prince's life, Merlin is appointed as his personal manservant. The two experience many adventures, over the course of which they come to respect and trust one another. But when Uther's actions eventually cause his ward, Morgana (Katie McGrath), to turn against Camelot and pursue a path of evil, Merlin and Arthur must join forces with friends, old and new, to protect their home and secure their destinies.


title: Merlin (2008 TV series)

text: The programme was conceived by Julian Murphy and Johnny Capps. The BBC had been keen on showing a drama based on the character of Merlin for some time. A year before the Shine series was initiated, writer and producer Chris Chibnall had been developing a project aimed at a BBC One Sunday night slot, but this was ultimately not commissioned. The Shine version of the project was put into development in late 2006, commissioned by Controller of BBC One Peter Fincham and BBC Head of Fiction Jane Tranter, with Fincham keen on having more series on his channel which embodied "three generation TV – that's TV you can watch with your grandparents and children. There's not enough of that about."


title: Merlin (2008 TV series)

text: The series went into production in March 2008, with filming in Wales and France (at the Château de Pierrefonds). Two Kent locations were also used: The Barons Hall and Garden Tower at Penshurst Place, and Chislehurst Caves for the first series. The series was produced by Shine in association with BBC Wales, whose Head of Drama Julie Gardner was executive producer for the BBC. "Doctor Who" chief writer Russell T Davies had been an important influence on the tone and style of "Merlin". CGI special effects for the series were provided by The Mill. The Old English for spells was written by university scholar and medievalist Dr. Mark Faulkner, and later by the script editing team. An initial series of 13 episodes, "Merlin" began transmission in the UK on 20 September 2008. A trailer was prepared in advance for television, cinemas, and online.


title: Merlin (2008 TV series)

text: US broadcaster NBC began airing "Merlin" on 21 June 2009; but, after a decline in viewers, it was moved to cable network Syfy, where it began broadcasting series 2 on 2 April 2010. On 19 September 2009, series 2 began airing on BBC One. On 5 September 2010, BFI Southbank in London previewed Episodes 1 and 2 of series 3 for its September Film Funday programme. A ten-episode fourth series was confirmed on 2 October 2010 (though it was rumoured to air in early 2012, later than its usual slot in autumn) so that it would not clash with the BBC's other primetime drama "Doctor Who" which would possibly run during the same period. In March 2011, this was revised, and the fourth series was extended to the standard 13 episodes. The fourth series was broadcast in the United States on the Syfy Channel "in early 2012." In UK, the fourth series began on Saturday 1 October 2011.


title: Merlin (2008 TV series)

text: Capps and Murphy confirmed on 24 July that BBC had commissioned a fifth series. Filming for the fifth series began March 2012 in Pierrefonds, France and near Cardiff, Wales. 13 episodes were ordered. Series 5 started broadcasting on 6 October 2012. On 26 November 2012, it was announced that the series 5 of Merlin would be the last, with a two-part special concluding the series over Christmas.


title: Merlin (2008 TV series)

text: A documentary series called "Merlin: Secrets and Magic" explains how the series was created. Apart from the initial 50-minute special, which was broadcast directly after the series two premiere, and the first episode, shown first on the Sunday repeat, all new 50-minute episodes were shown after each "Merlin" episode repeat on Saturday, Sunday, Monday, or Friday evening on BBC Three.


title: Merlin (2008 TV series)

text: In April 2008, United States broadcasting rights were purchased by NBC, where it was shown on Sundays at 8 pm (EST), starting 21 June 2009. This made it the first British drama in over 30 years to be shown on US network television, as opposed to PBS or cable. The programme moved to Syfy, a cable channel also owned by NBC, for the second series, which premiered on 2 April 2010.


title: Merlin (2008 TV series)

text: Syfy aired the third series in early 2011, after the conclusion of the initial broadcast on BBC. It was later announced the series would air after "WWE SmackDown" beginning 7 January 2011 at 10 pm (9 pm Central). The distributor, FremantleMedia Enterprises, also sold broadcast rights to CTV in Canada, Network Ten in Australia and Prime in New Zealand. It aired on Choice TV. The series was broadcast in 183 countries.


title: Merlin (2008 TV series)

text: Series one and two were released on DVD in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia. Series three is available in the United Kingdom, and was released in Australia on 4 August 2011. Accompanying box sets are featurettes, video diaries, and commentaries. Behind the Magic, a two-part overview of making "Merlin" is included with the UK series one box set, while the documentary series, Secrets and Magic, is included with series two. In Australia "The Complete Collection" boxset (23-Discs, Seasons 1–5) was released on 13 May 2015.


title: Merlin (2008 TV series)

text: A soundtrack for the first two series featuring music from selected episodes was released on the MovieScore Media record label. "Merlin" composer Robert Lane was nominated for Best Original Score for Television for the 10th annual Movie Music UK Awards (2008), the 8th edition GoldSpirit Awards (2008), and the 5th annual International Film Music Critics Association (IFMCA) Awards (2008). In early October 2012 MovieScore Media released the soundtrack from the third and fourth series along with that from the start of the fifth series.


title: Merlin (2008 TV series)

text: UK publisher Attic Brand Media launched an official magazine for the show in September 2011 featuring articles, puzzles and a comic strip written by Damian Kelleher and drawn by Lee Carey. The monthly magazine cost £3.20 per issue and was distributed in UK newsagents.


title: Merlin (2008 TV series)

text: A Merlin attraction was created at Warwick Castle entitled Merlin: The Dragon Tower, which featured a walkthrough, a projection of Kilgharrah the dragon, "Merlin" from the BBC TV Series "Merlin", or at least a true-to-life wax model-which was created with over 300 measurements—and a catalogue of reference shots of Colin Morgan. Upon seeing his wax work, Morgan said, "Little did I think that when I visited Madame Tussauds as a kid that I would have the honour of having the same fantastic team making a wax figure of myself. It’s truly amazing and I can’t praise their hard work enough in creating such a brilliant life-like me."


title: Merlin (2008 TV series)

text: The wax model cost £150,000, and the entire castle experience was part of a £3 million investment by the Merlin Entertainment Group to promote the show. The attraction closed in 2014 and is now the site of the Warwick Castle Time Tower.


title: Merlin (2008 TV series)

text: The BBC released two small Merlin-themed video games on the BBC website: a tower defense game called 'Camelot Defence', and an adventure puzzle game named 'Quest for the Mortaeus'. In 2012, a 'real-time cooperative' video game adaptation named 'Merlin: The Game' was announced and launched on Facebook. It has since been taken offline.


title: Toyota GR engine

text: The Toyota GR engine family is a gasoline, open-deck, piston V6 engine series. The GR series has a 60° die-cast aluminium block and aluminium DOHC cylinder heads. This engine series also features 4 valves per cylinder, forged steel connecting rods and crankshaft, one-piece cast camshafts, and a cast aluminium lower intake manifold. Some variants use multi-port fuel injection, some have D4 direct injection, and others have a combination of direct injection and multi-port fuel injection or D4-S.


title: Toyota GR engine

text: The GR series replaces the previous MZ V6 and JZ inline-6, and in the case of light trucks the VZ V6.


title: Toyota GR engine

text: "Note: Power ratings have changed due to SAE measurement changes for 2006 model year vehicles. Toyota rates engines on 87 pump octane, Lexus rates engines on 91 pump octane."


