Emilia-Romagna (, , both , ) or ; is an administrative region of northern Italy, comprising the historical regions of Emilia and Romagna. Its capital is Bologna. It has a population of over 4.4 million in an area of .
Emilia-Romagna is one of the wealthiest and most developed regions in Europe, with the third highest gross domestic product per capita in Italy. It is also a cultural centre, being the home of the University of Bologna, the oldest university in the world. Some of its cities, such as Modena, Ferrara, and Ravenna, are UNESCO World Heritage Sites. It is a centre for food and automobile production (such as Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Maserati). It has coastal resorts such as Cervia, Cesenatico, and Rimini. In 2018, the Lonely Planet guide named Emilia-Romagna as the best place to see in Europe.
Etymology The name Emilia-Romagna dates back to Ancient Rome. Emilia derives from the via Aemilia, the Roman road connecting Piacenza to Rimini, completed in 187 BC, and named after the consul Marcus Aemilius Lepidus.Livy Ab Urbe Condita XXXIX 1; Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 617 Romagna derives from Romània, the name of the Eastern Roman Empire applied to Ravenna by the Lombards when the western Empire had ceased to exist and Ravenna was an outpost of the east (540–751).
History Prehistory and antiquity Before the Romans took control of present-day Emilia-Romagna, it was part of the Etruscan world and later the Gauls. During the first thousand years of Christianity, trade flourished, as did culture and religion, thanks to the region's numerous monasteries.
Early origins
The history of Emilia-Romagna dates back to Roman times, when imperial judges linked to the nearby regions of either Liguria or Tuscany ruled the region of Emilia. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, the Lombards, a Germanic tribe, founded the kingdom of Lombardy in northern and central Italy. This kingdom, which included the region known as Emilia, flourished until the Lombard dynasty was overthrown by the Frankish king Charlemagne in 774. From the 6th to 8th centuries, the region of Romagna was under Byzantine rule, and Ravenna was the capital of the Exarchate of Italy within the Eastern Roman Empire. In the 8th century, this region became a province of the Papal States when Pepin, Charlemagne's father, donated the land to the Pope in 754.
High Middle Ages to early modern period In the 10th century, northern Italy became part of the Holy Roman Empire under the Germanic leader Otto I. Holy Roman emperors held varying degrees of control over northern Italy until the end of the Middle Ages. In the 12th century, the papacy extended its political influence, and city-states began to form in opposition to the Holy Roman emperors.
The northern cities, supported by the Pope, formed the Lombard League and reduced the Hohenstaufen dynasty's influence over their lands. Division between imperial partisans and their opponents created factions called the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, which would divide the cities for centuries. For the next few centuries, papal legates, or representatives of the Pope, ruled both Emilia and Romagna.
The University of Bologna—the world's oldest university, established in AD 1088—and its bustling towns kept trade and intellectual life alive. Local nobility like the Este of Ferrara, the Malatesta of Rimini, the Popes of Rome, the Farnese of Parma and Piacenza, and the Duchy of Modena and Reggio, jostled for power and influence.
The House of Este gained a notable profile for its political and military might and its patronage of the arts: it left behind a vast heritage of splendid Renaissance palaces, precious paintings and literary masterpieces, such as the works of Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso and Matteo Maria Boiardo.
Following the rise of Napoleon, the region of Emilia came under French control. 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 ...":The tri-coloured standard.Getting to Know Italy, Ministry of Foreign Affairs (retrieved 5 October 2008) For having proposed the green, white and red tricolour flag, Giuseppe Compagnoni is considered the "father of the Italian flag".
After the Congress of Vienna in 1815, a growing movement for Italian national unity and independence emerged. In 1848, a revolution in Vienna initiated uprisings against Austrian rule. Over the following decades, uprisings spread to several regions, and in 1861 the Kingdom of Italy was established. During this Italian Unification, the territories of Emilia and Romagna were incorporated into the new nation.
Late modern and contemporary In the 16th century, the Papal States seized most of what would become Emilia-Romagna, but the territories of Parma, Piacenza, and Modena remained independent until Emilia-Romagna became part of the Italian kingdom between 1859 and 1861.
After the First World War, Emilia-Romagna was at the center of the so-called Biennio Rosso, a period of left-wing agitations that paved the way for Benito Mussolini's coup d'état in 1922 and the birth of the Fascist regime in Italy. Mussolini, a native of Emilia-Romagna, sponsored the rise of many hierarchs from his region, such as Italo Balbo, Dino Grandi, and Edmondo Rossoni.
Towards the end of the Second World War, Emilia-Romagna was occupied by Germany and was the theatre of numerous Nazi war crimes, such as the Marzabotto massacre in which 770 innocent civilians were brutally executed by German troops.
During the Cold war era, Bologna, traditionally a left-wing city, was particularly hit by political street violence and terrorism; in 1980 a far-right terrorist group detonated a bomb at the city's main railway station, killing 85 people and wounding more than 200.
