Maltese people Maltese people The Maltese (, ) are an ethnic group indigenous to Malta, and identified with the Maltese language. Malta is an island in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. Included within the ethnic group defined by the Maltese people are the "Gozitans" (, ) who inhabit Malta's sister island, Gozo. The current Maltese people, characterised by the use of the Maltese language and by Roman Catholicism, are the descendants – through much mixing and hybridisation – of colonists from Sicily and Calabria who repopulated the Maltese islands in the beginning of the second millennium after a two-century lapse of
Name of Italy "Italia" to a larger region, but it was during the reign of Augustus, at the end of the 1st century BC, that the term was expanded to cover the entire peninsula until the Alps, now entirely under Roman rule. Under Emperor Diocletian the Roman region called "Italia" was further enlarged with the addition of the three big islands of the western Mediterranean Sea: Sicily (with the Maltese archipelago), Sardinia and Corsica. Dante in the 14th century wrote that the borders of what is geographically and historically called "Italia" are clearly defined in the north by the Alps (from the Vare