title: Toyota GR engine

text: The 1GR-FE is the version, designed for longitudinal mounting in RWD and 4WD pickup applications. It has a bore and a stroke of . Output is at 5200 rpm with of torque at 4000 rpm when tuned for 87 octane, and at 5200 rpm with at 3700 rpm when tuned for 91 octane. This engine features Toyota's VVT-i, variable valve timing system on the intake cam and a compression ratio of 10.0:1. Service weight, including fluids, is .


title: Toyota GR engine

text: An updated version of this engine features Dual VVT-i, increasing output to at 5600 rpm and at 4400 rpm on 87 octane. Inside, the 1GR uses a "taper-squish" combustion chamber design with matching pistons to improve anti-knocking and engine performance, while also improving intake and fuel efficiency. Toyota adopted a siamese-type intake port, which reduces the surface area of the port walls and prevents fuel from adhering to such walls. This engine has special cast-iron cylinder liners cast into the block, which are a spiny type to improve adhesion between the liner and cylinder block. In the event of cylinder wall damage (scoring, deep protrusions, etc.), the entire cylinder block must be replaced. For increased block rigidity, the 1GR also receives a high temperature plastic insulator/protector, which fills the empty space between the outer portion of the cylinders and block material common to open deck engines. For increased cooling efficiency, the 1GR employs water passages between the bores of the engine. There are two such passages for each bank for a total of four. This reduces cylinder hot-spotting and keeps combustion chamber temperatures more uniform.


title: Toyota GR engine

text: A bolt-on TRD supercharger kit was available on the Tacoma and FJ Cruiser but has been discontinued by Toyota.


title: Toyota GR engine

text: The new 2015 Toyota HiLux receives a slightly different version of the single VVT-i engine, with the only change being a removal of an air intake baffle tank being replaced by a conventional air filter housing to intake pipe to surge tank style. The new intake pipe now contains resonators. Power output is unchanged.


title: Toyota GR engine

text: First generation 1GR-FE variants with single VVT-i features Toyota's Acoustic Control Induction System. This system consists of a bulkhead to divide the intake manifold into two sections, and an intake air control valve (in the bulkhead) to control its effective length. When the engine is operating at moderate revolutions and under high load, an actuator closes the intake air control valve to increase the effective length of the intake manifold.


title: Toyota GR engine

text: At other operating conditions, the intake air control valve opens up to reduce the effective length of the intake manifold.


title: Toyota GR engine

text: The 2GR-FE is a version. Bore remains at ; but stroke is reduced to . Reported output varies depending on the vehicle application, but is approximately to at 6200 rpm with to of torque at 4700 rpm on 87 octane (R+M/2). This version features Toyota's Dual VVT-i, variable valve timing on both the intake and exhaust cams. The cams are driven using a timing chain.


title: Toyota GR engine

text: Valves are driven by roller-follower rocker arms with low friction roller bearings, and a unique, concave cam lobe design to increase valve lift over the traditional shimless lifter type system of the 1GR-FE. This increases overall cylinder head height to accommodate the slightly taller roller rocker system. Moreover, the cylinder head is segmented into 3 parts: valve cover, camshaft sub-assembly housing, and cylinder head sub-assembly. As such, this valvetrain is used across all other GR engines with Dual VVT-i. Its service weight is .


title: Toyota GR engine

text: The 2GR-FSE is a engine used in the Lexus IS, GS, Mark X and Crown and incorporates Toyota's latest D-4S twin injection fuel system. This system combines direct injection (/min injectors) with traditional port injection (/min injectors). Direct injection lowers the tendency to knock (detonation) and increases performance by reducing the charge intake temperature. Traditionally, direct injection engines require an in-engine mechanism such as swirl ports or specific piston crown shapes to increase air turbulence in the engine. These are in place to help achieve a homogeneous air-fuel mixture inside the cylinder at low RPM and high load, but these mechanisms inhibit performance at higher engine speeds. In the 2GR-FSE, port injection is used considerably to achieve the correct mixture without having in-engine restrictions, meaning the engine achieves specific power near the top of all naturally aspirated production gasoline engines in the world (/L, in the Mark X). Toyota also developed a new type of injector for this engine. The dual fan spray pattern of the direct injectors is perpendicular to the piston travel with wide dispersion in the cylinder, which aids air and fuel mixture and therefore increases power and efficiency. The port injectors not only help improve the power and efficiency but they also help improve emissions, especially in the first 20 seconds after start-up (when the catalytic converter is in its warm-up stage). Compression ratio is 11.8:1.


title: Toyota GR engine

text: For the Lexus RX 450h, the compression ratio was 12.5:1. For the Lexus GS 450h, the compression ratio was 13.0:1.


title: Toyota GR engine

text: The 2GR-FKS is a , 24-valve DOHC (with VVT-iW and VVT-i) V6 engine that combines the D-4S system from the 2GR-FSE with the simulated on-demand Atkinson cycle used in the 2UR-GSE and 8AR-FTS engines. The 2GR-FKS and the 2GR-FXS selectively use direct and port injection. This engine first appeared in the 2015 Lexus RX350.


title: Toyota GR engine

text: The 3GR-FE is a version with Dual VVT-i, designed for RWD longitudinal mounting. Bore is 87.5mm while stroke is shared with the 2GR at 83 mm, with a compression ratio of 10.5:1. Output is at 6,400 RPM, and at 4,800 RPM.


title: Toyota GR engine

text: The 4GR-FSE is a version. Bore is   while stroke is reduced to with a compression ratio of 12.0:1. Output is at 6,400 RPM and at 3,800 RPM. This version also features Dual VVT-i, variable valve timing on both the intake and exhaust cams and an improved D4 direct injection system.


title: Toyota GR engine

text: The 5GR-FE is a version. Bore is while stroke is with a compression ratio of 10.0:1. Output is at 6,200 RPM and at 4,400 RPM. This version does not include direct injection, but does include Dual VVT-i. The 5GR-FE engine is only built in China for vehicles for the Chinese market. Using the same bore as the 3GR-FE which is also built in China it can be built on the same production line, thus reducing production cost.


title: Toyota GR engine

text: The 6GR-FE is a version. Bore is while stroke is . This version does not include direct injection, but does include Dual VVT-i and is similar to the updated Dual VVT-i 1GR-FE, engine output is at 5,000 RPM and at 4,400 RPM.


title: Toyota GR engine

text: The 7GR-FKS is a version. Bore and stroke is . This version features a D-4S combined injection system, and includes Dual VVT-i and is similar to the 2GR-FKS, engine output is at 6,000 RPM and at 4,500 RPM.


title: Toyota GR engine

text: The 8GR-FKS is a version. Bore and stroke is . The 8GR-FKS includes on-demand Atkinson cycle, engine output is at 6,600 RPM and at 4,800 RPM.


