Who Lived in Italy Before the Romans?
Long before the founding of the city of Rome, the Italian Peninsula was inhabited by numerous peoples. Initially, during the Paleolithic era, the peninsula was settled by Neanderthals around 50,000 years ago. At that time, the peninsula’s geography was quite different from today. During the Ice Age, sea levels in the oceans and the Mediterranean Sea were more than a hundred meters lower than they are now. Therefore, the islands of Sicily and Elba were connected to the mainland by land bridges. The shelf near Mount Gargano was then a fertile valley.
Then, with the warming period, the sea waves engulfed the coastal lowlands. Around 34,000 years ago, Cro-Magnons, i.e., modern humans, appeared here, quickly displacing the Neanderthals. Several primitive cultures successively replaced each other. By the end of the second millennium BC, the peninsula was home to many relatively civilized peoples from the ancient era. The first to be mentioned are the Italic tribes, who later gave their name to the entire Italian peninsula. At that time, the Italic people, also known as the Italici, occupied a small region in Bruttium in southern Italy, at the very “toe” of the Italian “boot.” It was Bruttium that first began to be called “Italy” in the 500s BC.
