trip to Italy.....

Without Julius Caesar invading us savages over the Alps we northern Europeans would still not know how to read or write.

Italy is an explosion of culture and civilisation.

Peeter

Hahah! there is alwayss bologna observatory!

By the way, when you are visiting Naples say "Caaaapri" when asking about the island not "Capri" as Northern Europeans (and Ford cars) tend to pronounce it.
Peter.

we northern Europeans would still not know how to read or write.

Peeter

or spell our own names presumably...

Without Julius Caesar invading us savages over the Alps we northern Europeans would still not know how to read or write.

Italy is an explosion of culture and civilisation.

Peeter

that is a matter of opinion. have you any proof the celts would not have developed their own written language?.

More to the point, is there any proof that Northern Europeans didn't already have written languages? Scribes of the early Christian Church were notorious for scrubbing existing texts off vellum and other materials and recycling them to copy parts of what we now call the Bible. They seem to have had little or no appreciation of the arts and sciences. So much pre-Christian scientific, cultural and historical knowledge was eradicated in this way that we've spent centuries reinventing many things that were already known at the beginning of the "first Millenium".