GetWiki

{{short description|Overview of the name of Italy}}{{History of Italy}}The etymology of the name of Italy has been the subject of reconstructions by linguists and historians. Considerations extraneous to the specifically linguistic reconstruction of the name have formed a rich corpus of solutions that are either associated with legend (the existence of a king named Italus) or in any case strongly problematic (such as the connection of the name with the grape vine, vitis in Latin).Alberto Manco, Italia. Disegno storico-linguistico, 2009, Napoli, L'Orientale, {{ISBN|978-88-95044-62-0}}.One theory is that that the name derives from the word Italói, a term with which the ancient Greeks designated a tribe of Sicels who had crossed the Strait of Messina and who inhabited the extreme tip of the Italic Peninsula, near today's Catanzaro.WEB,weblink Quale è l'origine del nome Italia?, 16 September 2021, it, This is attested by the fact that the ancient Greek peoples who colonized present-day Calabria by integrating with the pre-existing peoples, referred to themselves as Italiotes, that is, inhabitants of Italy. This group of Italian people had worshiped the simulacrum of a calf (vitulus, in Latin), and the name would therefore mean "inhabitants of the land of calves". In any case, it is known that in archaic times the name indicated the part located in the extreme south of the Italian Peninsula.Guillotining, M., History of Earliest Italy, trans. Ryle, M & Soper, K. in Jerome Lectures, Diciassettesima serie, p.50 The name of Italy originally applied only to the tip of the Italian boot. As time progressed, the name "Italia" was extended further and further north until it reached the Alps in Roman times and became synonymous with the whole Italian geographical region.WEB,weblink La riorganizzazione amministrativa dell'Italia. Costantino, Roma, il Senato e gli equilibri dell'Italia romana, 19 November 2021, it,

Hypothesis on etymology

The myth of Italus

}}There are various legends about the character of Italus, king of the Oenotrians who, according to the myth, lived 16 generations before the Trojan War; the name "Italy" derives from him.WEB,weblink Italo, il mitico re che ha dato il nome all'Italia, 22 October 2020, 5 November 2021, it, Given first to the region corresponding to his kingdom, that is almost all of Calabria with the exception of the northern area. King Italus converted the Oenotrians from a nomadic people to a permanent one, establishing them in the extreme offshoot of the European coasts, in the current isthmus of Catanzaro between the Gulf of Squillace to the east and the Gulf of Saint Euphemia to the west.WEB,weblink Gli Itali in Calabria, 5 November 2021, it, The capital of his kingdom, according to Strabo, was Pandosia Bruzia, today probably corresponding to the city of Acri.According to Strabo, Antiochus of Syracuse (5th century BC) already spoke of the borders of Italy in his work On Italy,Strabo, Geographica, VI, 1,4. which identified it with the ancient Oenotrians. At that time it extended from the Strait of Sicily to the Gulf of Taranto (to the east) and the Gulf of Posidonia (to the west).Strabo, Geographica, V, 1,1.

