Italy’s early history is molded by the shape of the land and its natural divisions. In the beginning, each valley was a tribal seat. The basin of the Po was the home of Celtic-speaking Gauls. Etruscans, whose early language cannot fit into the Indo-European group, peopled Tuscany. Greeks settled in southern Italy in numbers sufficiently large to bestow the name of Magna Graecia on the districts they occupied. The welding of these territorial elements into the Roman state was attended by the spread of the Latin language within the land. Rome’s Latin eventually reached far beyond peninsular frontiers. Modern Italian nationality did not, however, acquire concrete expression before the nineteenth century. For fully two hundred years prior to that time the Hapsburgs had steadily encroached on Italian territory. It remained for the democratic ideals of the French Revolution to become the moving force in the shaping of Italian nationality. Unity of language favored its rapid development. Beginning with Piedmont in the first half of the nineteenth century Italy grew to its present extent by the addition of territory to the south. Lombardy was added in 1859, Tuscany and the kingdom of Two Sicilies in 1860, Venetia in 1866 and the Papal States in 1870. Prior to these years Italian national aspirations had found solace in a Venetian saying, expressive of Austrian covetings, “Carta tua, montagna mia,” which may be rendered as “Yours is the map, but mine the land.” Since then, a people speaking the same language has become united into a single nation on the Italian peninsula. The land frontier of Italy, however, has remained to this day a zone of linguistic mingling. Districts of non-Italian languages are occupied by populations made up of descendants of immigrants from beyond the Alps or from beyond the seas. Six foreign linguistic groups can be distinguished, to wit: (1) Franco-Provençal, (2) German, (3) Slovene, (4) Albanian, (5) Greek, (6) Catalan.[48] The political significance to be attached to these settlements is slight, as they contain a negligible proportion of the kingdom’s population. The foreign languages are used only in the home. Beyond the threshold Italian prevails everywhere.