title: Toyota GR engine

text: The 8GR-FXS is a version. Bore and stroke is with a compression ratio of 13.0:1. Used in hybrid applications, and including on-demand Atkinson cycle, engine output is at 6,600 RPM and at 5,100 RPM. The 8GR-FXS uses a similar fuel setup to the 2GR-FKS, combining the D-4S system and the simulated on-demand Atkinson cycle used in the 2UR-GSE and 8AR-FTS engines. The intake camshafts are equipped with VVT-iW and the exhaust camshafts are equipped with VVT-i.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The national flag of Italy (, ), often referred to in Italian as "il Tricolore" (, ) is a tricolour featuring three equally sized vertical pales of green, white and red, national colours of Italy, with the green at the hoist side, as defined by article 12 of the Constitution of the Italian Republic. The Italian law regulates its use and display, protecting its defense and providing for the crime of insulting it; it also prescribes its teaching in Italian schools together with other national symbols of Italy.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The Italian Flag Day named Tricolour Day was established by law n. 671 of 31 December 1996, which is held every year on 7 January. This celebration commemorates the first official adoption of the tricolour as a national flag by a sovereign Italian state, the Cispadane Republic, a Napoleonic sister republic of Revolutionary France, which took place in Reggio Emilia on 7 January 1797, on the basis of the events following the French Revolution (1789–1799) which, among its ideals, advocated the national self-determination. The Italian national colours appeared for the first time in Genoa on a tricolour cockade on 21 August 1789, anticipating by seven years the first green, white and red Italian military war flag, which was adopted by the Lombard Legion in Milan on 11 October 1796.


title: Flag of Italy

text: After 7 January 1797, popular support for the Italian flag grew steadily, until it became one of the most important symbols of the Italian unification, which culminated on 17 March 1861 with the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy, of which the tricolour became the national flag. Following its adoption, the tricolour became one of the most recognisable and defining features of united Italian statehood in the following two centuries of the history of Italy.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The Italian tricolour, like other tricolour flags, is inspired by the French one, introduced by the revolution in 1790 on French Navy warships, and is symbolic of the renewal perpetrated by the origins of Jacobinism. Shortly after the French revolutionary events, the ideals of social innovation began to spread widely on the basis of the advocacy of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, including in Italy, and subsequently political innovation with the first patriotic ferments addressed to the national self-determination that later led to the Italian unification on the Italian peninsula. For this reason, the French blue, white and red flag became the first reference of the Italian Jacobins and subsequently a source of inspiration for the creation of an Italian identity flag.


title: Flag of Italy

text: On 12 July 1789, two days before the storming of the Bastille, the revolutionary journalist Camille Desmoulins, while hailing the Parisian crowd to revolt, asked the protesters what colour to adopt as a symbol of the French Revolution, proposing green, a symbol hope or the blue of the American Revolution, a symbol of freedom and democracy. The protesters replied "The green! The green! We want green cockades!" Desmoulins then seized a green leaf from the ground and pointed it to the hat as a distinctive sign of the revolutionaries. The green, in the primitive French cockade, was immediately abandoned in favour of blue and red, the ancient colours of Paris, because it was also the colour of the king's brother, Count of Artois, who became monarch after the First Restoration with the name of Charles X of France. The French tricolour cockade was then completed on 17 July 1789 with the addition of white, the colour of the House of Bourbon, in deference to King Louis XVI of France, who still ruled despite the violent revolts that raged in the country; the French monarchy was abolished on 10 August 1792.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The first documented use of Italian national colours is dated 21 August 1789. In the historical archives of the Republic of Genoa it is reported that eyewitnesses had seen some demonstrators pinned on their clothes hanging a red, white and green cockade on their clothes. The Italian gazettes of the time had created confusion about the facts of French Revolution, especially on the replacement of green with blue and red, reporting that the French tricolour was green, white and red. When the correct information on the chromatic composition of the French tricolour arrived in Italy, the Italian Jacobins decided to keep green instead of blue, because it represented nature and therefore metaphorically, also natural rights, or social equality and freedom, both principles dear to them.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The red, white and green cockade then reappeared several years later on 13–14 November 1794 worn by a group of students of the University of Bologna, led by Luigi Zamboni and Giovanni Battista De Rolandis who attempted to plot a popular riot to topple the Catholic government of Bologna, a city which was part of the Papal States at the time. Zamboni and De Rolandis defined themselves as "patriots" and wore tricolour cockades to signal they were inspired by Jacobin revolutionary ideals, but modified them also to distinguish themselves from the French cockade.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The red, white and green cockade appeared, after the events of Bologna, during Napoleon's entry into Milan, which took place on 15 May 1796. These cockades, having the typical circular shape, possessed red on the outside, green on an intermediate position, and white on the centre. These ornaments were worn by the rioters even during the religious ceremonies officiated inside the Milan Cathedral as thanks for the arrival of Napoleon, who was seen, at least initially, as a liberator. The tricolour cockades then became one of the official symbols of the Milanese National Guard, which was founded on 20 November 1796, and then spread elsewhere along the Italian peninsula. Later the green, white and red cockade spread to a greater extent, gradually becoming the only ornament used in Italy by the rioters. The patriots began to call it "Italian cockade" making it become one of the symbols of the country. The green, white and red tricolour thus acquired a strong patriotic value, becoming one of the symbols of national awareness, a change that gradually led it to enter the collective imagination of the Italians.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The oldest documented mention of the Italian tricolour flag is linked to Napoleon Bonaparte's first descent into the Italian peninsula. The first territory to be conquered by Napoleon was Piedmont; in the historical archive of the Piedmontese municipality of Cherasco is preserved a document attesting, on 13 May 1796, on the occasion of the Armistice of Cherasco between Napoleon and the Austro-Piedmontese troops, the first mention of the Italian tricolour, referring to municipal banners hoisted on three towers in the historic centre. On the document the term "green" was subsequently crossed and replaced by "blue", the colour that forms — together with white and red — the French flag.


title: Flag of Italy

text: With the start of the first campaign in Italy, in many places the Jacobins of the Italian peninsula rose up, contributing, together with the Italian soldiers framed in the Napoleonic army, to the French victories. This renewal was accepted by the Italians despite being linked to the conveniences of Napoleonic France, which had strong imperialist tendencies because the new political situation was seen as better than the previous one. However, this double-threaded link with France was more acceptable than the previous centuries of absolutism.


title: Flag of Italy

text: On 11 October 1796, Napoleon communicated to the Directorate the birth of the Lombard Legion, a military unit constituted by the General Administration of Lombardy, a government that was headed by the Transpadane Republic (1796–1797). On this document, with reference to its war flag, which followed the French tricolour and which was proposed to Napoleon by the Milanese patriots, it is reported that this military unit would have had a red, white and green banner, colours formerly used by Milanese National Guard as well as on the cockades. In a ceremony at the Piazza del Duomo on 16 November 1796, a military flag was presented to the Lombard Legion. The Lombard Legion was therefore the first Italian military department to equip itself, as a banner, with a tricolour flag. The first official approval of the Italian flag by the authorities was therefore as a military insignia of the Lombard Legion and not yet as the national flag of a sovereign Italian state.