After the referendum of 2006, seven municipalities of Montefeltro were detached from the Province of Pesaro and Urbino (Marche) to join that of Rimini on 15 August 2009. Article on "il Resto del Carlino" The municipalities are Casteldelci, Maiolo, Novafeltria, Pennabilli, San Leo, Sant'Agata Feltria and Talamello.
On 20 and 29 May 2012, two powerful earthquakes struck the central area of the region, killing 27 people and causing substantial damage to the region's artistic heritage as well as to numerous manufacturing facilities. The 5.8 magnitude earthquake left 14,000 people temporarily homeless.
Geography
The region of Emilia-Romagna consists of nine provinces and covers an area of , ranking sixth in Italy. Nearly half of the region (48%) consists of plains while 27% is hilly and 25% mountainous. The region's section of the Apennines is marked by areas of flysch, badland erosion (calanques) and caves. The mountains stretch for more than from the north to the south-east, with only three peaks above 2,000 m – Monte Cimone (2,165 m), Monte Cusna (2,121 m) and Alpe di Succiso (2,017 m).
The plain was formed by the gradual retreat of the sea from the Po basin and by the detritus deposited by the rivers. Almost entirely marshland in ancient times, its history is characterised by the hard work of its people to reclaim and reshape the land in order to achieve a better standard of living.
The geology varies, with lagoons and saline areas in the north and many thermal springs throughout the rest of the region as a result of groundwater rising towards the surface at different periods of history. All the rivers rise locally in the Apennines except for the Po, which has its source in the Alps in Piedmont. The northern border of Emilia-Romagna follows the path of the river for .
The region has temperate broadleaved and mixed forests and the vegetation may be divided into belts: the Common oak-European hornbeam belt (Padan plain and adriatic coast) which is now covered (apart from the Mesóla forest in Province of Ferrara) with fruit orchards and fields of wheat and sugar beet, the Pubescent oak-European hop-hornbeam belt on the lower slopes up to 800–900 m, the European beech-Silver fir belt between 800–900 m and 1,700 m and the final mountain heath belt above 1,700–1,800 m. Emilia-Romagna has two Italian National Parks, the Foreste Casentinesi National Park and the Appennino Tosco-Emiliano National Park.
Land use
Emilia-Romagna has been a highly populated area since ancient times. Inhabitants over the centuries have radically altered the landscape, building cities, reclaiming wetlands, and establishing large agricultural areas. All these transformations in past centuries changed the aspect of the region, converting large natural areas to cultivation, up until the 1960s. The trend then changed, and agricultural lands began giving way to residential and industrial areas. The increase of urban-industrial areas continued at very high rates until the end of the 2010s. In the same period, hilly and mountainous areas saw an increase in the registration of semi-natural areas, because of the abandonment of agricultural lands.
Land use changes can have strong effects on ecological functions. Human interactions such as agriculture, forestation and deforestation affect soil function, e.g. food and other biomass production, storing, filtering and transformation, habitat and gene pool.
In the Emilia-Romagna plain, which represents half of the region and where three quarters of the population of the region live, the agricultural land area has been reduced by 157 km2 while urban and industrial areas have increased to over 130 km2 between 2003 and 2008. The impact of land use, particularly the urbanisation of the Emilia-Romagna plain during this period, has had significant consequences for the economic and ecological assessment. The loss of arable land is equivalent to a permanent loss of the capacity to feed 440,000 persons per year from resources grown within the region. Increased water runoff from soil sealing requires adaptation measures for rivers and irrigation canals, such as building retention basins, at a total cost estimated in the order of billions of euros.
In 2000 there were 103,700 farm holdings and in 2010 there were 73,470, or a -29.2% loss in holdings for the region. The total utilised agricultural area (UAA) was in 2000 and in 2014 for a loss of 4.5%, indicating a downturn of smaller farm ownership. During this same timeframe there was a 14.5% decrease in the farm labor workforce.Eurostat- Retrieved 4 July 2018
Government and politics
The Regional Government (Giunta Regionale) is presided by the President of the Region (Presidente della Regione), who is elected for a five-year term. The Regional Government is composed of the President and the Ministers (Assessori), of which there are currently twelve including the Vice President and the Under-Secretary for the President's office.
Apart from the province of Piacenza, Emilia-Romagna was historically a stronghold of the Italian Communist Party, forming the Italian "Red Quadrilateral" or sometimes called the "Red Belt" with Tuscany, Umbria and Marche. This is probably due to the strength of the anti-fascist resistance around the time of World War II as well as a strong tradition of anti-clericalism dating from the 19th century, when part of the region belonged to the Papal States. The strength of the anti-fascist resistance is one of the main factors, along with the effectiveness of trade-unionism, that led to the dominance of the PCI in the region.
Emilia-Romagna has since World War II been a left-wing stronghold, nowadays led by the Democratic Party, since its creation in 2007.
Administrative divisions
Emilia-Romagna is divided into nine provinces. Apart from the creation of the Metropolitan City of Bologna, plans to reduce the number of provinces from nine to four have been dropped.
ProvincePopulation (2026)Area