[2] Two Italian professional teams (Treviso and Zebre) compete in United Rugby Championship, a league that also includes sides from Ireland, Scotland, South Africa and Wales.

Four Italian clubs from the national championship compete in a qualifying tournament that awards two places in the Challenge Cup.

[citation needed] Many teams are either from Veneto or Lombardy in the north of Italy as this area has the highest rugby popularity however the sport has achieved national presence as it is played and followed throughout the country.

[4] The remote ancestry of rugby has been linked to a Roman game known as harpastum, which spread throughout their Empire, include the province of Britannia.

Another remote Roman ancestor of rugby may be a game called trigon, which involved three players passing a ball to one another by hand.

Italian rugby's traditional heartland consists of the small country towns in the Po Valley and other parts of Northern Italy.

[9] Some believe that Italian workers returning from France, particularly the south, introduced the game and gave it a significant rural/working class base, which still exists in towns such as Treviso and Rovigo.

Whatever the ultimate origins of the game in northern Italy, the region's proximity to the French rugby heartland helped as well.

In 1934 the FIR became founding members of FIRA (Fédération Internationale de Rugby Amateur) along with the national teams of Italy, France, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Germany.

Rugby union spread to other parts of Italy, especially the cities of Rome, Bologna, Padua, Naples, Brescia, Turin and Parma.

However, Mussolini found rugby union inconveniently resistant to authority and dropped the sport, and for Fascist purposes turned to volata, a malleable kind of handball.

Volata never caught on and in 1933 the effort was officially abandoned, however the invention of the game proved damaging to rugby union's popularity and place in Italian sporting culture.

After the decline of the volata project, his supporters turned back to rugby in the years leading up to the Second World War as an alternative to soccer, which they saw as an effete English influence.

Post-war, there was a desire to return to normality and Italian rugby union entered a new dimension thanks to the help of Allied troops in Italy.

Players of Italian ancestry from Australia and Argentina were brought in, and the likes of Frano Botica, David Campese, John Kirwan and Michael Lynagh plied their trade in Italy's top flight.

[9] Although the rise in standards was not immediate, the influx of money helped buy in some top foreign coaches such as Mark Ella and Bernard Fourcarde, which allowed them to develop their own stars such as Massimo Giovanelli.

Italy's best result at a Rugby World Cup was at the 2007 tournament in France, where they won two of their four pool matches and lost by two points to Scotland, narrowly missing the quarter-finals.

The announcement by Celtic rugby followed a long period of negotiations and planning, starting with a tentative agreement in 2008 to admit two Italian sides.

Only after repeated assurances by the FIR of the ability of the two new sides to contribute financially to the league did Celtic rugby finally admit the two teams.

The Heineken Cup was an annual rugby union competition involving leading clubs, regional and provincial teams from the rest of the Six Nations: England, France, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.

Italy is guaranteed one place in the Champions Cup; the Italian Pro12 team that finishes higher on the previous season's Pro12 table automatically qualifies.

It was competed for by teams from England, France, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Italy, and Romania (plus, in some years, Portugal and Spain) on a knock-out basis.

The structure has not yet been announced, but it will involve the top four teams from the Eccellenza plus club sides from second-tier European rugby nations.