NAME, MEANING, ORIGINS

Within these two extremes lies the story of a region, in present day Southern Italy and Sicily, that has played a large part in the cultural history of Western Europe. The origin of the name and the time of its emergence are a matter of discussion among historians.

The history of this migration is the subject of a debate that has been particularly intense over the last twenty years. It is difficult to believe that the movement originated at the time of the Trojan War – an era during which Greeks frequented Southern Italy and Sicily only for commercial exchanges. The stable settlements are instead the product of a vast relocation movement of Greeks who founded cities starting from 750 BC, a movement that the Greeks call , a word meaning the ‘removal from home’ to found , that is, settlements detached from the city of origin, the (‘mother-city’). In this regard, none of the founded in) it controlled.