Since the earliest times the history of Italy has been influenced by cultural and political divisions resulting from the peninsula's disparate geography and by circumstances that made Italy the scene of many of Europe's most important struggles for power. Most people will have learned a bit about the Roman empire at school. Italian is the official language but in the provence Bolzano (southern Tirol) a lot of people speak German (about 200,000 people), in some of the valleys of Piemonte and Valle d'Aosta people speak French (about 100,000 people); in the valleys of the Dolomites and the region Friuli-Venezia Giulia some speak Raetoroman. In the provence of Basilicata, southern Italy, a part of the population even speaks Albanese.