title: Flag of Italy

text: With the succession of Napoleon's military victories and the consequent founding of republics favourable to revolutionary ideals, red, white and green were adopted on military banners as a symbol of social and political innovation in many Italian cities. On 19 June 1796, Bologna was occupied by Napoleon's troops. On 18 October 1796, together with the establishment of the Italian Legion (the military banner of this military unit was composed of a red, white and green tricolour, probably inspired by the similar decision of the Lombard Legion), the wire Napoleonic congregation of magistrates, and deputies of Bologna, decided to create a civic banner of red, white and green, this time released from military use. Following the adoption by the Bolognese congregation, the Italian flag became a political symbol of the struggle for the independence of Italy from foreign powers, supported by its use also in the civil sphere.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The first red, white and green national flag of a sovereign Italian state was adopted on 7 January 1797, when the Fourteenth Parliament of the Cispadane Republic (1797), on the proposal of deputy Giuseppe Compagnoni, decreed "to make universal the ... standard or flag of three colours, green, white, and red ...":


title: Flag of Italy

text: For having proposed the green, white and red tricolour flag, Giuseppe Compagnoni is considered the "father of the Italian flag". The congress decision to adopt a green, white and red tricolour flag was then greeted by a jubilant atmosphere, such was the enthusiasm of the delegates, and by a peal of applause. The adoption of the Italian flag by a sovereign Italian state, the Cispadane Republic, was inspired by this Bolognese banner, linked to a municipal reality and therefore still having a purely local scope, and to the previous military banners of the Lombard Legion and Italian Legion. In particular, the Italian Legion was formed by soldiers coming from Emilia and Romagna. The flag of the Cispadane Republic was a horizontal square with red uppermost and, at the heart of the white fess, an emblem composed of a garland of laurel decorated with a trophy of arms and four arrows, representing the four provinces that formed the Republic. In France, due to the Revolution, the flag went from having a "dynastic" and "military" meaning to a "national" one, and this concept, still unknown in Italy, was transmitted by the French to the Italians.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The Cispadane Republic and the Transpadane Republic merged in 1797 into the Cisalpine Republic (1797–1802) and adopted the vertical square tricolour without badge in 1798. Originally the colours of the flag of the Cisalpine Republic were arranged horizontally, with green at the top, but on 11 May 1798, the Grand Council of the newborn State chose, as the national banner, an Italian tricolour with the colours arranged vertically. At the formal celebration of the birth in the new republic, which took place on 9 July in Milan, 300,000 people took part, including ordinary citizens, French soldiers and representatives of the major municipalities of the republic. The event was characterised by a riot of tricolour flags and cockades. On this occasion, Napoleon solemnly gave to the military units of the newborn republic, after having reviewed them, their tricolour banners.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The flag of the Cisalpine Republic was maintained until 1802, when it was renamed the Napoleonic Italian Republic (1802–1805), and a new flag was adopted, this time with a red field carrying a green square within a white lozenge; the Presidential Standard of Italy in use since 14 October 2000 was inspired by this flag.


title: Flag of Italy

text: It was during this period that the green, white and red tricolour predominantly penetrated the collective imagination of the Italians, becoming an unequivocal symbol of Italianness. In less than 20 years, the red, white and green flag had acquired its own peculiarity from a simple flag derived from the French one, becoming very famous and known.


title: Flag of Italy

text: In 1799, the independent Republic of Lucca came under French influence and horizontally adopted the vertical green, white and red flag, with green at the top; this lasted until 1801. In 1805, Napoleon installed his sister, Elisa Bonaparte Baciocchi, as Princess of Lucca and Piombino. This affair is commemorated in the opening of Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace".


title: Flag of Italy

text: In the same year, after Napoleon had crowned himself as the first French Emperor, the Italian Republic was transformed into the first Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy (1805–1814), or "Italico", under his direct rule. The flag of the Kingdom of Italy was that of the Republic in rectangular form, charged with the golden Napoleonic eagle. This remained in use until the fall of Napoleon in 1814.


title: Flag of Italy

text: With the fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the absolutist monarchical regimes, the Italian tricolour went underground, becoming the symbol of the patriotic ferments that began to spread in Italy and the symbol which united all the efforts of the Italian people towards freedom and independence. In the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia, a state dependent on the Austrian Empire born after the fall of Napoleon, those who exhibited the Italian tricolour were subject to the death penalty. The Austrians' objective was in fact, quoting the textual words of Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria:


title: Flag of Italy

text: Between 1820 and 1861, a sequence of events led to the independence and unification of Italy (except for Veneto and the province of Mantua, Lazio, Trentino-Alto Adige and Julian March, known as "Italia irredenta", which were united with the rest of Italy in 1866 after the Third Italian War of Independence, in 1870 after the capture of Rome, and in 1918 after World War I respectively); this period of Italian history is known as the "Risorgimento". The Italian tricolour waved for the first time in the history of the "Risorgimento" on 11 March 1821 in the Cittadella of Alessandria, during the revolutions of the 1820s, after the oblivion caused by the restoration of the absolutist monarchical regimes.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The green, white and red flag reappeared during the revolutions of 1830, mainly due to Ciro Menotti, the patriot who started the rebellion in Italy. Menotti, in particular, argued that the best form of state for a united Italy was the monarchy with a sovereign chosen by a national congress. The main points of this idea were Rome as the capital of Italy and the tricolour flag as a national banner. On 5 February 1831, during the Forlì uprisings, the patriot Teresa Cattani wrapped herself in the tricolour flag during the assault on the building that was the seat of the Legation of Romagna, challenging the shots of the papal soldiers.


title: Flag of Italy

text: In 1831, the tricolour was chosen by Giuseppe Mazzini as the emblem of Young Italy. An original flag of Young Italy is kept at the Museum of the Risorgimento and Mazzinian institute in Genoa. From 1833 to 1834, the symbolism of the tricolour spread more and more along the Italian peninsula, starting from northern and central Italy. Mazzini, regarding the reason why the Italian patriots had participated in the uprisings of 1830–1831, said:


title: Flag of Italy

text: The Italian flag also spread among political exiles, becoming the symbol of the struggle for independence and the claim to have more liberal constitutions. In 1834 the tricolour was adopted by the rioters who tried to invade Savoy, while the tricolour flag of Young Italy was brought to South America in 1835 by Giuseppe Garibaldi during his exile.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The Italian flag was also waved during the uprisings of 1837 in Sicily, of 1841 in Abruzzo and of 1843 in Romagna. In 1844, a tricolour of Young Italy accompanied the Bandiera brothers in their failed attempt to raise the population of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The patriots following the two brothers wore a uniform consisting of a blue and green shirt, white trousers, red handguards, a red and green collar, a red leather belt and a cap with an Italian tricolour cockade pinned.


title: Flag of Italy

text: Italian tricolours waved, challenging the authorities, who had decreed the ban, also on the occasion of the commemoration of the revolt of the Genoese quarter of Portoria against the Habsburg occupiers during the War of the Austrian Succession. During this event, which took place on 10 December 1847 in Genoa at the square of the "santuario della Nostra Signora di Loreto" of the Genoese district of Oregina, "Il Canto degli Italiani" by Goffredo Mameli and Michele Novaro played for the first time in history; it would become the Italian national anthem from 1946. "Il Canto degli Italiani", in a verse, quotes the Italian flag:


title: Flag of Italy

text: These verses, which can be read in the second verse, recall the hope that Italy, still divided into the pre-unification states, would be united in a single nation, gathering under a single flag. Starting from this period the strawberry tree plant began to be considered a national symbol of Italy due to the green leaves, white flowers and red berries, which recall the colours of the Italian flag. The strawberry tree is the national tree of Italy.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The Italian flag was a symbol of the revolutions of 1848. In March 1848, the Five Days of Milan, an armed insurrection which led to the temporary liberation of the city from Austrian rule, were characterised by a profusion of flags and tricolour cockades. On 20 March, during furious fighting, with the Austrians barricaded in the Castello Sforzesco and within the defensive systems of the city walls, the patriots Luigi Torelli and Scipione Bagaggia managed to climb on the roof of the Milan Cathedral and hoist the Italian flag on the highest spire of the church, the one on which the "Madonnina" stands. At the moment of the appearance of the tricolour on the spire of the "Madonnina", the crowd below greeted the event with a series of enthusiastic "Hurray!" This historic flag is kept inside the Museum of the Risorgimento in Milan. The patriot Luciano Manara then managed to hoist the tricolour, amidst the Austrian artillery shots, on the top of Porta Tosa. The abandonment of the city by the Austrian troops of field marshal Josef Radetzky, on 22 March, determined the immediate establishment of the provisional government of Milan chaired by the podestà Gabrio Casati, who issued a proclamation that read:


title: Flag of Italy

text: The process of transforming the flag of Italy into one of the Italian national symbols was completed, definitively consolidating itself, during the Milanese uprisings.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The following day King Charles Albert of Piedmont-Sardinia assured the provisional government of Milan that his troops, ready to come to his aid by starting the First Italian War of Independence, would use a tricolour defaced with the Savoyan coat of arms superimposed on the white as a war flag. In his proclamation to the Lombard–Venetian people, Charles Albert said:


title: Flag of Italy

text: As the arms, blazoned "gules a cross argent", mixed with the white of the flag, it was "fimbriated azure", blue being the dynastic colour, although this does not conform to the heraldic rule of tincture. The rectangular civil and state variants were adopted in 1851.


