Italy–Spain relations

Italy and Spain maintain interstate relations. Both countries established diplomatic relations some time after the unification of Italy in 1861.

Both nations are member states of the European Union (and both nations use the euro as currency) and are both members of the Council of Europe, OECD, NATO, Union for the Mediterranean, and the United Nations.

History

Precedents

In 218 BC, the Romans, coming from Italy, conquered the Iberian Peninsula, which later became the Roman province of Hispania. The Romans introduced the Vulgar Latin, the ancestor of the Romance languages, which are spoken in both current-day countries of Italy and Spain. As a result of the conquest, mining extractive processes in the southwest of the peninsula (which required a massive number of forced laborers, initially from Hispania and later also from the Gallic borderlands and other locations of the Mediterranean), increased by leaps and bounds, bringing the interaction of slaving and ecocide, entailing far-reaching environmental outcome in terms of pollution records, unmatched in the Mediterranean region until the Industrial Revolution. Vis-à-vis the local aristocracies in Hispania, a long process consisting of the fusion of incoming Roman and Italic settlers and the romanized indigenous elites was chiefly completed by the 1st century CE. It had involved the granting of Roman citizenship to entire communities. Some of the members of the local aristocracies of the Baetica managed to insert themselves into the social and political structures of the High Roman Empire.

Rome's imperial authority over Hispania receded and was ultimately severed in the 5th century, during the Migration period. The Rome-based Latin Church would go on to hold nonetheless substantial clout over Christian polities of the Peninsula for the rest of the Middle Ages.