Greatest Italian contributions to the world ?

What is/are Italy's greatest contribution(s) to the world ?

  • Navigators (Marco Polo, C. Columbus, A. Vespucci, G. Caboto, G. Verrazzano ...)

    Votes: 3 60.0%
  • Painting & scuplture (Brunelleschi, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raffaello, Botticelli, Caravaggio...)

    Votes: 4 80.0%
  • Italian literature (Dante Alighieri, Petrarca, Machiavelli, Eco...)

    Votes: 2 40.0%
  • Italian food (pasta, pizza, risotto...)

    Votes: 4 80.0%
  • Italian cinema

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • The mechanical clock

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • The telephone (invented by A. Meucci, not A.G. Bell)

    Votes: 2 40.0%
  • Optical glasses

    Votes: 1 20.0%
  • The thermometer & barometer

    Votes: 1 20.0%
  • Musical instruments (piano, violin, cello...)

    Votes: 2 40.0%
  • Classical music (Vivaldi, Albinoni, Puccini, Rossini, Verdi...)

    Votes: 2 40.0%
  • Modern music (Pavarotti, Morricone, Zucchero, Ramazzotti,...)

    Votes: 1 20.0%
  • Italian sport cars (Ferrari, Bugatti, Maserati, Lamborghini...)

    Votes: 1 20.0%
  • Italian fashion (Armani, Gucci, Prada, Versace...)

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Ice cream

    Votes: 1 20.0%
  • Carnival

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Tarot cards

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Other (please specify)

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    5
Zanipolo... am I noticing some regional pride here?
Son veneto anca mi (originario di Vicenza)....
How would you classify an "Italian" inventor and/or contribiution before 1861?.

You have to understand that the italian government from its beginning until now has classified there where no italians before 1861. The term Italian before this date was similar to the term called scandinavians for the swedes, danes and norwegians.
This law is based on jus sanguinis. For Trentini, friuli, veneti and lombardi its 1928.

An "italian" inventor before 1861 is classified from where he was from, Michelangelo =Tuscan, Da Vinci =Tuscan......same as artists, Cumin=Veneto, Titian =Veneto, Canova =Veneto

I did not write the rules, the Europeans did...even in the Congress of Vienna 1815 to 1820 , all european leaders said that there where no italians.

Italians need to stop the nationalistic lies which are being fed, if it keeps going with these lies, then we will not have a Roman empire but a Italian empire

Nationalism destroys the real truth of history.
 
Galileo and Leonardo Da Vinci helped usher in the Scientific Age.
 
rome is their greatest contribution; the disciplined evil empire that everybody is desperately trying to be today.
other things on the list:
-art
-beach culture
-mafia
-fellini
-wannabe italians all over the world
-"divide and conquer"
-alphabet
-an imaginary country you want to move at
 
As an Italian I voted for navigators: of course without them the process of colonization of America would never have started or at least the world would be deeply different from what it is today in bad and in positive. Large masses of humans would not have deported from Africa or Europe to the New World, many indigenous would not have died... It was the largest revolution that can be linked to Italy IMO.

I think you did miss something: Enrico Fermi, an Italian Jew escaped to Chicago, was the first man to realize a nuclear reactor. The first nuclear reactor was made by an Italian as well. This is also very important.
 
Also the physicist Enrico Fermi, "best known for his work on Chicago Pile-1 (the first nuclear reactor), and for his contributions to the development of quantum theory, nuclear and particle physics, and statistical mechanics. He is one of the men referred to as the 'father of the atomic bomb'. Fermi held several patents related to the use of nuclear power, and was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on induced radioactivity by neutron bombardment and the discovery of transuranic elements. He was widely regarded as one of the very few physicists to excel both theoretically and experimentally". (by Wikipedia)
 
If you're going to claim that an Italian invented the telephone, perhaps you should give Leonardo da Vinci credit for inventing the helicopter. His version didn't become anything functional, any more than the Italian version of the telephone did, but he could probably have gotten his helicopter to work if he'd managed to also invent something like the internal combustion engine.
 
