Austria cedes Veneto and Mantua to France, which immediately awards them to Italy in exchange for the earlier Italian acquiescence to the French annexation of Savoy and Nice.
Mantua ( MAN-tew-; Italian: Mantova [mantova] (listen); Lombard and Latin: Mantua) is a city and comune in Lombardy, Italy, and capital of the province of the same name.
In 2016, Mantua was designated as the Italian Capital of Culture. In 2017, it was named as the European Capital of Gastronomy, included in the Eastern Lombardy District (together with the cities of Bergamo, Brescia, and Cremona).
In 2008, Mantua's centro storico (old town) and Sabbioneta were declared by UNESCO to be a World Heritage Site. Mantua's historic power and influence under the Gonzaga family has made it one of the main artistic, cultural, and especially musical hubs of Northern Italy and the country as a whole. Having one of the most splendid courts of Europe of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries. Mantua is noted for its significant role in the history of opera; the city is also known for its architectural treasures and artifacts, elegant palaces, and the medieval and Renaissance cityscape. It is the city where the composer Monteverdi premiered his opera L'Orfeo and to where Romeo was banished in Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet. It is the nearest town to the birthplace of the Roman poet Virgil, who is commemorated by a statue at the lakeside park "Piazza Virgiliana".
Mantua is surrounded on three sides by artificial lakes, created during the 12th century as the city's defence system. These lakes receive water from the Mincio River, a tributary of the Po River which descends from Lake Garda. The three lakes are called Lago Superiore, Lago di Mezzo, and Lago Inferiore ("Upper", "Middle", and "Lower" Lakes, respectively). A fourth lake, Lake Pajolo, which once served as a defensive water ring around the city, dried up at the end of the 18th century.
The area and its environs are important not only in naturalistic terms, but also anthropologically and historically; research has highlighted a number of human settlements scattered between Barche di Solferino and Bande di Cavriana, Castellaro and Isolone del Mincio. These dated, without interruption, from Neolithic times (5th4th millennium BC) to the Bronze Age (2nd1st millennium BC) and the Gallic phases (2nd1st centuries BC), and ended with Roman residential settlements, which could be traced to the 3rd century AD.
In 2017, Legambiente ranked Mantua as the best Italian city for the quality of the life and environment.
Veneto (US: , Italian: [ˈvɛːneto]; Venetian: Vèneto [ˈvɛneto]) or Venetia is one of the 20 regions of Italy. Its population is about five million, ranking fourth in Italy. The region's capital is Venice while the biggest city is Verona.
Veneto was part of the Roman Empire until the 5th century AD. Later, after a feudal period, it was part of the Republic of Venice until 1797. Venice ruled for centuries over one of the largest and richest maritime republics and trade empires in the world. After the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna, the Republic was combined with Lombardy and annexed to the Austrian Empire as the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia, until that was merged with the Kingdom of Italy in 1866, as a result of the Third Italian War of Independence.
Besides Italian, most inhabitants also speak Venetian.Since 1971 the Statute of Veneto has referred to the region's citizens as "the Venetian people". Article 1 defines Veneto as an "autonomous Region", "constituted by the Venetian people and the lands of the provinces of Belluno, Padua, Rovigo, Treviso, Venice, Verona and Vicenza", while maintaining "bonds with Venetians in the world". Article 2 sets forth the principle of the "self-government of the Venetian people" and mandates the Region to "promote the historical identity of the Venetian people and civilisation". Despite these affirmations, approved by the Italian Parliament, Veneto is not among the autonomous regions with special statute, differently from its north-eastern and north-western neighbours, Friuli-Venezia Giulia and Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol respectively.
Veneto is home to a notable nationalist movement, known as Venetian nationalism or Venetism. The region's largest party is the Liga Veneta, a founding component of the Lega Nord. The current President of Veneto is Luca Zaia (Liga Veneta–Lega Nord), re-elected in 2020 with 76.8% of the vote. An autonomy referendum took place in 2017: 57.2% of Venetians turned out, 98.1% voting "yes" to "further forms and special conditions of autonomy".
Having been for a long period in history a land of mass emigration, Veneto is today one of the greatest immigrant-receiving regions in the country, with 487,493 foreigners (9.9% of the regional population; January 2018), notably including Romanians (25.2%), Moroccans (9.3%), Chinese (7.1%), Moldovans (7.0%) and Albanians (6.9%).