The flag of Italy is a tricolour featuring three equally sized vertical stripes of green, white and red, with the green at the hoist. Its current form has been in use since June 18, 1946, and was formally adopted on January 1, 1948.
The first entity to use the Italian tricolour was the Cispadane Republic in 1797, which supplanted Milan after Napoleon's victorious army crossed Italy in 1796. The colors chosen by the Cispadane Republic were red and white, which were the colours of the recently conquered flag of Milan; and green, which was the colour of the uniform of the Milanese civic guard. During this time, many small French-proxy republics of Jacobin inspiration supplanted the ancient absolute Italian states and almost all, with variants of color, used flags characterized by three bands of equal size, clearly inspired by the French model of 1790.
