The Italians: the first European melting pot



You can find Celtic peoples in Northern Italy (Gaul, 2005), not just in France, but intermingling in Northern Italy also happened through Germanic peoples (Lombards, 2005; Ostrogoth, 2005), Hungarian peoples (Huns, 2005), and there may have been a touch of Slavic blood (Venedes, 2005) in there as well, especially in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia and Veneto regions.

We call them “Italians” today, and the pathetic, infinitely stupid movie directors in Hollywood make them all seem like a Sicilian minority of minorities (the mafia), but in truth they’re a pretty mixed bunch, racially-speaking, a melting pot of Gaulish, Germanic, Hun, Slavic, Greek, and even Norman (Normans, 2005) stock down south in Sicily, not to mention the original Roman-Latium stock, which if the Greek legends are right, was Greek to begin with, but perhaps intermingled with the local indigenous people as well.

You also have the mystery represented by the Etruscans (area of modern Tuscany), on whose origins one can only speculate, but they could have originated even in advanced Lydia (modern western Turkey), the place where money was first invented. This may explain in part why it was also the Tuscans to later invent banking and modern accounting practices.

There is also a lot of Croat blood in Central Italy (Molise Croats, 2005), and there is also Albanian stock (Albanian language, 2005) in the regions of Sicily and Calabria. The western part of Sicily is said to be mostly Phoenician (Phoenicia, 2005), while the eastern part and southern Italy is mostly Greek (Magna Graecia, 2005).

Some of the folks where my mother came from were probably from Northern Europe, and probably came from as far as the Baltic States. They ended-up settling the central mountainous area of Italy during the Middle Ages, especially in the regions bordering the Adriatic coastline. My Tallini surname is in fact very rare in Italy, and it probably originated in either Hungary, Estonia, or Finland, according to linguistic telltale signs.


HMRD Cesidio Tallini
 

References