America is a child of the Age of Enlightenment. Italy, for its part, is an offspring of first indigenous cultures from, for example, Villanova and the Etruscans and later (after 500 B.C.) classical Greece and Phoenicia. - also referred to Magna Graecia (Greater Greece).
Though to some, the Etruscans are criminally overlooked as having greater influence as Baccolini writes:
"I can never succeed in understanding why Italians still fail to recognize the enormous contribution that the Etruscan civilization has made to our Western civilization. We keep on believing the teaching that the Greeks and above all the Romans are the peoples to whom the Western world owes its origins. All of this is considerably exaggerated and based on historical falsehoods. However, I have ascertained instead that it is the Etruscans, coming from the East, who are the true founders of our European culture, for both good and bad aspects."
Nonetheless, Italy evolved and eventually witnessed Ancient Greece give way to the splendor of Rome and later the Renaissance.
With all these civilizations, and I haven't even mentioned Germanic influences, spiritually flowing within the blood of its people, it's no wonder Italy has produced some of history's greatest cultural and industrial masterpieces.
The rest is, to capture a cliched caption, history.
