Italy

**Italy** (Italian: Italia) is a small and thin country located at southern Europe on the planet Earth. It was the birthplace of the Roman civilisation, which heavily influenced the cultures of the West.

## Factfile

* Official name: Italian Republic
* Anthem: The Song of the Italians
* Official motto: N/A
* Capital city: Rome
* Official language: Italian
* State religion: N/A, secular
	+ Major religions: Christianity (Catholic), Islam, Judaism
* Government: Republic
* President: Sergio Mattarella
* Prime Minister: Giuseppe Conte
* Climate: Temperate and alpine in the north, subtropical and arid in the south.
* Population: 60,317,116
* Currency: Euro (100 centesimi)
* National Day: 2 June (Republic Day)

## In the Rinnarverse

Italy's republic collapsed during the economic crash of the 2070s, causing it to be briefly ruled by a nationalist dictatorship.

When Ivan York was younger, he was abused and tortured by an angry, strict priest, Dominico Fraterone, who forced him to be a proper worshipper of God and the saints. Bitter from his education from Dominico and reading Earth history, Ivan began to develop a hatred of everything Dominico stood for: his Italian background and his Catholic faith. Years later, Ivan led a rebellion and founded his own country, the Rinnarit Republic, and among his laws include banning the Catholic Church, attacking anything and anyone related to Italy in his country, and replacing the Latin vocabulary in his country's English and Esperanto languages with Greek and Germanic words.

Some of Ivan's soldiers joined Farsider fleets in bombarding Rome, to punish the medieval Church and the persecutions of the Caesars. Before Ivan's death, he personally took part in the destruction of St. Ambrose's Basilica to punish him for the persecutions of pagans and to seek revenge against Roman civilisation. There, his troops exhumed the saint's body and he threw a spear at his ribcage, and after they smashed the saint's bones to pieces, they erected a shrine to Odin at the ruins of the basilica. Some claim that his hatred of the Church and his desecration of a sacred site became his curse, caused either by divine retribution or inhaling toxic chemicals from the irradiated Italian wasteland.

Furthermore, in Rinnarit pop culture, Satan and his demons were depicted wearing Roman armour, yelling and cursing in a hideous form of Latin.

The Farsiders worshipped and killed people as sacrifices to the Roman gods, such as Jupiter, Juno, and the Caesar emperors, to frighten Christian Galactics, whom they considered to be their enemies. In spite of this, some Farsiders bombarded Italy to punish the Roman Empire for its atrocities by disintegrating tombs of Roman emperors and dropping a nuclear bomb on Rome.

Travis is of partial Italian ancestry. For that reason, his classmates called him a "Roman" and made him wear the costume of a demonic centurion for Halloween to make fun of him.

## In the Rabydosverse

Italy does not exist in the Rabydosverse, but its equivalents are Verucci and the Tornarin Empire (formerly Vilon).

## Trivia

* Italian and Roman culture were influenced by those of the Greeks.
* Marnos' national flag has the same colours as Italy's flag.
* At one point in late 2021, the author considered using Latin to represent classical or religious languages when depicting translated text in his stories.
	+ It was also inspired by Starcraft translating Khalani (an alien classical language) as Latin.