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. 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) , 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. 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). 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.
Greek origin , corresponding to the current
Calabria 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. 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. 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. 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. ==Evolution of the territory called "Italy"==