Italian is the direct descendant of Vulgar Latin as spoken in the Italian Peninsula, with regional dialects that diverged significantly after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century CE. For much of the medieval period, educated writing was conducted in classical Latin, while spoken vernaculars evolved independently — a diversity immortalized in the Sicilian School of poetry and the Tuscan works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. The Florentine Tuscan dialect gained literary prestige largely through Dante's Divine Comedy (c. 1320), and Pietro Bembo's 16th-century treatises formally promoted it as the standard for written Italian. National unification in 1861 brought urgency to establishing a common spoken standard, a process described by statesman Massimo d'Azeglio as 'making Italians'. Today, standard Italian coexists with dozens of regional varieties — some, like Neapolitan and Venetian, are distinct enough to be considered separate languages.
