ABSTRACT
The description of Italy is, in many respects, unique in Strabo's Geography. Strabo explicitly quotes also the geographer Artemidorus of Ephesus, as well as an author chronologically closer to him and of Roman origin, known as the anonymous "Chorographer". The predominance of Greek sources, on the one hand, and the larger attention devoted to towns and regions of Greek tradition on the other, can be accounted for by Strabo's education and ideological orientation as a Greek man of letters. Italy itself had only apparently been unified, as Strabo seems to acknowledge, given the narrative organization of his ethno-geographical treatise according to macro-areas identified also by means of cultural, ethnic and historical criteria, besides geographical ones. Strabo's descriptions of the Italian macro-areas are characterized, with slight variations, by the same organizational pattern, with equal narrative attention to both the spatial dimension of lands and to the historical development of peoples.
