Alongside this group, a smaller number of more recent migrants from Greece lives in Italy, forming an expatriate community in the country.

), the search for new commercial outlets and ports, and expulsion from their homeland, Greeks began a large colonization drive, including southern Italy.

[7] In this same time, Greek colonies were established in places as widely separated as the eastern coast of the Black Sea and Massalia (Marseille).

[8] The Romans called the area of Sicily and the foot of the boot of Italy Magna Graecia (Latin, "Greater Greece"), since it was so densely inhabited by Greeks.

The ancient geographers differed on whether the term included Sicily or merely Apulia and Calabria — Strabo being the most prominent advocate of the wider definitions.

During the Early Middle Ages, new waves of Greeks came to Magna Graecia from Greece and Asia Minor, as Southern Italy remained governed by the Eastern Roman Empire.

Griko is the name of a language combining ancient Doric, Byzantine Greek, and Italian elements, spoken by people in the Magna Graecia region.

[12] These emigres were grammarians, humanists, poets, writers, printers, lecturers, musicians, astronomers, architects, academics, artists, scribes, philosophers, scientists, politicians and theologians.

[20] The Griko people are a population group in Italy of ultimately Greek origin which still exists today in the Italian regions of Calabria and Apulia.

Greeks were the dominant population element of some regions in the south of Italy, especially Calabria, the Salento, parts of Lucania and Sicily until the 12th century.

65–86 Heleni Porphyriou, 'La presenza greca in Italia tra cinque e seicento: Roma e Venezia', La città italiana e I luoghi degli stranieri XIV-XVIII secolo, ed.