Villanovans (c.900-c.730 BC)
The Villanovans take their name from a site near the city of Bologna where the objects and practices of their culture were first recognized. Finds of the Villanovan culture have come from a large area extending from the Po Valley into Tuscany and parts of Campania. The archaeological record indicates that the large Villanovan settlements developed directly into great Etruscan towns and cities with no decisive break to indicate the arrival of a new population.
The time of the Iron Age presence around Rome has been labelled the Latial culture (c.900-c.580 BC). Settlements were small, with similar structures and material culture. There are indications that suggest that by c.770 BC village settlements on the Palatine/Capitoline hills had fused with those on the Quirinal to form a proto-urban settlement. By c.650 BC, during the Orientalizing Period (c.730-c.580 BC) – a time when a mixture of techniques and objects came from Greece and the east – some wattle-and-daub huts were levelled to create a shared centre with a pavement of tamped (compressed) earth by the future Forum. Around 625 BC on the Velian Ridge the first permanent houses, and shortly before 600 BC on the Palatine an entire row of atrium (open central court) houses, were built of stone and had tiled roofs.
Greeks, Phoenicians and Carthaginians
Around 775 BC Euboean Greeks founded the first and most northerly Greek settlement in Italy, the trading post of Pithecusae on the island of Ischia in the Gulf of Naples off the west coast of Italy. In c.750 BC the Chalcidian element moved to the mainland opposite and founded Cumae/Cyme. Subsequently, the Greeks planted so many colonies along the coasts of Southern Italy and in eastern Sicily that the Romans termed the entire area Magna Graecia (‘Great Greece’).
Meanwhile the Phoenicians and their successors, the Carthaginians, founded colonies in western Sicily and on Sardinia. In the north, Celtic-speaking peoples whom the Romans called Gauls pushed across the coast around the sixth and fifth centuries BC and settled in the Po Valley.
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