Foreign relations of Italy
overview of the foreign relations of the Italian Republic
The foreign relations of the Italian Republic are the Italian government's external relations with the outside world. Located in Europe, Italy has been considered a major European power since its unification in 1860. Its main allies are the NATO countries and the EU states, two entities of which Italy is a founding member. Italy was admitted to the United Nations in 1955, and it is a member and a strong supporter of a wide number of international organisations, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and World Trade Organization (GATT and WTO), the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the Council of Europe, and the Central European Initiative.
Its turns in the rotating presidency of international organisations include the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the G7 and the EU Council. Italy is also a recurrent non-permanent member of the UN Security Council. Italy is an important actor in the Mediterranean region and has close relations with the Romance-speaking countries in Europe and Latin America. Although it is a secular state, Rome hosts the Pope and the headquarters of the Catholic Church, which operates a large diplomatic system of its own. Italy is currently commanding various multinational forces and has significant troops deployed all over the world for peacekeeping missions, and for combating organized crime, illegal drug trade, human trafficking, piracy and terrorism.
History
National unification
The Risorgimento was the era from 1829 to 1871 that saw the emergence of a national consciousness.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Foreign relations of Italy” is overview of the foreign relations of the Italian Republic. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Foreign, relations and Italy, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1403854. The Library of Congress control number is sh85068924. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1860, 1955, 1829 and 1871.
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This entry incorporates text from “Foreign relations of Italy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.