The earliest mention of Italia appears in Herodotus and other Greek chroniclers in the Fifth Century BCE. With the exception of the Romans and the Etruscans, the chroniclers referred to the inhabitants of Italy as Italoi, while the citizens of the Greek colonies in Magna Grecia were Italiotai.
The term Italìa was initially used to indicate only the area formerly known as Bruttium, just the extremity of what we know today as Calabria, where the coastal areas had been colonized by the Greeks. The name derived from the legendary king Italus, who ruled the region between the Strait of Messina, the Gulf of Squillace and the river Lao. With the expansion of Rome and the military and political unification of all the Italian peoples, the geographical notion of Italy was extended to all the lands that lay between the Alps, the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Adriatic. Once the province of Cisalpine Gaul was incorporated by Octavian in 42 BCE, the geographical and administrative unification of Italy was established in full.
Other ancient historians, including the Roman Varro, elaborated different theories as to the origins of the term Italoi (and therefore of Italy), arguing that it derived from the Latin vitulus (calf) or from the Greek italòs (bull) and its Etruscan equivalent italòn. The coins minted by the Italics who rebelled against Rome in the Social War (91-88 BCE) in fact show, above the Oscan word Vìtelliù, a bull goring the Roman she-wolf. Other series of coins minted in the capital of the insurgents Corfinium – renamed Italica – show a female figure in profile crowned with a laurel as the personification of Italia, as the indicated in the legend, as the first epigraphic attestation of the term