The Italian Peninsula or Apennine Peninsula, also Italy (Italian: Penisola italiana or Penisola appenninica) is one of the three large peninsulas of Southern Europe (the other two being the Iberian Peninsula and Balkan Peninsula), spanning 1,000 km (620 mi) from the Po Valley in the north to the central Mediterranean Sea in the south. The peninsula's shape gives it the nickname Lo Stivale (The Boot). Three smaller peninsulas contribute to this characteristic shape, namely Calabria, Salento and Gargano.

Since the reign of Roman Emperor Augustus (end of first century BCE), the northern border of the peninsula has been set on the Alps watershed, but geographically it coincides with a line extending from the Magra to the Rubicone rivers, north of the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines, which excludes the Po Valley and the southern slope of the Alps.

Nearly all of the peninsula is part of the state of the Italian Republic, apart from San Marino and the Vatican City. Additionally, Sicily, Elba, Malta (an independent state), and other smaller islands, as Palagruža (It. Pelagosa), belonging to Croatia, are usually considered as islands off the peninsula and in this sense geographically grouped along with it.

Santiago Sierra (born 1966) is a Spanish artist. He lives in Madrid.

Sierra's most well-known works involve hiring laborers to complete menial tasks. These works are meant to elucidate the nature of the laborer within Capitalist society, how the laborer sells his physical labor and thus his body, political issues such as immigration and continual immigrant poverty in Capitalist countries, the nature of work in Capitalist society, and the isolation of economic classes. He achieves this through a number of techniques that present these themes and also question the nature of the art institution. While Sierra is critical of capitalism and the institutions which support it, he is also considered a successful artist. He seems to be aware of this contradiction when he says, “Self-criticism makes you feel morally superior, and I give high society and high culture the mechanisms to unload their morality and their guilt.”