Central Italy: History of ancient and current migrations

The great cultural variability in Italy is the result of population movements and invasions from all Mediterranean Sea, which took place in both historical and prehistoric times. Because of many interesting places such as the city of Rome, the Central Italy was endured by arrival of small human groups, which would carry their cultural and linguistic and also genetic contributions. A high number of the prehistoric sites and the substantial cultural diversity of those people living in all Central Italy show animated history already before Roman period. However, in the last decades, there has been a gradual interest to a new and important tool for studying the human migrations: genetics. Along with cultural anthropology and archeology, this instrument could be useful to shed light on forgotten historical events, and to unravel the genetic structure of ethnolinguistic minorities and small mountain communities. A very interesting case study is the biodemographic reconstruction of the mountain communities located between Latium and Abruzzi through the genetics. This work highlighted a genetic similarity between the Central Italian samples and Near Eastern populations mainly in the male genetic pool. In conclusion, in this Chapter we provide to make state-of-art on previous work that reconstruction of the human demic during the centuries through both archeology and genetics.