Origin of the Name "Italy" One April afternoon I was strolling across Michelangelo’s superb pavement on the summit of the Capitoline Hill in Rome. The Campidoglio is surely the most beautiful public square in the world. A happy throng of Italian school kids followed their teacher, not too dutifully, across the marbled symmetry of the square. One of the kids suddenly yanked his Walkman earphones off and shouted, “Forza Italia! Viva Italia!” A soccer fan, he’d been listening to the World Cup on the radio. Italy’s team had just scored. I wondered where the word Italy came from. Word nerd? Yep.
All place names have a history. They don’t spring full-formed from the forehead of Jupiter. So, pedantic tourist that I am, I leafed through my well-thumbed copy of the Blue Guide to Rome. And I found not one word about the origin of the name of the country I was in: Italy. For me, this annoying lacuna tainted one of the most complete guide books available. Nor was it in any of the paperback guides I had in my gym bag back in my cheap pensione in Testaccio, a shabby part of central Rome. Later that week in a Roman library, through the kind help of an American friend, I spend a pleasant morning discovering the origin of the place name, Italia. Italy : Origin of the Name The English word Italy derives from the Latin then Italian term for the country, Italia. But originally it was spelled Vitalia, literally ‘calf-land,’ from the Latin vitulus ‘calf.’ A vitulus was a one-year-old calf. This yearling’s name came from the same Latin root that gave the Romans their word for old age, vetus. And that root shows up in the origin of our English word veteran. A Roman veteranus was a soldier who had seen many campaigns, who had literally grown old in the service of Rome’s army. Somewhat later, a veterinary or veterinarian was a slave charged with caring for cows, older cows, from one of the Latin words for milk cows, veterinae ‘cows old enough to give milk’ from vetus ‘age.’
Hundreds of years before Caesar strode the Forum, the Greeks had borrowed this root for calf, vitulus, and made a Greek word for bull. Tauros was the usual word; but the Greeks admired heaps of synonyms, and so they used this word to mean bull too. The Greeks had an old letter in their alphabet called digamma to represent a v sound. But digamma fell out of use before Classical Attic Greek, and so a word that probably began in early Greek as *vitalos ‘bull’ ends up by the time of Plato as italos. An obscure Greek historian named Timaios, writing in the 3rd century B.C. offers an etymology of Italy, as derived from the Latin word vitulus. Now, often, we must be wary of ancient theories of word origin. They were frequently polluted by folk etymologies and fanciful notions conceived by writers. But this is one very anciently posited etymology that modern scholars think is correct. For example, educated ancient Romans knew about the Italia-Vitalia connection. Vergil, the great epic poet of Augustan Rome knew it. But when he came to compose his mighty epic of the founding of Rome, The Aeneid, Vergil decided it would be more fitting for an epic designed to glorify Rome, if Italy had taken its name from some long-ago hero. Vergil found in a book about Roman cattle breeding by an earlier writer named Varro, the story of Italus. If an ancient searcher needed a quick origin of a place name and had no clue, he often made up the name of some dubious ancient king. Varro made up Italus, who was a hero to his people, and so they named the kingdom after him. Italus, meet Italia! There is no historically verifiable record whatsoever of a king named Italus. But there he is, parading through Vergil’s Aeneid as the royal bigwig who gave his name to his country. Real proof, or at least some corroborating evidence that Italy means ‘calf-land,’ occurs a little south of Rome. Now, we tend to think of Latin as the only language of ancient Italy. But it was not. Before the Romans, and even during the early years of Rome’s rise, Latin-speaking peoples of Latium shared Italy with many other languages and races. The language Latin took its name from the territory inhabited by its speakers, Latium. In turn, Latium was the ‘flat land’ just to the west of present-day Rome, the word Latium derived from the adjective latus which means ‘broad, wide, or flat.’ When the Romans began to expand southward beyond the seven hills of Rome they encountered a tribe called the Osci living around the Bay of Naples and on the fertile grasslands of Campania, where cattle and calves throve. This tribe spoke an Italic language we call Oscan and they named their country Viteliu, which also means ‘calf-land.’ Another form of vitulus, a word that meant little calf, came to be used by ordinary Romans, especially soldiers on their marches through Gaul and Hispania (Spain). This word was vitellus (a dialect version of vitulus with a few vowel shifts, common in many dialects), and it became in modern French veau. An older form in French was veel, origin of our English word for calf meat, veal. Is that veally, veally interesting? I hope so.
In modern Italian there is a related word, and it was used as the title of one of Federico Fellini’s early films, I Vitelloni. It was a movie about idle older teenagers and twenty-somethings hanging around the streets as unsavoury layabouts. A vitellone is a big calf, a teenager who is full grown but still acts like a little child, a twenty-seven year-old guy who still lives at home, likes Momma to feed him, and has no wish to step forth into the cruel world outside the house of his birth. Hey, don't we have that same syndrome clogging family homes in North America even today?
© 2006 William Gordon Casselman
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