Varied landscapes, ancient fortifications, cities surrounded by ramparts...Seen from the sky, Italy offers the patchwork image of a country that has experienced a fragmentation of its territory until modern times. While invisible from the ground, the relatively recent traces of this fragmentation become visible when seen from high above. .

At the dawn of the 19th century, the Italian peninsula was not a country but more of a strip of land with a number of small independent states - a stretch of territory which had little chunks bitten off in the north by French and Austrian possessions and by the pontifical states in its centre. The unification of the country, known as the “Risorgimento", would take more than half a century.
These fifty years of strive, diplomatic negotiations and compromises in order to create a state is best observed by flying over a territory that has been assembled like a jigsaw puzzle of a thousand pieces.

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