The Italian Peninsula has been continuously inhabited since at least the Paleolithic era. The earliest known form of the Italian language is known as Old Italian and appeared during the 9th century as the vulgar tongue used across the Italian Peninsula, Corsica and Sardinia after the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the fragmentation of the Latin literary language in different Latin vulgares ("common Latin" or popular Latin), from which most European modern languages originate.
Modern Italian as a nation-wide linguistic and literary standard derives largely from the dialect of Florence (also used by Dante Alighieri and Petrarch during the 14th century) through a long development which occurred under a strong Tuscan cultural (i.e. literature and education) hegemony during an age considered one of the peaks of Western civilization, the Italian Renaissance