Italy is an interesting case because there are in fact many thriving languages (Sicilian, Piemontese, Venetian, Napolitan, and a long etc) but most Italians themselves are not very aware of this and don’t call them languages but dialects (I know the definition is blurry, but I think it is easy to argue that they are different enough among them to be called fully-fledged languages). What we call Italian is actually the language that was spoken in Florence and became recently the common language for all Italians. In Spain there is a different situation: Valencian and Catalan and technically the same language, but they are recognized as different languages in the Spanish Consitution mostly for political reasons.
Italy is an interesting case because there are in fact many thriving languages (Sicilian, Piemontese, Venetian, Napolitan, and a long etc) but most Italians themselves are not very aware of this and don’t call them languages but dialects (I know the definition is blurry, but I think it is easy to argue that they are different enough among them to be called fully-fledged languages). What we call Italian is actually the language that was spoken in Florence and became recently the common language for all Italians. In Spain there is a different situation: Valencian and Catalan and technically the same language, but they are recognized as different languages in the Spanish Consitution mostly for political reasons.