| Year | Date | Event |
|---|
| 1900 | | King Umberto assassinated. |
| 1906 | | The poet Giosuè Carducci is the first Italian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. |
| 1907 | | Maria Montessori establishes her first Casa dei Bambini in Rome. |
| | Ernestina Prola is the first Italian woman to get a driving licence. |
| 1908 | | Europe's worst earthquake, centered on the strait of Messina, kills up to 200,000 people in Sicily and southern Italy. |
| 1911 | | Italy defeats the Ottoman Empire and gain control over Libya and the Rhodes archipelago. |
| 1915 | | Although it is formerly aligned with Germany and Austria-Hungary, Italy enters World War I on the side of the Anglo-French Allies. After the war, Italy expands his borders well beyond Trento and Trieste, including Bolzano/Bozen and Fiume/Rijeka. |
| 1919 | | Enzo Ferrari, having no other job perspective, eventually settles for a job at a small car company called CMN (Costruzioni Meccaniche Nazionali) redesigning used truck bodies into small passenger cars. |
| 1922 | | After the lack of a compromise between socialists and Christian-democrats, and the March on Rome of the fascist militias, Benito Mussolini is named by the King as prime minister of Italy and in 1926 assumes dictatorial powers |
| 1926 | | The novelist Grazia Deledda is the first Italian woman who is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. |
| 1934 | | The Italian national football team wins its first FIFA World Cup |
| 1936 | | Following the invasion of Ethiopia, Italy is expelled from the League of Nations. Mussolini and Hitler signed the Rome-Berlin Axis. |
| 1938 | | The Italian national football team wins its second FIFA World Cup. |
| | Enrico Fermi is awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on induced radioactivity. |
| 1940 | | Italy enters World War II by invading Greece from Albania, which had been occupied in 1939. |
| 1941 | | While they are confined on the island of Ventotene by the Fascist regime, Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi compile the Ventotene Manifesto, entitled "Towards a Free and United Europe". With his Manifesto, Spinelli gives the major contribution to the formulation of the Federalist thinking, and is later one of the main figures of the European Parliament. |
| 1943 | | Nazi troops occupy Northern Italy, release Mussolini from prison and have him leading the puppet Italian Social Republic. Anglo-American troops fight in the following two years to free the whole peninsula. The Italian Resistance plays a growing role in harassing German occupation forces. |
| 25 July | After the Allied occupy Sicily, the government of Mussolini is overthrown by the same Great Council of Fascism |
| 8 September | General Badoglio signs the armistice |
| 1945 | | Alcide De Gasperi becomes Prime Minister, holding the office until 1953. He is considered one of the founding fathers of the European integration. |
| 25 April | Milan is finally liberated on 25 April 1945. Resistance fighters catch Benito Mussolini as he flees north in the hope of reaching Switzerland. They shot him along with his lover, Clara Petacci. The corpses are brought back to Milan and hang in a gas station in Piazzale Loreto. |
| 1946 | 10 June | Birth of the Italian Republic: Italy becomes a republic after the results of a popular referendum. The Constituent Assembly is elected to draft the Republican Constitution. Women are granted suffrage too. |
| 1947 | | Primo Levi publishes If This Is a Man, based on his experiences in Auschwitz. |
| 1948 | | The Constitution of the Italian Republic, agreed between Christian-democrats, Socialists and Communists, comes into force. The same year, the general election sanctions the supremacy of the Christian Democracy party, and the belonging of Italy to the Western side. Communists are excluded from governments till 2006, although they episodically support them from the outside (1976–79 and 1996–98). |
| 1949 | | Italy joins NATO |
| 1952 | | Italy was a founding member of the European Coal and Steel Community |
| 1953 | | The national oil company ENI (Ente Nationale Idrocarburi) is established, with Enrico Mattei as his first President. The ENI will become a strong actor in Italian foreign policy towards Arab countries. |
| 1954 | | The state-owned RAI broadcasts the first Italian official TV program. |
| 1955 | | The Messina Conference achieves the basic agreement on the European Economic Community |
| | Italy finally joins the United Nations, along with other 15 states, after years of stalemate due to opposed vetoes between USA and USSR. |
| 1957 | | The Treaty of Rome founds the European Economic Community. |
| 1959 | | Valentino opens his first atelier, in Rome on Via Condotti. |
| 1960 | | Italian film director Federico Fellini shoots La Dolce Vita, an episodic study of life along Via Veneto in Rome. |
| | Rightist riots in Reggio Calabria against the regional capital being set in Catanzaro. |
| | Leftist riots in Genoa and Reggio Emilia against the Tambroni Cabinet led by Fernando Tambroni, a coalition between DC and post-fascist Italian Social Movement |
| 25 August | The 1960 Summer Olympics opens in Rome |
| 1963 | | The DC switches to a strategy of alliance with the socialist PSI. Electric energy is nationalised and the high school system is reformed. |
| 30 June | Ciaculli massacre: a bomb intended for the mafia boss Salvatore Greco "Ciaschiteddu" explodes in Ciaculli killing seven police and military officers. |
| 9 October | 2000 people die when a landslide causes the overtopping of the Vajont Dam north of Venice; the flooding wave completely wipes out several villages. |