Italy as the land of calves

File:Iron Age Italy.svg|thumb|right|upright=1.5|Ethnolinguistic map of Italy in the Iron Age, before the Roman expansion and conquest of Italy ]]Not all ancient authors adhered to the mythological version. Marcus Terentius Varro who, citing Timaeus, derives the word Italia from calves ("Italia a Vitulis") for the abundance and beauty of the calf (Vitulus in Latin; Vitlu in Osco-Umbrian) in the region.WEB,weblink Bollettino di studi latini, 5 November 2021, it, The passage from the Vitalia form to Italia can in this case be explained by the simple fall of the initial consonant by means of classical Greek, in which the letter V is absent.WEB,weblink Perché l'Italia si chiama Italia? 7 possibili risposte, 31 December 2020, 5 November 2021, it, Other proposals that motivate the name beyond a real linguistic analysis can be remembered that of Domenico Romanelli, who, based on the ancient but never fully accepted hypothesis that it was related to the bulls (taurus in Latin), explained it with the fact that those who came from the sea from the west saw bull-like silhouettes in the Bruttia and Japigia peninsulas.Domenico Romanelli, Antica topografia istorica del Regno di Napoli, Napoli 1815In ancient times the lands of present-day Calabria were known as Italy.WEB,weblink L'Italia è nata in Calabria. Ecco la teoria che lo confermerebbe?, 12 May 2020, 5 November 2021, it, The ancient Greeks indicated the origin of the name in Ouitoulía from the word "Italói" (plural of Italós), a term with which the Achaeans settlers who arrived in the lands of present-day Calabria ambiguously designated the Vitulis, a population that inhabited the lands of current southern Calabria whose ethnonym was etymologically related to the word indicating the bull, an animal sacred to the Vitulis. The ancient Greek italós is of Italic derivation from the Osco-Umbrian uitlu, precisely bull (see the Latin uitellus, form with diminutive suffix meaning calf). Ouitoulía thus came to mean "land of the Vitulis" or "land of the bulls". In support of this hypothesis, it is highlighted that in the southern part of the Calabrian peninsula, and in the Sicilian coast of the Strait of Messina, there are toponyms of Magna Graecia origin (some translated into Latin by the Normans) probably belonging to the most ancient etymology of the land of the bulls (of cattle). These include Tauriana, a city destroyed by the Saracens in the 10th century whose name survives today in the municipalities of Gioia Tauro, Taurianova, and Terranova Sappo Minulio, Bova, Bovalino and Itala.The similarity with the name "Italy" of the last toponym, "Itala", is evident. Danish archaeologist and philologist Frederik Poulsen, in a study on the origin of the name "Italia", claimed that it was used for the first time in the 5th century BC, precisely with reference to the territory south of Messina where Itala is situated and where a population of the Oenotrians lived, which had a bull as its emblem ("Vitulus").WEB,weblink Itala, 5 November 2021, it, With the arrival of the ancient Greeks, the consonant V was eliminated from the word Vitulus, which disappeared in classical Greek, and only the word "Itulus" remained.From the Oenotrians, the populations of the Italics, Morgetes and Sicels would then be distinguished. Subsequently, according to Poulsen, the name "Italy" was extended to the whole peninsula.Poulsen's thesis, however, seems to be questioned by the fact that the oldest documentable toponymic form for Itala is that of Gitala, as shown by a donation diploma from Count Roger of 1093. The name would then undergo many variations over the centuries: Quitala, Gitalas, Gytalas, Kitala, Hitala and finally Itala.BOOK, Itala, Salvatore Vernaci, Armando Siciliano Editore, 2011, 978-88-7442-426-9,

Greek origin

File:Italia colonie.jpg|upright=1.5|thumb|Italy according to the ancient Greeks, corresponding to the current CalabriaCalabriaIn ancient Greek tradition the name revived the theory of expansion from south to north in that the ancient Greeks would gradually apply the name "Italy" to an ever wider region, until the time of the Roman conquest, when it was extended to the entire peninsula.For some linguists who supported this theory, the name would be based on a hypothetical ancient Greek form such as Aἰθαλία (Aithalía) which in its initial part Aith- (typical of words referring to fire) would contain a reference to the volcanic dimension of the lands of the peninsula. This meaning would resist for example in the name of Etna, in ancient Greek "Aitna". This proposal had already been advanced by Gabriele Rosa, according to whom the first ancient Greeks who arrived in the peninsula would have called it precisely:BOOK, Gabriele Rosa, Le origini della civiltà in Europa, Editori del Politecnico, 1863,weblink 31 December 2009, it, Rosa, however, did not address and clarify the strictly linguistic arguments that had led him to such a solution, thus leaving his proposal in the pre-scientific dimension.It was mainly Silvestri who recovered this theory, assuming three ancient Greek or Proto-Greek bases ("Aitalía", "Eitalía", and "Etalía") in order to give scientific basis to the proposal. According to this theory, Italy would originally have meant "fiery land", "land of the fiery sunset" (or "land of the West"), or "smoking land".D. Silvestri, “Per una etimologia del nome Italia”, AIΩN-linguistica 22, 2000

Etruscan origin

This theory is opposed by that which, with a solution that has authoritative precedents and yet little remembered in its most recent revival, proposes an Etruscan solution of the name of Italy;Massimo Pittau, “Il nome dell'Italia è probabilmente etrusco”, RION IX, 2003, 1 it is a reconstruction that deems the "Greek" hypothesis inadmissible and implies conclusions symmetrically opposed to the latter, such as the fact that the name has spread from north to south.

