Which country is shaped like a boot?

Italy, whose peninsula is one of the few country outlines that people can draw from memory - which has been quietly useful to it. The shape exists because Italy is being built by a collision: the African plate is driving into the Eurasian one, throwing up the Alps at the top and the Apennines down the spine, and rotating the peninsula as it goes.

The same collision supplies the volcanoes and the earthquakes. Vesuvius, Etna and Stromboli are all products of it, and Etna is the most active volcano in Europe with eruptions recorded for 2,700 years. Pompeii is the best-preserved Roman town in existence for the worst possible reason.

Italy as a country is younger than most people assume - unified only in 1861, later than the United States by a long way. Before that it was a patchwork of kingdoms, duchies, papal territory and Austrian possessions, which is why regional identity, dialect and cooking still vary so sharply over short distances. Massimo d'Azeglio's remark after unification - that having made Italy, they must now make Italians - was a real political problem rather than a witticism.