| 1964 | | Sergio Leone directs A Fistful of Dollars, the first of his three 'spaghetti westerns' starring Clint Eastwood. |
| | An attempted coup (Piano Solo) is defused. |
| | Michele, the son of Mastro Pietro Ferrero, modifies his father’s recipe for the “supercrema gianduja” (invented in 1946) and renames it Nutella. |
| 1969 | | The “Hot Autumn” of 1969 features occupations of factories and universities, and violence between right and left-wing students. |
| | The “Years of Lead” are characterized by bombings and shootings, a “strategy of tension” purportedly aimed at avoiding the “historic compromise” between DC and PCI. |
| 12 December | far-right terrorists bomb the Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura in Milan (Piazza Fontana bombing), killing 17 people and wounding 88. Four more bombs detonate without victims. Investigations are blurred, and no responsible party has been held accountable. |
| 1970 | | Another rightist coup attempt is defused (golpe Borghese). |
| 1974 | | On 12 May, a referendum asking voters to repeal a government law allowing divorce is defeated. The result of Italian divorce referendum, 1974 is the retention of the law allowing divorce. |
| 1978 | 16 March | Kidnapping of the former Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades. |
| 9 May | Moro is killed after the government refuses to negotiate with the Communist group. The “historic compromise” is stopped and Giulio Andreotti steps down from government. The Red Brigades begin falling apart. |
| 1980 | | Umberto Eco publishes The Name of the Rose, a medieval murder mystery. |
| 1982 | | The Italian national football team wins its third FIFA World Cup in Spain. |
| 1983 | | Bettino Craxi (PSI) is premier of a PSI-DC coalition until 1987. Under his government, a television reform allows Berlusconi to build up his media empire. The Concordat with the Vatican is revised, and salary indexation is abolished to curb inflation from 12% to 5%, but public debt raises up to 90% of GDP. |
| 1984 | | At the European Parliament elections, in the wake of the death of the leader Giovanni Berlinguer, the PCI gains 33,3% of votes and overcomes the DC as first party in Italy. |
| 1985 | | Franco Modigliani receives the Nobel Prize for Economics for his work on household savings and the dynamics of financial markets. |
| 1986 | | Italy took its most visible steps toward fighting organized crime, convicting 338 Mafia members of criminal activities. |
| | Italy-US relations are strained by the Libyan retaliation after the American bombing of Tripoli, and by the Sigonella crisis following the kidnapping of the Achille Lauro liner ship by the Palestinian Liberation Front. |
| | The neurologist Rita Levi-Montalcini, together with Stanley Cohen, receives the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of Nerve growth factor (NGF). Since 2001, she has also served in the Italian Senate as a Senator for Life. |
| 1987 | | In the wake of the Chernobyl disaster, a referendum put off the use of nuclear plants. The three working plants are slowly decommissioned. The Green party establishes itself in Italy. |
| 1990 | | Italy hosts the World Football Cup, but loses in the semi-final against Argentina at penalties. |
| 1991 | | A man found frozen high in the Alps turns out to be a Neolithic hunter from about 5000 years ago. |
| 1992 | | Paolo Borsellino and Giovanni Falcone, two Italian anti-Mafia magistrates, are assassinated by the mafia. |
| | Mani pulite (clean hands), a nationwide judicial investigation into political corruption and influence-peddling, leads to the fall and dissolution of the Christian Democracy, and of the Socialist party, which had been the most influential political parties in Italy since 1948. Craxi flees to Tunisia to avoid prosecution. |
| 1994 | | The Italian film Il Postino depicts poetry entering the life of a postman who delivers mail to the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. |
| 27 April | Media magnate Silvio Berlusconi becomes Prime Minister for a rightist coalition. However, the pact between northern autonomists and southern post-fascists collapsed late in the year, and Berlusconi is forced to resign as prime minister. |
| 1996 | 17 May | Romano Prodi becomes Prime Minister for the Olive Tree coalition, voted into power with the external support of the communists. By 2001, Italy has secured his place in the Eurozone. |
| 1997 | | Valentino Rossi wins his first (out of 9) World Championship, racing in Grand Prix for Aprilia in the 125cc category. |
| | Dario Fo, an Italian avant-garde playwright, manager-director, and actor-mime, is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. A theatrical caricaturist with a flair for social agitation, he has often faced government censure. |
| 1998 | | 20 skiers (of which 3 Italians) die in the Cavalese cable car disaster, when a US EA-6B Prowler military jet severed the cables supporting the Cermis mountain cable car. Pilots will be later found not guilty by an American court. |
| 1999 | | Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful is nominated for seven Academy Awards. The film wins the awards for Best Actor (the first for a male performer in a non-English-speaking role, and only the third overall acting Oscar for non-English-speaking roles), the Best Original Dramatic Score and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. |
| | Italy takes part in the Kosovo War, a NATO-led aerial operation against Milosevic’s Serbia to prevent genocide in Kosovo. The premier is Massimo D’Alema, of the post-communist Partito Democratico della Sinistra. |
| | Italy is accepted in the eurozone |