Evangelista Torricelli was an Italian physicist and mathematician, and a student of Galileo. He is best known for his invention of the barometer, but is also known for his advances in optics and work on the method of indivisibles. The torr is named after him.
The culture of Italy encompasses the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, and customs of the Italian peninsula and of the Italians throughout history. Italy has been the centre of the Roman civilization, the Catholic Church, and of the Renaissance, as well as the starting point of movements with a great international impact such as the Baroque, Neoclassicism, and Futurism and significantly contributed to historical phenomenons such as the Age of Discovery and the Scientific revolution. Italy is considered a cultural superpower and the Italian peninsula one of the birthplaces of Western civilization.
Italians are an ethnic group native to the Italian geographical region. Italians share a common culture, history, ancestry and language. Their predecessors differ regionally, but generally include native populations such as the Etruscans, the Rhaetians, the Ligurians, the Adriatic Veneti, and the Italic peoples, including the Latins, from which the Romans emerged and helped create and evolve the modern Italian identity. Foreign influences include the ancient Greeks in Magna Graecia, and the Phoenicians, who had a presence in Sicily and Sardinia, the Celts, who settled in parts of the north, the Germanics and the Slavs. Legally, Italian nationals are citizens of Italy, regardless of ancestry or nation of residence and may be distinguished from ethnic Italians in general or from people of Italian descent without Italian citizenship and ethnic Italians living in territories adjacent to the Italian peninsula without Italian citizenship. The Latin equivalent of the term Italian had been in use for natives of the geographical region since antiquity.
The University of Pavia is a university located in Pavia, Lombardy, Italy. There was evidence of teaching as early as 1361, making it one of the oldest universities in the world. It was the sole university in Milan and the greater Lombardy region until the end of the 19th century. In 2022, the university was recognized by the Times Higher Education among the top 10 in Italy and among the 300 best in the world. Currently, it has 18 departments and 9 faculties. It does not have a main campus; its buildings and facilities are scattered around the city, which is in turn called "a city campus". The university caters to more than 20,000 students who come from Italy and all over the world.
The Duchy of Milan was a state in Northern Italy, created in 1395 by Gian Galeazzo Visconti, then the lord of Milan, and a member of the important Visconti family, which had been ruling the city since 1277. At that time, it included twenty-six towns and the wide rural area of the middle Padan Plain east of the hills of Montferrat. During much of its existence, it was wedged between Savoy to the west, Republic of Venice to the east, the Swiss Confederacy to the north, and separated from the Mediterranean by Republic of Genoa to the south. The duchy was at its largest at the beginning of the 15th century, at which time it included almost all of what is now Lombardy and parts of what are now Piedmont, Veneto, Tuscany, and Emilia-Romagna.
The Duchy of Parma and Piacenza was an Italian state created in 1545 and located in northern Italy, in the current region of Emilia-Romagna.
A Galileo thermometer is a thermometer made of a sealed glass cylinder containing a clear liquid and several glass vessels of varying density. The individual floats rise or fall in proportion to their respective density and the density of the surrounding liquid as the temperature changes. It is named after Galileo Galilei because he discovered the principle on which this thermometer is based—that the density of a liquid changes in proportion to its temperature.
Camillo Guarino Guarini was an Italian architect of the Piedmontese Baroque, active in Turin as well as Sicily, France and Portugal. He was a Theatine priest, mathematician, and writer. His work represents the ultimate achievement of Italian Baroque structural engineering, creating in stone what could be attempted today in reinforced concrete.
Galileo Ferraris was an Italian university professor, physicist and electrical engineer, one of the pioneers of AC power system and inventor of the induction motor although he never patented his work. Many newspapers touted that his work on the induction motor and power transmission systems were some of the greatest inventions of all ages. He published an extensive and complete monograph on the experimental results obtained with open-circuit transformers of the type designed by the power engineers Lucien Gaulard and John Dixon Gibbs.
Leopoldo de' Medici was an Italian cardinal, scholar, patron of the arts and Governor of Siena. He was the brother of Ferdinando II de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany.
Giacomo Boni was an Italian archaeologist specializing in Roman architecture. He is most famous for his work in the Roman Forum.
The prehistory of Italy began in the Paleolithic period, when members of the genus Homo first inhabited what is now modern Italian territory, and ended in the Iron Age, when the first written records appeared in Italy.
Giovanni Faber was a German papal doctor, botanist and art collector, originally from Bamberg in Bavaria, who lived in Rome from 1598. He was curator of the Vatican botanical garden, a member and the secretary of the Accademia dei Lincei. He acted throughout his career as a political broker between Maximilian I, Elector of Bavaria and Rome. He was a friend of fellow Linceian Galileo Galilei and the German painters in Rome, Johann Rottenhammer and Adam Elsheimer. He has also been credited with inventing the name "microscope".
The National Liberation Committee was a political umbrella organization and the main representative of the Italian resistance movement fighting against the occupying forces of Nazi Germany and the fascist collaborationist forces of the Italian Social Republic during the German occupation of Italy in the aftermath of the armistice of Cassibile, while simultaneously fighting against Italian fascists during the Italian Civil War. It coordinated and directed the Italian resistance and was subdivided into the Central Committee for National Liberation (CCLN), which was based in Rome, and the later National Liberation Committee for Northern Italy (CLNAI), which was based in Milan. The CNL was a multi-party entity, whose members were united by their anti-fascism.
Science and technology in Italy has a long presence, from the Roman era and the Renaissance. Through the centuries, it has made many significant inventions and discoveries in biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, astronomy, and other sciences. In 2019, Italy was the world's sixth-highest producer of scientific articles, publishing more than 155,000 documents. From 1996 to 2000, it published two million. It ranked 26th in the Global Innovation Index for 2024.
Siena is a city in Tuscany, Italy. It is the capital of the province of Siena. Siena is the 12th largest city in the region by number of inhabitants, with a population of 53,062 as of 2022.
Giuseppe Alberigo was an Italian Catholic historian and editor of a history of the Second Vatican Council that focuses on alleged discontinuities and departures from previous Church teaching.
Andrea Benetti is an Italian painter, the author of the Manifesto of Neo Cave Art presented in 2009, at the 53rd Venice Biennale, at the Ca' Foscari University.
Riccardo Felici was a physicist and Italian professor of the University of Pisa. He is best known for the electrodynamics law that bears his name, through which the total charge passing through a circuit subject to an induced current can be calculated as the difference between the final and initial flux of the magnetic field, divided by the electrical resistance of the circuit. Felici anticipated, by almost fifty years, the experiments by André Blondel in 1914, in his search for the general law of magnetic induction.
The history of cinema in Naples begins at the end of the 19th century and over time it has recorded cinematographic works, production houses and notable filmmakers. Over the decades, the Neapolitan capital has also been used as a film set for many works, over 600 according to the Internet Movie Database, the first of which would be Panorama of Naples Harbor from 1901.