title: Flag of Italy

text: A makeshift tricolour consisting of redshirts, green displays and a white sheet was hoisted on the flagpole of the ship that brought Giuseppe Garibaldi back to Italy from South America shortly after the outbreak of the First Italian War of Independence. The patriots who had gathered at the port of Genoa to welcome her return gave Anita Garibaldi, in front of 3,000 people, a tricolour to be given to Giuseppe Garibaldi so that he could plant it on Lombard soil.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The Grand Duchy of Tuscany in the act of granting the constitution (17 February 1848) did not change the national banner ("The State retains its flag and its colours") but later granted the Tuscan militias, by decree, the use of a tricolour scarf next to the symbols of the Grand Duchy (25 March 1848). The Grand Duke, following the pressure of the Tuscan patriots, then adopted the tricolour flag also as a state banner and as a military banner for the troops sent to help Charles Albert of Piedmont-Sardinia. Similar measures were adopted by the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza and by the Duchy of Modena and Reggio.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The flag of the Constitutional Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, a white field charged with the coats of arms of Castile, Leon, Aragon, Two Sicilies, and Granada, was modified by Ferdinand II through the addition of a red and green border. This flag lasted from 3 April 1848 until 19 May 1849. The Provisional Government of Sicily, which lasted from 12 January 1848 to 15 May 1849 during the Sicilian Revolution, adopted the Italian tricolour, defaced with the trinacria, or triskelion.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The Republic of San Marco, proclaimed independent in 1848 by the Austrian Empire, also adopted the tricolour. The flags that they adopted marked the link to Italian independence and unification efforts. The former, the Italian tricolour undefaced, and the latter, charged with the winged lion of St. Mark, from the flag of the Republic of Venice (maritime republic which existed from 697 AD until 1797 AD), on a white canton. A chronicler of the time described the final moments of the subsequent capitulation of the Republic of San Marco by the Austrian troops, which took place on 22 August 1849:


title: Flag of Italy

text: The tricolour flag of 1848 that greeted the expulsion of the Austrians from Venice is kept in the Museum of the Risorgimento and the Venetian 19th century.


title: Flag of Italy

text: In 1849, the Roman Republic, formed following the revolt against the Papal State that dethroned the Pope, adopted as its national banner a green, white and red flag with a republican Roman eagle at the tip of the pole. This lasted for four months, while the Papal States of the Church was in abeyance. The Roman Republic resisted until 4 July 1849, when it was capitulated by the French Army. The troops from beyond the Alps, as a last act, entered the municipality of Rome where the last members of the republican assembly not yet captured were barricaded. Their secretary Quirico Filopanti surrendered wearing a tricolour scarf.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The tricolour also flew over the barricades of the Ten Days of Brescia, a revolt of the citizens of the Lombard city against the Austrian Empire, and in many other centres such as Varese, Gallarate, Como, Melegnano, Cremona, Monza, Udine, Trento, Verona, Rovigo, Vicenza, Belluno and Padua. This spread throughout the Italian peninsula and demonstrated that the tricolour flag had by then assumed a consolidated symbolism valid throughout the national territory. The iconography of the Italian flag then began to spread not only in the vexillological and military fields, but also in some everyday objects such as scarves and clothing fabrics.


title: Flag of Italy

text: This turning point lasted until the failure of revolutions and the end of the First Italian War of Independence (1849), which ended with the defeat of the Piedmont-Sardinian Army of Charles Albert; after this, the ancient flags were restored. Only the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia confirmed the Italian tricolour as the national flag of the state even after the First Italian War of Independence ended. After the defeat in the First Italian War of Independence in 1849, Charles Albert abdicated in favour of his son Victor Emmanuel II.


title: Flag of Italy

text: On 14 April 1855, before the departure for the Crimean War, the Italian tricolour flags were solemnly entrusted to the soldiers of the Sardinian Expeditionary Corps in the Crimean War by King Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont-Sardinia with the following farewell sentence:


title: Flag of Italy

text: One of the Italian flags that participated in the Crimean War is kept in the Royal Armoury of Turin. In 1857, an Italian flag with the pole surmounted by a Phrygian cap and with an archipendulum, a symbol of social balance, was a symbol of the Sapri expedition, or rather the failed attempt to trigger a revolt in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies perpetrated by Carlo Pisacane. In order not to be captured, Pisacane committed suicide, and was reported to be bandaged with the tricolour flag.


title: Flag of Italy

text: On 10 January 1859, King Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont-Sardinia, in front of the members of parliament, announced the imminent entry into war of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia against the Austrian Empire:


title: Flag of Italy

text: When the Second Italian War of Independence (1859) broke out, volunteers from all over Italy were enrolled in the Piedmont-Sardinian army.


title: Flag of Italy

text: During the Second Italian War of Independence the cities that were gradually conquered by Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont-Sardinia and Napoleon III of France greeted the two sovereigns as liberators in a riot of flags and tricolour cockades; even the centres about to ask for annexation to the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia through plebiscites underlined their desire to be part of a united Italy with the waving of the tricolour. The Italian flag waved in Lombardy, annexed following the victory of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia in the Second Italian War of Independence, as well as in Tuscany, Emilia, Marche and Umbria, annexed in the following year to the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia through plebiscites, but also in cities that would have had to wait some time before being annexed, such as Rome and Naples.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The enthusiasm of the population toward the tricolour grew in addition to the army of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia and the troops of volunteers who participated in the Second Italian War of Independence, the green, white and red flag spread widely available in newly conquered or annexed regions by plebiscites, appearing on house windows, in shop windows and in public places such as hotels and taverns.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The tricolour was also the flag of the United Provinces of Central Italy, a short-lived military government established by the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia that was formed by a union of the former Grand Duchy of Tuscany, Duchy of Parma, Duchy of Modena, and the Papal Legations, after their monarchs were ousted by popular revolutions. The United Provinces of Central Italy existed from 1859 to 1860, when they were annexed to the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The tricolour accompanied, although not officially, also the volunteers of the Expedition of the Thousand (1860–1861) led by Giuseppe Garibaldi, whose goal was to conquer the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Garibaldi, in particular, had an absolute deference and respect for the Italian flag. Shortly after the loss of Sicily, on 25 June 1860, trying to limit the damage given the growing participation of the population in the Expedition of the Thousand, King Francis II of the Two Sicilies, decreed that the green, white and red flag was also the official banner of his Kingdom, with the House of Bourbon-Two Sicilies coat of arms superimposed on the white. Adopted on 21 June 1860, this lasted until 17 March 1861, when the Two Sicilies was incorporated into the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, after its defeat in the Expedition of the Thousand. Ironically, in the final phase of the Expedition of the Thousand, the tricolour of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies fluttered in antagonism to the tricolour flag of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. Two of the original tricolours that flew on the "Lombardo" steamship that participated, together with "Piedmont", in the Expedition of the Thousand, are preserved, respectively, inside the Central Museum of the Risorgimento at the Vittoriano in Rome and the Museum of the Risorgimento in Palermo.


