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Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe, and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia. Italy shares its northern Alpine boundary with France, Switzerland, Austria and
Slovenia. The independent states of San Marino and the Vatican City are enclaves within the Italian Peninsula, while Campione d'Italia is an Italian exclave in Switzerland. Italy has been the home of many European cultures, such as the Etruscans and
the Romans, and later was the birthplace of the universities and of the movement of the Renaissance, that began in Tuscany and spread all over Europe. Italy's capital Rome was for centuries the center of Western civilization; it also spawned the Baroque
movement and seats the Catholic Church. Italy possessed a colonial empire from the second half of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Today, Italy is a democratic republic and a developed country with the 8th-highest Quality-of-life
index rating in the world. It is a founding member of what is now the European Union (having signed the Treaty of Rome in 1957), and a founding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It is a member of the G8 (having the world's 7th
largest nominal GDP), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), World Trade Organization (WTO), the Council of Europe, the Western European Union, the Central European Initiative, and a Schengen state. It has the world's 7th largest
defence budget and shares NATO's nuclear weapons. On January 1, 2007, Italy began a two year term as a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.
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