I think Italians have made many great contributions to the world, like opera, beautiful art (Da Vinci, Michelangelo, etc), and more.However, many things that Italians claim as theirs are not theirs.Pizza was invented by the ancient Greeks.
Wikipedia said:
The word pizza originates from the Latin verb pìnsere ("to press") and from the Greek pitta (derived from ancient Greek pēktos, πηκτός, meaning "solid" or "clotted"). The ancient Greeks covered their bread with oils, herbs and cheese. In Byzantine Greek, the word was spelled πίτα, pita, or πίττα, pitta, meaning pie. The word has also spread to Romanian as pită, Turkish as pide,[2] and Bulgarian, Bosnian, Croatian, Macedonian and Serbian as pita, Albanian as pite and Modern Hebrew pittāh.[3] The Romans developed placenta, a sheet of dough topped with cheese and honey and flavored with bay leaves.
Columbus was Spanish:
The Telegraph said:
But American researchers say the mystery over the explorer's true origins has finally been solved after a thorough investigation of his writings.A study of the language used in the official records and letters of the Great Navigator apparently proves he hailed from the Kingdom of Aragon in northeastern Spain and his mother tongue was Catalan.Since his death in 1506 debate has raged over the true nationality of the man credited with discovering the Americas.It was widely believed that he was the son of a weaver born in the Italian port of Genoa, but over the centuries he has been claimed as a native son of Greece, Catalonia, Portugal, Corsica, France and even Poland.According to one theory, he may have been Jewish and another more recent account traced his origins to Scotland.But a linguistic professor at Georgetown University in Washington has published new findings following an exhaustive study of documents written in his hand.Estelle Irizarry studied his language and grammar and concluded that Columbus was a Catalan speaking man from the Kingdom of Aragon, an inland region of north-eastern Spain at the foot of the Pyrenees.The findings published this month in a new book "The DNA of the writings of Columbus" explain that although he wrote in Castilian it was clearly not his first language and his origins can be pinpointed to the Aragon region because of the grammar and the way he constructed sentences."He didn't express him correctly in any written language," said the professor. "His Spanish was notoriously incorrect yet at the same time efficient, poetic and eloquent."A scientific project launched three years ago to discover his true origins using DNA comparisons between his family and possible descendants has so far failed to provide conclusive results.A team of scientists took samples from the tomb of Columbus in Seville and from bones belonging to his brother and son and compared them to the genetic make-up of hundreds of people living across Europe with surnames believed to be modern day variants of Columbus.Swabs were taken from the cheeks of Colom's in Catalonia, Colombo's in Italy and even members of the deposed Portuguese royal family, who argue that Columbus was the product of an extramarital affair involving a Portuguese prince.Scientists had hoped to establish a common ancestor using standard Y-chromosome tests but they have yet to find a link.They study may be in vain, however, as there is evidence to suggest that Columbus, who first crossed the Atlantic in 1492, may have adopted his surname later in life to disguise his true origins.One theory claims that he once worked for a pirate called Vincenzo Columbus, and adopted that name in order not to embarrass his relations with his new profession.Columbus himself, when asked about his origins, used to shrug off the questions. "Vine de nada" – "I came from nothing", he said.
Pasta is not originally Italian:
Wikipedia said:
In the 1st century BC writings of Horace, lagana (Sing.: laganum) were fine sheets of fried dough [12] and were an everyday foodstuff.[13] Writing in the 2nd century Athenaeus of Naucratis provides a recipe for lagana which he attributes to the 1st century Chrysippus of Tyana: sheets of dough made of wheat flour and the juice of crushed lettuce, then flavoured with spices and deep-fried in oil.[13] An early 5th century cookbook describes a dish called lagana that consisted of layers of dough with meat stuffing, a possible ancestor of modern-day lasagna.[13] However, the method of cooking these sheets of dough does not correspond to our modern definition of either a fresh or dry pasta product, which only had similar basic ingredients and perhaps the shape.[13] The first concrete information concerning pasta products in Italy dates from the 13th or 14th century.[14]Historians have noted several lexical milestones relevant to pasta, none of which changes these basic characteristics. For example, the works of the 2nd century AD Greek physician Galen mention itrion, homogeneous compounds made up of flour and water.[15] The Jerusalem Talmud records that itrium, a kind of boiled dough,[15] was common in Palestine from the 3rd to 5th centuries AD,[16] A dictionary compiled by the 9th century Arab physician and lexicographer Isho bar Ali[17] defines itriyya, the Arabic cognate, as string-like shapes made of semolina and dried before cooking. The geographical text of Muhammad al-Idrisi, compiled for the Norman King of Sicily Roger II in 1154 mentions itriyya manufactured and exported from Norman Sicily:"West of Termini there is a delightful settlement called Trabia.[18] Its ever-flowing streams propel a number of mills. Here there are huge buildings in the countryside where they make vast quantities of itriyya which is exported everywhere: to Calabria, to Muslim and Christian countries. Very many shiploads are sent."[19]Itriyya gives rise to trie in Italian,[citation needed] signifying long strips such as tagliatelle and trenette. One form of itriyya with a long history is laganum (plural lagana), which in Latin refers to a thin sheet of dough,[13] and gives rise to Italian lasagna.Boy with Spaghetti by Julius Moser, c. 1808.Typical products shop in Naples with pasta on displayAccording to historians like Charles Perry, the Arabs adapted noodles for long journeys in the 5th century, the first written record of dry pasta.[citation needed] The dried pasta introduced was being produced in great quantities in Palermo at that time.[citation needed]In North Africa, a food similar to pasta, known as couscous, has been eaten for centuries. However, it lacks the distinguishing malleable nature of pasta, couscous being more akin to droplets of dough. At first, dry pasta was a luxury item in Italy because of high labor costs; durum wheat semolina had to be kneaded for a long time.There is a legend of Marco Polo importing pasta from China[20] which originated with the Macaroni Journal, published by an association of food industries with the goal of promoting the use of pasta in the United States.[21] Rustichello da Pisa writes in his Travels that Marco Polo described a food similar to "lagana". Jeffrey Steingarten asserts that Arabs introduced pasta in the Emirate of Sicily in the ninth century, mentioning also that traces of pasta have been found in ancient Greece and that Jane Grigson believed the Marco Polo story to have originated in the 1920s or 30s in an advertisement for a Canadian Spaghetti company.
 
