Italians remember Greece

[Brian G Turner]

Just an article I found on the BBC site, that I thought would be worth pasting up:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4116006.stm

A world-class archaeological exhibition opened this week in Calabria, in the toe of Italy.

Its subject is Magna Graecia, or Greater Greece - the name given to parts of southern Italy colonised by the ancient Greeks 2,500 years ago.

The migrations of modern Europe are nothing new.

But for the ancient Greeks, southern Italy was their America.

Long before the Roman empire flourished, they sailed west in search of new lands.

They settled around the hospitable coastline of Calabria and Sicily, dominating local tribes, building huge temples to their gods and founding Greek-speaking colonies.

However, their cities and culture were later destroyed by the Romans. Only very recently have archaeologists been able to reconstruct their history.