The Celtic Cisalpine Gaulish inscriptions are frequently combined with the Lepontic inscriptions under the term Celtic language remains in northern Italy.
While it is possible that the Lepontii were autochthonous to Northern Italy since the end of the 2nd millennium BC, it is known from ancient sources that the Gauls invaded the regions north of the river Po in several waves since the 5th century BC.
They apparently took over the art of writing from the Lepontii, including some of the orthographic peculiarities.
The inscriptions stem largely from the area south of the Lepontians.
[1][2] There is an ongoing debate whether Cisalpine Gaulish is a dialect of Gaulish (e.g. Schumacher 2004),[3] or a historical or dialectical continuation of Lepontic (e.g. Eska 2010).