Name of Italy
One theory is 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.
[4] The region, which is now called Italy, formerly held the Oenotrians; some time their king was Italus, and then they changed their name to Italics; succeeding Morgete, they were called Morgetes; later came a Siculus, who divided the peoples, who were then Morgeti and Sicels; and Italics were those who were OenotriansThere 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.
[10] 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.
[11] 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.
[13] 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).
[13] 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.
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").
Catch from the Oenotrians, formerly Oenotria: now, as it is famous, having taken the name of Italus, Italy is calledPoulsen'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.
[1] 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.
[24] 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".
Coins bearing the name Víteliú in Oscan (𐌅𐌝𐌕𐌄𐌋𐌉𐌞) were minted by an alliance of Italic peoples (Sabines, Samnites, Umbrians and others) competing with Rome in the 1st century BC.
[3] 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 sphere of influence in the 220s BC and became considered geographically and de facto part of Italy.
