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Italy has been the home of many European cultures, such as the Etruscans and the Romans, and later was the birthplace of the university and 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 is the seat of 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,. It is a member of the G8, having the world's 7th-largest nominal, and is also a member state of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Trade Organization, the Council of Europe, the Western European Union, and the Central European Initiative. Italy is a Scheme state. It has the world's 7th-largest defense budget and shares NATO's nuclear weapons. On 1 January 2007, Italy began a two-year term as a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.
![italy-flag[1]](http://im.glogster.com/media/1/3/55/22/3552204.gif "italy-flag[1]")
