Rome was founded as a village of peasants in Italy, around the 10th century B. C. It grew from a small community to a powerful local kingdom, an expanding Roman Republic, and, finally, a vast Roman Empire encompassing much of the known world, from Britain and Northern Africa to Eastern Europe and the modern Middle East. Roman culture was essentially a Latin culture, the language of the Romans being Latin, which they spread, along with their technology, infrastructure, culture and civilization to all the lands they conquered or peacefully annexed into their lands.

The Romans developed an extensive network of roads and aqueducts, and were prolific traders on land and on the Mediterranean, accumulating immense wealth that paid the mighty Roman Legions, the provincial governments and infrastructure, and the lavish lifestyle of the Roman aristocracy, known as the patrician class (as opposed to the commoners, called the plebeians).

The Roman state and private religion, known as the “Religio Romana,” was polytheistic and tolerant of almost all other traditions, often incorporating them into itself, and except for a demand to respect the gods of Rome and the Emperor (who himself was considered a god), Roman conquerors did not force the conquered peoples to give up their own religious traditions and “convert” exclusively to the Roman religion.

While initially brutally repressed, Christianity became gradually accepted, and eventually declared as the exclusive official state religion of the Empire, banning the traditional polytheistic Religio Romana. After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the Eastern Part survived for another thousand years known as the Byzantine Empire. The Roman Catholic Church, the biggest Christian denomination today, is one of the greatest protectors of ancient Roman culture and the Latin language.
Modern Latin America, which is seen as a major cultural inheritor of the Latin culture, is predominantly Roman Catholic.