Oscan origin

The ultimate etymology of the name is uncertain, in spite of numerous suggestions. According to the most widely accepted explanation, Latin OLD, p. 974: "first syll. naturally short (cf. Quint. Inst. 1.5.18), and so scanned in Lucil.825, but in dactylic verse lengthened metri gratia." may derive from Oscan víteliú, meaning "[land] of young cattle" (c.f. Latin vitulus "calf", Umbrian vitlu), via ancient Greek transmission (evidenced in the loss of initial digamma).J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams, Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture (London: Fitzroy and Dearborn, 1997), 24. The bull was a symbol of the southern Italic tribes and was often depicted goring the Roman wolf as a defiant symbol of free Italy during the Social War.WEB,weblink "Fucinus lacus" - Il primo prosciugamento, 5 November 2021, it, On the coinage of the Social War, dating back to 90 BC, found in the ancient city of Corfinium (in Abruzzo), there is a personification of Italy as a goddess, accompanied by a legend that reproduces her name, ITALIA, in the Latin alphabet, or the equivalent VITELIUGiacomo Devoto, Gli antichi Italici, Vallecchi, 1931 (p. 116) (Víteliú = Italy) in the Oscan alphabet. This is the first epigraphic testimony of the use of the name Italia.WEB,weblink Lo sapevi che ci sono varie ipotesi sull'origine del nome "Italia"?, 6 April 2019, 5 November 2021, it,

Semitic origin

Another theory, rather contested, suggests that Italy derives from "Atalu", an Akkadian word (Semitic language like Phoenician) reconstructed by the scholar Giovanni Semerano, which would mean "land of sunset".WEB,weblink Umberto Galimberti: All'origine delle parole. Giovanni Semerano, 5 November 2021, it, Itamar Ben-Avi, the son of linguist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and the first modern native speaker of Hebrew, theorized that Italy derived from Hebrew — "I" ("אִי", "island"), "tal" ("טַל", "dew"), and "yam" ("יָם", "sea") — and that the name was pre-Latin and showed possible links between Etruscan and Hebrew cultures through the Mediterranean Sea.NEWS, Ben-Avi, Itamar, 16 October 1929, דרך ימנו העברי, 3, Do'ar ha-yom (דאר היום),weblink 20 September 2023, Though this theory did not gain wide traction, it was also adopted by Zionist leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky.BOOK, Kaplan, Eran, The Jewish Radical Right: Revisionist Zionism and its Ideological Legacy, University of Wisconsin Press, 2005, Madison, WI, 146, 204,

Conclusions

It can be observed that the notion of Italy is a dynamic and plural notion, in progress until the 3rd century BC. In fact, in the conception of Italy a Greek Italy (limited to the southern Italy), another Etruscan (separated from the Apennines, from the Gallic and ancient Greek world), and probably also a first Roman Italy, which initially coincided with the large western coastal region between northern Etruria and the ager Campanus, and which then absorbed the others.BOOK, Giovanni Brizzi, Roma. Potere e identità: dalle origini alla nascita dell'impero cristiano, 2012, Patron, 978-88-555-3153-5, it,

Evolution of the territory called "Italy"

