question: Why is it, perhaps, surprising that Italy has only existed as a nation since 1871? answer: Because it is a peninsula with obvious geographical unity (clearly bounded by the Alps and the Mediterranean Sea) paragraph: Italy has only existed as a nation since 1871. Before then, despite the peninsula's obvious geographical unity bounded by the Alps and the Mediterranean, its story is a fragmented tale of independent-minded cities, regions, and islands — and the outside powers who coveted them. We have abundant evidence of the ancient Etruscan, Greek, and Roman communities in Italy, but know very little of the country's earlier, prehistoric settlers. Vestiges of dwellings survive — cabins on stilts in the frequently flooded Po valley, larger clay houses on the western marshlands of Tuscany, and Sardinia's still visible domed dry-stone nuraghi. But the inhabitants? Perhaps North Africans and eastern Europeans peopled the Ligurian coast, while the Adriatic and south may have been settled by people from the Balkans and Asia Minor. Nobody knows much about the early Etruscans. Some historians believe that they were the first native Italians; others believe they arrived from Asia Minor. During the millennium before the Christian era, their civilization reached north beyond Tuscany to the Po valley and south toward Naples. At a time when early Roman and other Latin tribes were still primitive, Etruscan society — itself savage in many respects — was also aristocratic and highly sophisticated. Solid gold workmanship and other metal ornaments and tools showed a Greek influence, but the Etruscans' vaulted architecture, town planning, and irrigation systems were indigenous. Arriving in the eighth century b.c. , the Greeks set up city-states in Sicily, dominated by Syracuse, as well as other settlements on the Italian mainland, such as Naples, Paestum, and Taranto. Together they formed Magna Graecia, whose zenith was reached during the 6th and 5th centuries b.c. After defeats by Greeks in the south, Latins in the center, and Gallic invaders in the north, the Etruscan empire faded in the fourth century b.c. As Greek colonial power grew weak from Athens-Sparta rivalry back home and pressure from Phoenicians in Sicily, the vacuum was filled by an uppity confederation of Latin and Sabine tribes living on seven hills known collectively as Rome. 