# The 16 Greatest Italians of All Time

> Poets, physicists, generals and one carmaker. The shortlist covers two thousand years and refuses to settle down.

*By YPB Team · Published August 16, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-16-greatest-italians-of-all-time*

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## Current results (0 votes)

1. **Leonardo da Vinci**
   Painter, anatomist and engineer from a Tuscan hill town, and the era's defining mind.
2. **Dante Alighieri**
   Wrote the Divine Comedy and, in doing so, largely invented written Italian.
3. **Michelangelo**
   Carved the David, painted the Sistine ceiling and designed St Peter's dome.
4. **Galileo Galilei**
   Turned a telescope on Jupiter, found its moons, and was tried for saying what he saw.
5. **Julius Caesar**
   General, dictator and the reason half the world's months are named as they are.
6. **Marco Polo**
   Venetian merchant whose account of Asia shaped European geography for two centuries.
7. **Giuseppe Garibaldi**
   The general whose thousand redshirts made Italian unification real.
8. **Enrico Fermi**
   Built the first nuclear reactor under a Chicago squash court in 1942.
9. **Guglielmo Marconi**
   Sent the first radio signal across the Atlantic and won the 1909 Nobel Prize.
10. **Sophia Loren**
   The first performer to win an acting Oscar for a role in a foreign language.
11. **Giuseppe Verdi**
   Composer of Rigoletto, La traviata and Aida, and a symbol of the Risorgimento.
12. **Maria Montessori**
   Physician and educator whose teaching method now runs in schools on every continent.
13. **Federico Fellini**
   Director of La Dolce Vita and 8½, and winner of four foreign-language Oscars.
14. **Niccolò Machiavelli**
   Florentine diplomat whose short book on power still supplies the adjective.
15. **Luciano Pavarotti**
   The tenor who took opera to stadiums and sold it to people who had never bought any.
16. **Enzo Ferrari**
   Racing driver turned constructor, and the name on the most recognisable car badge on earth.

Tags: historical-figures, italy, people