File:Regioni dell'Italia Augustea.svg|thumb|right|upright=1.5|Regions of Augustan ItalyRegions of Augustan ItalyItalia, the ancient name of the Italian Peninsula, which is also eponymous of the modern republic, originally applied only to the "tip" of the Italian "boot" (in modern Calabria).According to Antiochus of Syracuse, it included only the southern portion of the Bruttium peninsula:WEB,weblink The Origins of the Name 'Italy', Arcaini.com, 2015-08-25,weblink" title="web.archive.org/web/20150923172942weblink">weblink 2015-09-23, dead, WEB,weblink History of Calabria - Passion For Italy, Passionforitaly.info, 2015-08-25, WEB,weblink + nome +, Bellevacanze.it, 2015-08-25,weblink" title="web.archive.org/web/20160301084437weblink">weblink 2016-03-01, dead, WEB,weblinkweblink 2021-12-21, live, italian travel team Calabria - Italy Guide, YouTube, 2011-03-01, 2015-08-25, {{cbignore}} the actual province of Reggio Calabria and part of the modern provinces of Catanzaro and Vibo Valentia. The town of Catanzaro has a road sign (in Italian) also stating this fact.WEB,weblink JPG, Billboard image, Procopiocaterina.files.wordpress.com, 2015-08-25, But by this time, Oenotria and Italy had become synonymous and the name also applied to most of Lucania as well. Coins bearing the name Víteliú in Oscan ({{Script|Ital|𐌅𐌝𐌕𐌄𐌋𐌉𐌞}}) were minted by an alliance of Italic peoples (Sabines, Samnites, Umbrians and others) competing with Rome in the 1st century BC.The ancient Greeks gradually came to apply the name Italia to a larger region, but it was during the Roman Republic, in 264 BC, that the territory called "Italy" was extended to the Italian Peninsula south of the Arno and Rubicon rivers. The northern area of Cisalpine Gaul came in the Roman speher of influence in the 220s BC and became considered geographically and de facto part of Italy.BOOK,weblink The "Birth" of Italy: The Institutionalization of Italy as a Region, 3rd–1st Century BCE, 978-3-11-054478-7, Carlà-Uhink, Filippo, 25 September 2017, Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, The borders of Roman Italy, Italia, are better established. Cato's Origines, the first work of history composed in Latin, described Italy as the entire peninsula south of the Alps.BOOK,weblink The "Birth" of Italy: The Institutionalization of Italy as a Region, 3rd–1st Century BCE, 978-3-11-054478-7, Carlà-Uhink, Filippo, 25 September 2017, Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, According to Cato and several Roman authors, the Alps formed the "walls of Italy".BOOK,weblink Livy on the Hannibalic War, 978-0-19-815295-8, Levene, D. S., 17 June 2010, Oxford University Press, The north, however, being a province, remained de jure separated from Italy in administrative matters for a longer period of rime. It was legally merged into the administrative unit of Italy in 42 BC by the triumvir Augustus, as planned by Julius Caesar, who had already extended Roman citizenship to all of Cisalpine Gaul in 49 BC.Pallottino, M., History of Earliest Italy, trans. Ryle, M & Soper, K. in Jerome Lectures, Seventeenth Series, p. 50 The term "Italy" also included Liguria up to the Varo river and Istria up to Pola. All its inhabitants were considered Italic and Roman.BOOK,weblink Beyond the Rubicon: Romans and Gauls in Republican Italy - J. H. C. Williams - Google Books, 22 May 2020, 9780198153009,weblink 22 May 2020, Williams, J. H. C., Oxford University Press, BOOK, Decline of the Roman republic: Volume 2, George, Long, 1866, London, BOOK, Cassius, Dio, Cassius Dio, Historia Romana, 41, 36, JOURNAL, Laffi, Umberto, La provincia della Gallia Cisalpina, 1992, Athenaeum, 80, 5–23, it, WEB, Aurigemma, Salvatore, Gallia Cisalpina,weblink www.treccani.it, Enciclopedia Italiana, 14 October 2014, it, Under Emperor Diocletian the administrative Roman region of "Italia" was further enlarged with the addition in 292 AD of the three big islands of the western Mediterranean Sea: Sicily (with the Maltese archipelago), Sardinia and Corsica, coinciding with the whole Italian geographical region.The Latin term Italicus was used to describe "a man of Italy" as opposed to a provincial. For example, Pliny the Elder notably wrote in a letter Italicus es an provincialis? meaning "are you an Italian or a provincial?".Letters 9.23The adjective italianus, from which are derived the Italian (and also French and English) name of the Italians, is medieval and was used alternatively with Italicus during the early modern period.ytaliiens (1265) TLFi {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181029191636weblink |date=29 October 2018 }}After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, which was caused by the invasion of the Ostrogoths, the Kingdom of Italy was created. After the Lombard invasions, "Italia" was retained as the name for their kingdom, and for its successor kingdom within the Holy Roman Empire, which nominally lasted until 1806, although it had de facto disintegrated due to factional politics pitting the empire against the ascendant city republics in the 13th century.{{in lang|it}} Italian "Comuni" {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120318214257weblink |date=2012-03-18 }}

See also

• History of Italy

References

{{Reflist}}

External links

• Origin of the name "Italia"

{{Europe topic|Name of|title=Names of European states and territories}}{{Italy topics}}