In the course of the first millennium BC Greek sailors, traders and colonists visited and settled in the Italian peninsula in increasing numbers. So much so, that the southern half of Italy became known as 'Big Greece', both by Romans (Magna Graecia) and Greeks (Megale Hellas). Greeks brought with them urban living, religion and wine drinking, together with the alphabet and its associated uses. Some cities of Italy, including Naples, Rhegium and Tarentum, remained Greek speaking under Roman rule. Substantial archaeological and textual discoveries in the last three decades have opened up our knowledge of the Greeks in Italy and the native societies they encountered, but there was no complete study of the impact made by Greek on indigenous languages. This project aimed to fill this gap, and considered the nature and outcomes of contact between Greeks and speakers of the various native languages of ancient Italy, investigating the changes on the languages themselves, and relating linguistic interactions to social and political factors. This project brought a new approach to the study of the impact of Greeks in Italy by combining two major recent research developments in research, linking studies of micro-regions in the Mediterranean, which emphasize networks and connectivity (e.g. Horden & Purcell The Corrupting Sea 2000), within the context of new work on ancient language contact (e.g. Adams Bilingualism and the Latin Language 2003).