I think Italians have made many great contributions to the world, like opera, beautiful art (Da Vinci, Michelangelo, etc), and more.However, many things that Italians claim as theirs are not theirs.Pizza was invented by the ancient Greeks. Columbus was Spanish:pasta is not originally Italian:

Whatever you’re sniffing is really bad for You. Lose the Tinfoil hat!
 
The term pizza was first recorded in the 10th century, in a Latin manuscript from Gaeta in Central Italy.[1] Modern pizza was invented in Naples, Italy, and the dish and its variants have since become popular and common in many areas of the world.[2]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza


This will hopefully melt the tin foil hat
 
Pita...
IMG_2493-2.JPG


Is not pizza...
naples+pizza.jpg


Everyone wants to claim Columbus, except, of course, the Amerindians. Get in line.

The invention of noodles may have been Chinese, or maybe as two very old agricultural societies it was "convergent" discovery. Regardless, we have brought it to perfection. Last count, we have 350 different varieties.

http://www.italymagazine.com/dual-language/so-how-many-pasta-shapes-are-there

These are just a few:
Pastasorten3.JPG


1022-895028-noodles_1.jpg


46640d5a54ed7833787efeeb181e3244--italian-food-recipes-italian-foods.jpg


Likewise, tomatoes came from the New World, but tomato sauce is Italian.

Find something else to ***** about.
 
In my view, Galileo is the greatest contribution to the world from Italy. How is he not on the list? At any rate, there are so many great contributions from Italy, it is hard to choose from among them. From your list, I would choose literature.
 
Electricity

Antonio Pacinotti : 1865, inventor of the DC magnetoelectric generator
 
Radio

Guglielmo Marconi : Radio Telephony and radio telegraphy. Nobel Prize 1909
 
Electricity

Alessandro Volta:1781, Electroscope,
Alessandro Volta: 1782, Capacitor
Alessandro Volta: 1800 , Volta stack or Volta Pile
 
Electricity

Luigi Galvani : 1763, discovery of the phenomenon of electrical stimulation of organs
 

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