Tell me about pre-roman Italy. What were the native people like?

Etruscans

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>>2644359
Sardinians were kings, pic related was made in 1300 bc

Sicels in Sicily that got Greek'd to the point where they may as well have been Greek. Because it's hard to tell one swarthy, stocky mediterranean man from another.

Messapians from Illyria on the heel, Samnites in the south center, where Campania is. I presume the Italic groups (Latins, Sabines, Samnites/Oscans, Ligurians, Veneti, Umbri Sicels are the ones I can think of off the top of my head) are all closely related but their individual tribal identity was eventually stamped out by Greco-Roman culture.

Greek colonies, and greekaboos.

Also the Italics and Sardinians were probably a large chunk of the sea people

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>>2645167

>>2645267
makes me want to play minecraft for some reason

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>>2645272
I wonder why

>>2644359
During the Bronze and early Iron age, various cultures that seem to have connections to Central Europe develop in Italy (Remedello, Teramare, Villanova). It's still not certain which is associated with what later linguistic group we find in Italy though.

In general they span what we could call the western European Celto-Italic linguistic continuum with some not clearly falling into either group.

The rest were were the non-Indo-European Etruscans (who seem to have connections to some of the cultures I mentioned earlier), the people collectivelly called the Messapians in the heel who seem to have linguistic associations with the Adriatic Balkan coast (the Illyrians and Liburnian) and might have migrated there during the Bronze Age, the various Greek groups who settled in the south in better documented historical processes and some populations in Sicily (Elymians, Sicanians) who have been associated with various linguistic groups but can't really be classified and so is hard to connect to certain movements.

As for Sardinia, it's a very interesting place from a genetic perspective, basically a relic population of Neolithic Europe. Paleo-Sardinian is usually considered non-Indo-European and often connected to Basque.

Italy also seems to have a linguistic substratum of -nt(h)-/-nd- and -ss- placenames that it shares with the Balkans and Anatolia. Those have been variously claimed to be either Indo-European (usually of the Anatolian variety) or pre-Indo-European and even related to some of the ancient languages spoken in the Caucasus and northeast Turkey.