title: Flag of Italy

text: On 17 March 1861, there was the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy, a formal act that sanctioned, with a normative act of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, the birth of the unified Kingdom of Italy. On 15 April 1861, the flag of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia was declared the flag of the newly formed Kingdom of Italy. The tricolour therefore continued to be the national flag also of the new State, although not officially recognised by a specific law, but regulated with regard to the shape of military banners. This Italian tricolour, with the armorial bearings of the former Royal House of Savoy, was the first national flag and lasted in that form for 85 years until the birth of the Italian Republic in 1946.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The "tricolore" had a universal, transversal meaning, shared by both monarchists and republicans, progressives and conservatives and Guelphs as well as by the Ghibellines. The tricolour was chosen as the flag of a united Italy also for this reason. After the Unification of Italy, the use of the tricolour became increasingly widespread among the population as the flag and its colours began to appear on the labels of commercial products, school notebooks, the first cars and cigar packages. Even among the aristocrats it was successful; the most important families often had a flag bearer installed on the main façade of their mansions where they placed the Italian tricolour. It then began to appear outside public buildings, schools, judicial offices and post offices. During this period, tricolour bands were introduced for mayors and the jurors of the assize court during this period.


title: Flag of Italy

text: Following the Third Italian War of Independence in 1866, Veneto and Friuli were annexed to the Kingdom of Italy; the entry of the Italian Army troops into Venice, which took place on 19 October 1866, was greeted by a profusion of tricolour flags. Since the promulgation of a resolution of its municipal council, dated 5 November 1866, Vicenza is the only city in Italy to have adopted the tricolour flag as its own gonfalon, instead of the civic banner, loaded with the coat of arms of the municipality. The Venetian city decided to patriotically change the nature of its sign shortly before the visit of King Victor Emmanuel II, who arrived in the city for the awarding of the Gold Medal of Military Valour earned by the Venetian municipality with the battle of Monte Berico, fought on 10 June 1848 in the outskirts of the city. The occasion of the Sovereign's visit, Vicenza presented Victor Emmanuel II not with his own banner but, a decision from which his subsequent resolution was to originate, the Italian tricolour.


title: Flag of Italy

text: During the battle of Custoza (24 June 1866), part of the Third Italian War of Independence, near Oliosi, today part of the municipality of Castelnuovo del Garda, the soldiers of the 44th regiment of the "Forlì" brigade saved the tricolour war flag from the capture of the Austro-Hungarian Army. In order not to hand over their military banner to the enemy, they tore the drape of the tricolour flag into 13 pieces, divided among those present, and hid those shreds of cloth under the jacket. After the war it was possible to recover 11 of the 13 portions of the cloth and thus reconstruct the flag, named "Tricolore di Oliosi". Every year, on the third Sunday in June, the remembrance of the war episode is celebrated in Oliosi. At the military parade on 2 June 2011, held in via dei Fori Imperiali in Rome on the occasion of the celebrations for the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy, the "Tricolore di Oliosi" was paraded on a cannon carriage along with five other historic Italian flags.


title: Flag of Italy

text: Massimo d'Azeglio was among the first to recognize the importance of the tricolour flag as a tool for forming a widespread national awareness. In this regard he declared: "The flag is a privileged symbol in the pedagogy of a nation". Tricolour flags then greeted the Italian Army during the march toward Rome, which ended with the capture of Rome on 20 September 1870, and the annexation of Lazio to the Kingdom of Italy. Rome officially became the capital of Italy on 1 January 1871, while the establishment of the royal court and the Savoy government took place on 6 July of the same year. From this date, the Italian flag flies from the highest flagpole of the Quirinal Palace.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The first Italian colony was founded in 1882, the Assab bay, which became the first outpost of the future Italian Eritrea, where the flag of Italy waved in an Italian colony for the first time. Subsequently, the tricolour also waved in the Italian Somaliland, in the Italian Libya, in the Italian concession of Tientsin and in the Italian Islands of the Aegean.


title: Flag of Italy

text: In 1897, the Italian flag had its 100th anniversary. The centennial celebration in Reggio Emilia, where the tricolour was created on 7 January 100 years earlier, Giosuè Carducci, who later became the first Italian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1906, defined the flag as "blessed" and kissed it at the end of the speech.


title: Flag of Italy

text: Around 1880 began large waves of Italian diaspora, especially towards the Americans. The tricolour, often carried in the suitcases of migrants, began to wave outside the national borders, especially in the Little Italies that were forming around the world. This bond with the land of origin did not fade with the passing of generations—often still alive in the third or fourth generation. Several years earlier, in 1861, the President of the United States Abraham Lincoln reviewed some military units that were participating in the American Civil War—among them was a Garibaldi Guard, made up of Italian immigrants, which had as its military banner the tricolour flag.


title: Flag of Italy

text: In 1885, the tricolour jersey was introduced for the cyclist who won the title of champion of Italy. Conceptually, this recognition is similar to the placement of a tricolour shield, the "scudetto", on the jerseys of the team champion of Italy in football, rugby, volleyball and basketball. The idea of affixing a "scudetto" on the shirts of the winning sports teams of the respective national championships was Gabriele D'Annunzio. In football, the first sport to use it, it was introduced in 1924.


title: Flag of Italy

text: In 1889, in the culinary field, the pizza Margherita was invented, named in honour of Queen Margherita of Savoy, whose main ingredients recall the tricolour flag. Green for the basil, white for the mozzarella and red for the tomato sauce. With the first trade union struggles at the end of the 19th century, the Italian flag began to wave in the hands of the demonstrators during strikes. Even during the struggles perpetrated by the Fasci Siciliani between 1892 and 1894 there was a profusion of Italian flag. They were contrasted by the tricolours of the police sent by the government to quell the trade union revolts. On 25 April 1900, the Italian flag flew in the Franz Josef Land, an archipelago located north of the Russian Empire between the Arctic Ocean and the Kara Sea, an expedition organized in the arctic areas led by explorer Umberto Cagni.


title: Flag of Italy

text: On 29 July 1900, King Umberto I of Italy, who succeeded his father Victor Emmanuel II in 1878, was assassinated in Monza at a public ceremony with the streets flagged with tricolours. The king was shot four times by the Italian-American anarchist Gaetano Bresci. Bresci claimed he wanted to avenge the people killed in Milan during the suppression of the riots of May 1898. Umberto I was succeeded by his son Victor Emmanuel III of Italy.


