National colours of Italy

The national colours of Italy are green, white, and red, collectively known in Italian as il tricolore (the tricolour). In sport in Italy, azure has been used or adopted as the colour for many national teams, the first being the men's football team in 1910.

The tricolore was symbolically important preceding and throughout the Risorgimento leading to Italian unification. In September 1794, Luigi Zamboni and Giambattista de Rolandis created a flag by uniting the white and red of the flag of Bologna with green, a symbol of liberty and hope that the populace of Italy join the revolution begun in Bologna to oust the foreign occupying forces. This tricolore was considered a symbol of redemption that from its creation was "consecrated to immortality of the triumph of faith, virtue, and sacrifice" of those who created it.

Napoleon Bonaparte, in a letter from Milan to an executive director on 11 October 1796, stated that the Legione Lombarda had chosen these colours as the national colours. In a solemn ceremony at the Piazza del Duomo on 16 November 1796, a military flag was presented to the Legione Lombarda, which would become a unit in the Cisalpine Republic (1797–1802) military, and was the first tricolore military standard to fly at the head of an Italian military unit. The first official Italian flag was created for the Cispadane Republic (1796–1797) in Reggio Emilia on 7 January 1797 based on a proposal by government deputy Giuseppe Compagnoni.

The formation of the Cisalpine Republic was decreed by Napoleon on 29 June 1797, and consisted of most of the Cispadane Republic and Transpadane Republic (1796–1797), which included between them Milan, Mantua, the portion of Parma north of the Po river, Bologna, Ferrara, and Romagna, and later the Venetian Republic. Its flag was proclaimed to be the tricolore, representing the "red and white of Bologna and the green of liberty".

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