Curious question.
First of all, during the Roman Empire, who could call himself Roman?
Roman citizenship was quite complicated stuff:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_citizenship
To our porpoise, I think that the most interesting part is the really last paragraph, about the Caracalla's Edict:
Quote:
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The Edict of Caracalla was an edict issued in AD 212 by the Roman Emperor Caracalla, which declared that all free men in the Roman Empire were to be given full Roman citizenship and all free women in the Empire were given the same rights as Roman women.
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Which means that, for a certain period of time, all the people living in these regions:
https://www.google.it/search?q=anno+...-mQtz7AXHFg7M:
could call themselves Romans.
In that period, if you wanted to specifically refer to people from the Italian peninsula you had to use the name of the corresponding territory, which was
Italia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Italy
This was the first time that Italy was united under an only entity, and this concept remained for all the centuries of fragmentation and foreign rules that characterised our history between the fall of the Roman Empire (476 AC) and the unification of modern Italy (1861 AC).
Anyway, we surely give a really large importance to ancient Roman history, culture and so on. Dating back one millennium and an half, we know that our ancestors were really likely to be citizens of the Roman Empire, and we are proud of the heredity that ancient Romans left to us. And this probably apply to other parts of Europe as well.
Now, if you notice, I wrote all the previous sentences saying "The ancient Romans did..." and not "we did". And this is how we usually write this kind of sentences even in Italy. We recognise their importance for our history, we can be even proud to be related with them, but we consider them as different people from us.
All this reasoning is based on a reasoning based on the whole country, but the exact perception can be different according to your region.
For example, people from Rome still call themselves Romans. But saying that they usually just mean that they are people who live in Rome, which is also the original meaning of the word. Anyway, they are probably the most Ancient Rome-proud
of the whole country. They still celebrate the anniversary of the foundation (this year it was the 2770th anniversary), they are really proud of all the monuments left by ancient Romans and so on. Together with the Papal State, Ancient Rome was surely the most important historical period for them.
If you move to Sicily instead, the Roman Empire is not much more than another ruler of the Island (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Sicily )
To the other extreme, I can use my place as an example: we were at the really border line with the Gaul Province, and we already had a well established Celtic organisation before the annexation to the Roman Empire. Then we were ruled by Lombards, Franks and finally by the Savoy family, which I would say was the longest and most important part of my region history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piedmont#History
(I've just noticed how I wrote that sentence: "
we already had a well established Celtic organisation before the annexation to the Roman Empire". I did it without thinking, but I think that this means that personally I feel a stronger connection to the original inhabitants of my region that to Romans).
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