title: Flag of Italy

text: Italy entered World War I in 1915 with the aim of completing national unity, and for this reason, the Italian intervention in World War I is also considered the Fourth Italian War of Independence in a historiographical perspective that identifies in the latter the conclusion of the unification of Italy, whose military actions began during the revolutions of 1848 with the First Italian War of Independence. King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, the day the Kingdom of Italy entered the war, appeared from the balcony of the Quirinal Palace while waving the tricolour shouting "Long live Italy". Victor Emmanuel III then made an official proclamation shortly before leaving for the Italian war front, which read, in its final part:


title: Flag of Italy

text: The tricolour flag was a symbol in both the trenches and in the civil sphere. The colours green, white and red were widely used as a stimulus to the general mobilization and moral sustenance of the civilian population, which was climbing a path that would have led to a very difficult situation, characterized by many deprivations. In the trenches, the tricolour was a fundamental symbol to spur the soldiers, while on the home front it was important for compacting and strengthening civil society.


title: Flag of Italy

text: During the flight over Vienna, on 9 August 1918 aerial flyer Gabriele D'Annunzio launched the tricolour leaflet over Vienna with which he exhorted the enemy to surrender and end the war. The Italian troops then entered Trieste in November 1918 following the victory in the battle of Vittorio Veneto, which ended the conflict with the retreat and the definitive defeat of the Austrians. The War Bulletin No. 1267 of 3 November 1918 by General Armando Diaz announced the "Bollettino della Vittoria" and the "Bollettino della Vittoria Navale" by few days, read:


title: Flag of Italy

text: After World War I, the Italian flag was also a symbol of the "Impresa di Fiume", led by D'Annunzio, and a consequence of the so-called "mutilated victory", a term used to describe the dissatisfaction concerning territorial rewards in favour of Italy at the end of World War I, shouted: "raise the flag: wave the tricolour!" During the Italian Regency of Carnaro (1919–1920), a state entity that administered the city of Fiume, now part of modern-day Croatia, D'Annunzio defined the Italian flag "the garment of the eternal nation" and urged the Italians to rebel against those responsible for the defeat of Caporetto by waving the "tricolour across the sky".


title: Flag of Italy

text: In particular, Italy, as a peace agreement at the conclusion of World War I, signed the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye (1919) and the Treaty of Rapallo (1920), which allowed the annexation of Trentino Alto-Adige, Julian March, Istria, Kvarner, with the cities of Trieste, Trento, Gorizia, Pola, as well as the Dalmatian city of Zara. The subsequent Treaty of Rome (1924) led to the annexation of the city of Fiume to Italy.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The coffin of the Italian Unknown Soldier was placed on the gun carriage of a cannon and wrapped in a tricolour flag during its journey from the Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta, Aquileia to the Altare della Patria in Rome, which took place in 1921 on a railway hearse. This historic flag is kept inside the Central Museum of the Risorgimento at the Vittoriano in Rome.


title: Flag of Italy

text: With the March on Rome in 1922, and the establishment of the fascist dictatorship, the Italian flag lost its symbolic uniqueness partly obscured by the iconography of the regime. When it was used, as the symbol of the National Fascist Party, its history was distorted, given that the tricolour was born as a symbol of freedom and civil rights. Despite this supporting role, with the royal decree nº 2072 of 24 September 1923 and subsequently with the law nº2264 of 24 December 1925, the tricolour officially became the national flag of the Kingdom of Italy. On 31 January 1923, the salute to the flag by the students of Italian schools was instituted by the Ministry of Public Education whereby every Saturday morning, at the end of the lesson, the students paid homage to the flag with the Roman salute and with the performance of patriotic musical pieces.


title: Flag of Italy

text: In 1926, the Fascist regime attempted to have the Italian national flag redesigned by having the fasces, the symbol used by the Fascist movement, included on the flag. However, this attempt by the Fascist government to change the Italian flag to incorporate the fasces was stopped by strong opposition to the proposal by Italian monarchists. Afterwards, the Fascist government raised the national tricolour flag along with a Fascist black flag in public ceremonies.


title: Flag of Italy

text: In 1926, an Italian flag was first brought to the North Pole by the Norge airship during the expedition led by Umberto Nobile and Roald Amundsen; the tricolours then greeted Italo Balbo in his oceanic seaplane crossings.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The Azione Cattolica, which made the Italian flag its banner in 1931, grouped the children of its organization dedicated to children into three categories, which were based on age group and colours of the Italian flag: "green flames", "white flames" and "red flames". In August 1933, the Italian ocean liner SS Rex, which had just won the Blue Riband, arrived in New York City setting the record for Atlantic Ocean crossing in the shortest time (four days) was greeted by the waving of tricolour flags.


title: Flag of Italy

text: Trains covered with tricolour flags carried the settlers to the new cities founded after the reclamation of the Pontine Marshes, while on 5 May 1936 there was the solemn flag-raising in Addis Ababa, Italian Ethiopia, which greeted the founding of the Italian Empire. The flag in Addis Ababa was then lowered in November 1941 at the end of the East African campaign, which was fought during World War II.


title: Flag of Italy

text: Italy entered World War II on 10 June 1940 with the speech by Benito Mussolini delivered from the main balcony of Palazzo Venezia in Rome; the climate, however, was very different from that which characterized Italy's entry into World War I. The king did not appear on the balcony of the Quirinal Palace waving the flag as he did in 1915..


title: Flag of Italy

text: During World War II, the Italian flag came back strongly after the Armistice of Cassibile of 8 September 1943, where it was taken as a symbol by the two sides who faced each other in the Italian Civil War in an attempt to recall the unification of Italy and its cultural tradition. In particular, it was used by the partisans as a symbol of the struggle against tyrants and emblem of the dream of a free Italy. Even the communist partisan brigades, which had the red flag as the official banner, often waved the Italian flag.


title: Flag of Italy

text: Tricolour flags were also the official banners of the Italian Partisan Republics and of the National Liberation Committee, as well as their antagonists, the Republicans in an attempt to recall the period of the unification of Italy and its cultural background. The national flag of the short-lived Fascist state in northern Italy, the Italian Social Republic (1943–1945), or "Republic of Salò" as it was commonly known, was identical to the flag of the modern Italian Republic, as both republics used the previous flag of the Kingdom of Italy with the coat of arms of Savoy removed.


title: Flag of Italy

text: This flag was somewhat rarely seen, however, while the war flag, charged with a silver/black eagle clutching horizontally placed "fascio littorio" (literally, bundles of the lictors), was very common in propaganda. Italian fascism derived its name from the fasces, which symbolised "imperium", or power and authority, in ancient Rome. Roman legions had carried the "aquila", or eagle, as "signa militaria".


title: Flag of Italy

text: The Italian tricolour was also used for propaganda. The Italian Social Republic, for example, used it on a poster depicting Goffredo Mameli, the author of the lyrics of "Il Canto degli Italiani", the national anthem of Italy from 1946, with an unsheathed sword and a tricolour behind him while he launches towards an assault. This poster bears the words "Brothers of Italy / Italy has woken!" and "1849-1944 The spirit of Goffredo Mameli/Defend the Social Republic".


title: Flag of Italy

text: On 25 April 1945, the government of Mussolini fell. This event is commemorated by Liberation Day. With the liberation, the tricolour appeared in public places such as the towers of town halls, on bell towers of churches, and in factories. Remembering these events, Francesco Cossiga, at the time President of the Senate of the Republic, in a speech delivered on 28 June 1984, said:


title: Flag of Italy

text: In the eastern Italian territories occupied by the Yugoslav partisan militias, the Italian flag was used with a red star in the centre as a model of the flag used by the partisan Garibaldi Brigades initially in the city of Fiume in 1943, then extended to all the territories where the Italian ethnic minority (Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians) resided. Having entered Yugoslavia, this flag remained official until 1992, when it was officially replaced by the flag adopted by the Italian state.


