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. This is attested by the fact that the ancient Greek peoples who colonized present-day Calabria, 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 (young bulls)". In any case, it is known that in archaic times the name indicated the part located in the extreme south of the Italian Peninsula.

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.

Hypothesis on etymology

The myth of Italus

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 Oenotrians

— Antiochus of Syracuse, in Dionysius of Halicarnassus 1, 12 vg

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. 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. 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, 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).

Italy as the land of calves (young bulls)

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, pronounced ; vitlu in Osco-Umbrian) in the region. 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.

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.

In ancient times the lands of present-day Calabria were known as Italy. 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 vitellus, 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"). 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.

Catch from the Oenotrians, formerly Oenotria: now, as it is famous, having taken the name of Italus, Italy is called

— Virgil, Aeneid III, 165

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.

Greek origin

In 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:

Aιθαλια (Italy) volcanic, or flaming and sooty, for the same reason that the islands of Elba (Ilva), Lemnos and Chios, full of forges, said Aιθαλια

— Gabriele Rosa

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".

For Felice Vinci, this solution would solve the problem of the long i length of the word Italia, that conflicts with the short i length of the word vitulus, word from that the toponym should derive according to the most credited theory. On the contrary, following the theory of the Greek origin, the long i quantity is not an exception, because it should derive from the Greek diphthong Aι.

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; 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 Italia may derive from Oscan víteliú, meaning "[land] of young cattle" (cf. Latin vitulus "calf", Umbrian vitlu), via ancient Greek transmission (evidenced in the loss of initial digamma). 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. 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 VITELIU (Víteliú = Italy) in the Oscan alphabet. This is the first epigraphic testimony of the use of the name Italia.

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".

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. Though this theory did not gain wide traction, it was also adopted by Zionist leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky.

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.