Geography

​After the foothills of the Alps is the beginning of what is now Italy. For the ancients called Oenotria ‘Italy’, which extended from the Sicilian Strait to the Gulf of Tarentum and that of Poseidonia, but the name, having prevailed, advanced even as far as the foothills of the Alps. It also took in those parts of Liguria as far as the river Varus and the sea in that region from the Tyrrhenian boundaries, and of Istria as far as Pola. One might conjecture that the first to be called Italians, having prospered, shared the name with their neighbors, and that it thus received expansion until the Roman supremacy. At length, after the Romans had shared equal citizenship with the Italiotes, they resolved to grant the same honor to the Galatae and Heneti within the Alps, and to call them all both Italiotes and Romans, and to send out many colonies, some earlier and others later, than which it is not easy to name any better.

​Now, it is not easy to encompass the whole of present-day Italy in a single geometrical figure, although they say that it is a triangular peninsula projecting towards the south and the winter sunrise, peaking at the Sicilian Strait, and having the Alps as its base; and one might also concede one of the sides, the one ending at the Strait, washed by the Tyrrhenian Sea. But strictly speaking, a triangle is called a rectilinear figure; whereas here both the base and the side are curved, so that, if I must say we should concede, we must assume both the base and the side to belong to a figure bounded by curves, and we must also concede the slant of this side towards the east; but in other respects they have not spoken adequately, since they assume one side to be from the innermost recess of the Adriatic as far as the Strait. For we call ‘side’ a line without an angle, and it is ‘without an angle’ when its parts either do not incline towards each other or do not do so to any great extent. But the line from Ariminum to the Iapygian promontory and the one from the Strait to the same promontory incline towards each other to a very great degree. And I think it is the same with the line from the innermost recess of the Adriatic and the one from Iapygia; for meeting around the places of Ariminum and Ravenna, they form an angle, or if not an angle, at least a remarkable curve. So that, if indeed, the coastwise voyage from the innermost recess to Iapygia would be one side, and not a straight line; and the remaining part from there to the Strait would trace another side, nor would this one be straight. Thus, one might call the shape quadrilateral rather than trilateral, and by no means triangular, unless by an abuse of terms. But it is better to admit that for non-geometrical figures, a description by a rough outline is acceptable.