title: Flag of Italy

text: Following the defeat of Italy in World War II and the Paris Treaties of 1947, Istria, Kvarner and most of Julian March, with the cities of Pola, Fiume and Zara, passed to Yugoslavia, and after the latter's dissolution, to Croatia, causing the Istrian-Dalmatian exodus which led to the emigration of between 230,000 and 350,000 of local ethnic Italians (Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians), the others being ethnic Slovenians, ethnic Croatians, and ethnic Istro-Romanians, choosing to maintain Italian citizenship. After World War II, Gorizia was divided in two: one part remained with Italy while the other, which was renamed "Nova Gorica", passed first to Yugoslavia and then to Slovenia.


title: Flag of Italy

text: On 13 June 1946, the Italian Republic was officially founded and the last king of Italy Umberto II, who succeeded his father Victor Emmanuel III on 9 May 1946, left the country on 13 June into exile. On the same day, the tricolour with the Savoy coat of arms in the centre was lowered from the Quirinal Palace. The Italian flag was modified with the decree of the President of the Council of Ministers No. 1 of 19 June 1946. Compared to the monarchic banner, the Savoy coat of arms was eliminated. This decision was later confirmed in the session of 24 March 1947 by the Constituent Assembly, which decreed the insertion of article 12 of the Italian Constitution, subsequently ratified by the Italian Parliament, which states:


title: Flag of Italy

text: The members of the Constituent Assembly were deeply moved when they approved this article, and as a sign of joy and respect, stood up and applauded at length shortly after the approval. Shortly before the officialisation of the flag in the constitution, on 7 January 1947, the tricolour turned 150. The role of master of ceremonies that belonged to Giosuè Carducci 50 years earlier was assumed by Luigi Salvatorelli, whose speech, uttered during the Reggio Emilia official celebrations in the presence of Enrico De Nicola, Provisional Head of State, alluded to the delicate phase that post-war Italy was going through with particular reference to the humiliations suffered by the country in World War II:


title: Flag of Italy

text: The Republican tricolour was then officially and solemnly delivered to the Italian military corps on 4 November 1947 on the occasion of National Unity and Armed Forces Day. The universally adopted ratio is 2:3, while the war flag is squared (1:1). Each "comune" also has a "gonfalone" bearing its coat of arms. On 27 May 1949, a law was passed that described and regulated the way the flag was displayed outside public buildings and during national holidays.


title: Flag of Italy

text: During the republican era, the tricolour greeted important events in Italian history. The flag was hoisted at the top of K2 during the Italian expedition in 1954 that led Achille Compagnoni and Lino Lacedelli to be the first people to reach the summit of this mountain—the second highest in the world after Mount Everest, and was brought in 2011 to the International Space Station by astronaut Roberto Vittori on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy. A profusion of Italian flags greeted the return of Trieste to Italy in 1954, which took place following the agreements signed between the governments of Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States and Yugoslavia concerning the status of the Free Territory of Trieste, an independent territory situated between northern Italy and Yugoslavia. The territory, under the direct responsibility of the United Nations Security Council in the aftermath of World War II, established on 10 February 1947 by a protocol of the Treaty of Peace with Italy.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The Italian naval ensign comprises the national flag defaced with the arms of the Italian Navy; the mercantile marine (and private citizens at sea) use the civil ensign, differenced by the absence of the mural crown and the lion holding open the gospel, bearing the inscription, instead of a sword. The shield is quartered, symbolic of the four great thalassocracies of Italy, the "repubbliche marinare" of Venice (represented by the lion "passant", top left), Genoa (top right), Amalfi (bottom left), and Pisa (represented by their respective crosses); the "rostrata" crown was proposed by Admiral Cavagnari in 1939 to acknowledge the Navy's origins in ancient Rome.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The tricolour flag was the official banner of the Italian Trust Administration of Somalia (1950–1960), which was granted on a UN mandate, and which was the first peacekeeping mission of the Italian Army. The tricolour continues to represent Italy in all peacekeeping missions in which the Italian armed forces participate.


title: Flag of Italy

text: In 1997, on its bicentenary, 7 January was declared Tricolour Day; it is intended as a celebration, though not a public holiday. On 31 December 1996, with the same law that established the Tricolour Day, a celebration held on 7 January of each year in memory of the adoption of the red, white and green flag by the Cispadane Republic (7 January 1797), established a national committee of 20 members that would have the objective of organising the first solemn commemoration of the birth of the Italian flag.


title: Flag of Italy

text: Among the events celebrating the bicentenary of the Italian flag, was the longest tricolour in history, which also entered the "Guinness World Records" at long, wide and had an area of , and paraded in Rome from the Colosseum to the Capitoline Hill.


title: Flag of Italy

text: During the celebrations for the 140 years of national unity, on 4 November 2001, in San Martino della Battaglia, during the National Unity and Armed Forces Day, in reference to the tricolour, the former President of the Italian Republic Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, said:


title: Flag of Italy

text: In 2003, a state ensign was created specifically for non-military vessels engaged in non-commercial government service whereby the Italian tricolour is defaced with the national coat of arms. Since 1914, the Italian Air Force have also used a roundel of concentric rings in the colours of the tricolour as aircraft marking, substituted, from 1923 to 1943, by encircled fasces. The Frecce Tricolori, officially known as the 313º Gruppo Addestramento Acrobatico, is its aerobatic demonstration team.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The law n. 222 of 23 November 2012, concerning "Rules on the acquisition of knowledge and skills in the field of" Citizenship and Constitution "and on the teaching of the Mameli hymn in schools", prescribes the study in schools of the Italian flag and other national symbols of Italy.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The colours of the Italian flag are indicated in article 12 of the Constitution of the Italian Republic, published in the "Gazzetta Ufficiale" No. 298, extraordinary edition, of 27 December 1947, and came into force on 1 January 1948:


title: Flag of Italy

text: If the flag is exposed horizontally, the green part should be placed at the hoist side, with the white one in a central position and the red one outside, while if the banner is exposed vertically the green section should be placed above.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The need to precisely define the colours was born from an event that happened at the Justus Lipsius building, seat of the Council of the European Union, of the European Council and of their Secretariat, when an Italian MEP, in 2002, noticed that the colours of the Italian flag were unrecognizable with red, for example, which had a shade that turned towards orange. For this reason the government, following the report of this MEP, decided to specifically define the colours of the Italian national flag.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The chromatic tones of the three colours, on polyester stamina, are enshrined in paragraph 1 of article n. 31 "Colour definition of the colours of the flag of the Republic", of Section V "Flag of Republic, National Anthem, National Feasts and State Funeral", of Chapter II "General provisions relating to ceremonial", of the annex "Presidency of the Council of Ministers – State Ceremonial Department", to the decree of the President of the Council of ministers of 14 April 2006 "General provisions on ceremonial and precedence between public offices", published in the "Gazzetta Ufficiale" No. 174 of 28 July 2006.


title: Flag of Italy

text: The President of the Italian Republic has an official standard. The current version is based on the square flag of the Napoleonic Italian Republic, on a field of blue, charged with the emblem of Italy in gold. The square shape with a Savoy blue border symbolise the four Italian armed forces, namely the Italian Air Force, the Carabinieri, the Italian Army and the Italian Navy, of which the President is the commander.