Italy's architecture has not been so influential
as its painting and sculpture, but the country
still presents a consistent number of historic
buildings, dating back more than 2500 years.
As in the other arts, strong regional distinctions
are evident in most of the main architectural
periods.
The Greeks and
Etruscans
The oldest important structures still standing
in Italy were built by the peninsula's Greek
colonizers of the sixth century BC. They show
the same characteristic of the classical architecture
of Greece itself...
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The Roman period
In architecture, as in many other fields, the
Romans adapted Greek models. Their approach
to building shows numerous differences ...
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Early Christian
and Byzanthine
The early Christians in Italy initially had
to practise their religion in private houses
and underground in catacombs . Those in Romeand
in Naples are the most famous...
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Romanesque
The European emergence from the Dark Ages in
the tenth and eleventh centuries finds in architecture
its expression in the Romanesque style, which
in Italy draws heavily on the country's own
heritage...
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The Gothic period
The Gothic style, which characteristic for light
and verticality, pointed arch, rib vault, flying
buttress and large traceried windows, started
from its mid-twelfth-century French origins
to become the...
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The early Renaissance
The Gothic style maintained its predominance
in northern European architecture until the
sixteenth century. In Florence , however, it
had been supplanted by the second decade of
the fifteenth century by the new, classically
derived ...
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The High Renaissance
and Mannerism
The ornate facades of the Venetian Renaissance
were to some extent repeated all across northern
Italy, especially in the early buildings of
Donato Bramante (1444-1514) in Milan .One of
these is the church of San Satiro...
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The Baroque
It is difficult to estabilish
the exact period when Baroque began. Politically,
its birth is linked to Rome , a city which needed
to reflect in a wealth...
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Neoclassicism
The Neoclassical style, which was a reaction
against the sumptuousness of late Baroque by
returning to the basic principles of classicism,
is generally considered to have begun in Rome
in the mid-eighteenth century...
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The twentieth
century
A reaction against the nineteenth-century imitation
of clasicall styles was the Art Nouveau movement,
whose forms dominated European architecture
and design in the firstyears of the new century...
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