One result of the multicultural nature of Italy was that processes of cultural exchange and acculturation between regions were frequent throughout the period in question. Cultural interactions between Etruscans and various areas outside in which they settled are an important element in the cultures of Campania, Latium, and northern Italy (Camporeale 2001), and the impact of Oscan language and culture on large areas of southern and central Italy is discussed above. In addition, large areas of Italy were also exposed to Greek culture, particularly in the archaic period and the second century bc. Finally, from the fourth century (and even earlier in some regions) the Roman conquest brought all of Italy into close contact with Roman culture.
However, the processes of cultural change and exchange were highly complex, affecting different sections of society and different areas of Italy in different ways. Adoption of elements of Greek culture, such as the alphabet, which was used to write indigenous languages throughout southern Italy and Sicily, Greek-style coinage, or Greek imported objects, did not necessarily indicate adoption of Greek values, and in many cases these cultural borrowings were used to express local identities. Equally, the increasing adoption of Roman culture was not a one-way process of Romaniza-tion or the top-down imposition of a cultural package of Roman features. It was a process of cultural dialogue between Roman and other Italian cultures. Features such as the use of Latin, Roman dress, nomenclature and other symbols of Roman citizenship, Roman architecture, urban layout, burial customs, etc. were adopted by local communities but frequently adapted by them (Terrenato 1997). For instance, nonRoman languages - an important marker of cultural identity - disappear in favor of
Latin by the late first century bc, but local variations in the type and format of inscriptions remain. The “Romanizing” adoption of Latin did not mean the loss of local tradition and identity, but the development of different ways of expressing this (Haussler 2002). The gradual emergence of a unified culture in Italy by the first century ad was not a process of imposition of a monolithic Roman culture, but a more interactive process of cultural convergence in which local traditions remained important, although often expressed within a Roman idiom or by Roman symbols, and in which Roman culture itself underwent many changes.
World History
