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hpirwany | 14:24 Wed 27th Mar 2013 | History
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What is the origin of the name of country of ITALY?
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^ That's just what the wife said to me last night.
20:14 Mon 08th Apr 2013
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The assumptions on the etymology of the name "Italia" are very numerous and the corpus of the solutions proposed by historians and linguists is very wide.[18] According to one of the more common explanations, the term Italia, from Latin: Italia,[19] was borrowed through Greek from the Oscan Víteliú, meaning "land of young cattle" (cf. Lat vitulus "calf", Umb vitlo "calf").[20] The bull was a symbol of the southern Italian tribes and was often depicted goring the Roman wolf as a defiant symbol of free Italy during the Social War. Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus states this account together with the legend that Italy was named after Italus,[21] mentioned also by Aristotle[22] and Thucydides.[23]

The name Italia originally applied only to a part of what is now Southern Italy – according to Antiochus of Syracuse, the southern portion of the Bruttium peninsula (modern Calabria: province of Reggio, and part of the provinces of Catanzaro and Vibo Valentia). But by his time Oenotria and Italy had become synonymous, and the name also applied to most of Lucania as well. The Greeks gradually came to apply the name "Italia" to a larger region, but it was during the reign of Emperor Augustus (end of the first century BC) that the term was expanded to cover the entire peninsula until the Alps.[24]
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Thank you for being so quick and detailed
^ That's just what the wife said to me last night.
-- answer removed --
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Thank you all for your time and trouble.

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