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ETHNOGRAPHY] from 30.79 lire (£1, 4s. 7d.) to 43.70 lire (£1, 14s. 11d.), an increase due in great part to the need for improved buildings, hygienic reforms and education, but also attributable in part to the manner in which the finances of many communes are administered. The total was in 1900, £49,496,193 for the communes and £6,908,022 for the provinces. The former total is more than double and the latter more than treble the sum in 1873, while there is an increase of 62% in the former and 26% in the latter over the totals for 1882.

See Annuario statistico italiano (not, however, issued regularly each year) for general statistics; and other official publications; W. Deecke, Italy; a Popular Account of the Country, its People and its Institutions (translated by H. A. Nesbitt, London, 1904); B. King and T. Okey, Italy to-day (London, 1901); E. Nathan, Vent’ Anni di vita italiana attraverso all’ Annuario (Rome, 1906); G. Strafforello, Geografia dell’ Italia (Turin, 1890–1902).

The difficulty of Italian history lies in the fact that until modern times the Italians have had no political unity, no independence, no organized existence as a nation. Split up into numerous and mutually hostile communities, they never, through the fourteen centuries which have elapsed since the end of the old Western empire, shook off the yoke of foreigners completely; they never until lately learned to merge their local and conflicting interests in the common good of undivided Italy. Their history is therefore not the history of a single people, centralizing and absorbing its constituent elements by a process of continued evolution, but of a group of cognate populations, exemplifying divers types of constitutional developments.

The early history of Italy will be found under and allied headings. The following account is therefore mainly concerned with the periods succeeding 476, when Romulus Augustulus was deposed by Odoacer. Prefixed to this are two sections dealing respectively with (A) the ethnographical and philological divisions of ancient Italy, and (B) the unification of the country under Augustus, the growth of the road system and so forth. The subsequent history is divided into five periods: (C) From 476 to 1796; (D) From 1796 to 1814; (E) From 1815 to 1870; (F) From 1870 to 1902; (G) From 1902 to 1910.

The ethnography of ancient Italy is a very complicated and difficult subject, and notwithstanding the researches of modern scholars is still involved in some obscurity. The great beauty and fertility of the country, as well as the charm of its climate, undoubtedly attracted, even in early ages, successive swarms of invaders from the north, who sometimes drove out the previous occupants of the most favoured districts, at others reduced them to a state of serfdom, or settled down in the midst of them, until the two races gradually coalesced. Ancient writers are agreed as to the composite character of the population of Italy, and the diversity of races that were found within the limits of the peninsula. But unfortunately the traditions they have transmitted to us are often various and conflicting, while the only safe test of the affinities of nations, derived from the comparison of their languages, is to a great extent inapplicable, from the fact that the idioms that prevailed in Italy in and before the 5th century are preserved, if at all, only in a few scanty and fragmentary inscriptions, though from that date onwards we have now a very fair record of many of them (see, e.g., , , , : section Language, and below). These materials, imperfect as they are, when combined with the notices derived from ancient writers and the evidence of archaeological excavations, may be considered as having furnished some results of reasonable certainty.

It must be observed that the name “Italians” was at one time confined to the Oenotrians; indeed, according to Antiochus of Syracuse (apud Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. ii. 1), the name of Italy was first still more limited, being applied only to the southern portion of the Bruttium peninsula (now known as Calabria). But in the time of that historian, as well as of Thucydides, the names of Oenotria and Italia, which appear to have been at that period regarded as synonymous, had been extended to include the shore of the Tarentine Gulf as far as Metapontum and from thence across to the gulfs of Laus and Posidonia on the Tyrrhenian Sea. It thus still comprised only the two provinces subsequently known as Lucania and Bruttium (see references s.v. “Italia” in R. S. Conway’s Italic Dialects, p. 5). The name seems to be a Graecized form of an Italic Vitelia, from the stem vitlo-, “calf” (Lat. vitulus, Gr.  ), and perhaps to have meant “calf-land,” “grazing-land”; but the origin is more certain than the meaning; the calf may be one of the many animals connected with Italian tribes (see, ).

Taking the term Italy to comprise the whole peninsula with the northern region as far as the Alps, we must first distinguish the tribe or tribes which spoke Indo-European languages from those who did not. To the latter category it is now possible to refer with certainty only the Etruscans (for the chronology and limits of their occupation of Italian soil see : section Language). Of all the other tribes that inhabited Italy down to the classical period, of whose speech there is any record (whether explicit or in the form of names and glosses), it is impossible to maintain that any one does not belong to the Indo-European group. Putting aside the Etruscan, and also the different Greek dialects of the Greek colonies, like Cumae, Neapolis, Tarentum, and proceeding from the south to the north, the different languages or dialects, of whose separate existence at some time between, say, 600 and 200, we can be sure, may be enumerated as follows: (1) Sicel, (2) South Oscan and Oscan, (3) Messapian, (4) North Oscan, (5) Volscian, (6) East Italic or “Sabellic,” (7) Latinian, (8) Sabine, (9) Iguvine or “Umbrian,” (10) Gallic, (11) Ligurian and (12) Venetic.

Between several of these dialects it is probable that closer affinities exist. (1) It is probable, though not very clearly demonstrated, that Venetic, East Italic and Messapian are connected together and with the ancient dialects spoken in (q.v.), so that these might be provisionally entitled the Adriatic group, to which the language spoken by the Eteocretes of the city of Praesos in Crete down to the 4th century was perhaps akin. (2) Too little is known of the Sicel language to make clear more than its Indo-European character. But it must be reckoned among the languages of Italy because of the well-supported tradition of the early existence of the Sicels in Latium (see ). Their possible place in the earlier stratum of Indo-European population is discussed under. How far also the language or languages spoken in Bruttium and at certain points of Lucania, such as Anxia, differed from the Oscan of Samnium and Campania there is not enough evidence to show (see ). (3) It is doubtful whether there are any actual inscriptions which can be referred with certainty to the language of the Ligures, but some other evidence seems to link them with the -CO- peoples, whose early distribution is discussed under and. (4) It is difficult to point to any definite evidence by which we may determine the dates of the earliest appearance of Gallic tribes in the north of Italy. No satisfactory collection has been made of the Celtic inscriptions of Cisalpine Gaul, though many are scattered about in different museums. For our present purpose it is important to note that the archaeological stratification in deposits like those of Bologna shows that the Gallic period supervened upon the Etruscan. Until a scientific collection of the local and personal names of this district has been made, and until the archaeological evidence is clearly interpreted, it is impossible to go beyond the region of conjecture as to the tribe or tribes occupying the valley of the Po before the two invasions. It is clear, however, that the Celtic and Etruscan elements together occupied the greater part of the district between the Apennines and the Alps down to its Romanization, which took place gradually in the course of the 2nd century Their linguistic neighbours were Ligurian in the south and south-west, and the Veneti on the east.

We know from the Roman historians that a large force of Gauls came as far south as Rome in the year 390, and that some part of this horde settled in what was henceforward known as the Ager Gallicus, the easternmost strip of coast in what was later known as Umbria, including the towns of Caesēna, Ravenna and Arīminum. A bilingual inscription (Gallic and Latin) of