Wednesday 5 August 2015

Blaugust 5/31: The Italian Question Strikes Back

Partly because it is a Blaugust tradition of mine to do a Wednesday quiz, and partly to get back at those amongst our readership that made a point of criticising "my new homepage" over the last year or so, today's post is a quiz about the History of Italy, as expressed in maps.

As always, the Wednesday quiz is surprise quiz on whatever floats the editors boat. To participate, lodge your answers in the comments. It is poor form to use references of any kind external to your own cybernetic brain. Remember to show your working, because everything is funnier that way.

Below are five very rough mud-maps that represent periods in the history of Italy. Rearrange the maps into the correct order and name the controlling power on each map labelled 'A' and 'B'. Points will be awarded for each map in the correct position in time and for each correctly labelled power.


Map 1:


Map 2: 



Map 3:



Map 4:



Map 5:



And for bonus points, which of these African regions was the first to come under Italian control in 1855, and which was the last to gain independence from Italy in 1951?


Don't be afraid to guess, there's a good chance that you'll do at least as well as I did this week in Mark's quiz. We'll mark the results in a week's time. See you then.

4 comments:

Mark said...

UGH, freaking Italy. I have only some very vague notions of this indeed, and without looking up anything at all this is HARD. So, wild guesses! Stabs in the dark! Venice is somewhere in the North, right?


2 - A Venice
1 - A Venice
5
4
3 - A Venice

Mark said...

(And I'm going to guess A and B on the bonus question)

John said...

Well, time to be horribly wrong.

1: The green (to me) implies that we’re looking at subdivisions of the modern nation-state of Italy, but I can’t come up with any logical subdivision that has those areas being relevant. I’ll take a stab in the dark and say that it’s the second world war, with A being the fascist rump state, B being areas directly occupied by the allies, and the rest being the post-Mussolini Italian state. Probably wrong.

2: The way the map is divided up makes it look like it’s alliances rather than states being represented here, so I’ll say it’s divided up by Guelph/Ghibelline allegiance (though obviously quite a lot of Italy flip-flopped over which side it supported). Let’s call the Guelphs A and the Ghibellines B. I will be royally incensed if I’m correct about everything except the A and B labels.

3: Given the shading it looks like this is modern Italy, with A and B being areas of regional government. I don’t know how Italian regional government works, so I’m just going to say that A and B seem centred around Venice and Rome and leave it there (as well as putting this one at the end chronologically)

4: The map is neatly fragmented so it looks like it’s around the renaissance or thereabouts. Let’s go with A being the Duchy of Savoy and B being the Kingdom of Naples

5: This is a tricky one. I’m pretty sure that A is France, but I’m not sure whether it’s during Louis the whatever’s adventurism in the middle ages or if it’s the Napoleon III occupying Rome in the 19th century. Either way I’m fairly sure that leaves B as Naples. I guess I’ll plump for the earlier option and put it in the ~1200-1300 span.

Timeline: 5 > 2 > 4 > 1 > 3

Very disappointed to find no evidence of Romans or Byzantines. Even more disappointed if they are on one of them and it’s my fault for being thick.

Bonus: I’ll say Libya (a) was first, and Eritrea (b) last.

Hooray!

Michael5000 said...

Oh for crying out loud.

I'm going to say #5 to start with, kind of a Middle Ages time with A being perhaps Genoa and B being the Normans.

Let's say #4 next, A still Genoa and B being, hmm, Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

#2 is an unlikely binary state of affairs. I have no idea what's going on here. It seems like the green bits, B, could conceivably be more or less Papal. Let's say the red bits, A, are Hapburgish.

Maybe #3 is just before Napoleon did in (b) the Vatican and (a) Venice?

#1 This is very discouraging. Maybe this is an immediate pre-unification scenario with B being, hell, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies -- obviously I don't have a strong temporal hook on which to hang the KofTS -- and A being, like, the Tyrol or some such.

First into Eritrea! Last outta Libya!

Criminy.