Of all three Italian world boxing champs to retire undefeated, which is greatest?

By Greek I mean Greek culture as there is evidence Hellenization occurred inside Greece itself let alone in Magna Grecia. The idea is that at that era, lots of diverse people were already in Italy. The Greeks and Latins never fully got into a real war, as the Romans and Punics did, so the Greek culture represented by a Neolithic movement out of Greece, followed by the historic era presence, when the Vandals took Sicily the Byzantine Greeks recaptured it, when the Moors tried to cross into Calibria they failed and had to fight the Greeks for two centuries. The history recorded Greek Peasntry resisting invasions especially after the Vandals were defeated [meaning it was natives not some occupiers]

The church did a big deservice to Italian history as they associated a stigma to anything associated with Greek Italy, because it was the Vatican vs Byzantum and they even sent a Crusade their way, so there is basis and motive for this, but not today.

 

Who do you consider as an Italian?

At that era:

• Taranto was Greek
• Genoa was Greek
• NeoPolis [Naples] was Greek
• Bari was Greek
• All of Coastal Sicily Except Palermo was a Greek colony

Thats just the Greeks, along them other Non-Latin people, in the north mostly related to the Gauls, some are other Indo-Europeans and Possible Plaeolithic people or Indo-Europeans with a strong a Paleolithic substratum.

 

There was no "one group", plenty of diverse people, layers of Neolithic settlers on top of a Paleolithic substratum, then the historic era. Italy has been settled since the Paleolithic, those people are what make the Italian gene pool itself, in addition to the build up of newcomers.

Normans were a very small population of culturally Latinized Northmen, who were able to change the language of Sicily and England at once, without leaving any sizeable DNA legacy. In both Occasions they entered as a small Elite Knight unit, later joined by irregulars. So a small group can change a big population, with no obvious traces or evidence, even language by Normans, they just came changed the status quo and left, similar events occured in history, Huns did it in Central Europe, Mongols did it in Central Asia, the invasions allowed the rise of new groups not related to the invaders or the original dominant group.

 

I like both Calzaghe and Marciano, difficult to choose.

As someone who is closer to Calzaghe ethnically (with my Anglo-Irish father and Italian mother, similar to Joe's Anglo-Welsh/Italian background) it might be expected that I'd naturally lean toward Joe.

But since I've always been more entertained by watching punchers, I chose Rocky Marciano.

 

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There is a slight difference between Italian and Italic, especially linguistically.

The tongue of Romanians/Vlachs/Spaniards is Italic, because it comes from vulgar Latin (which is a Romance language, which is in turn a part of Italic languages group). However, it is not Italian, which is much like Romanian/French/Spanish etc a Romance language, comes from Latin, which comes from Italic. The classification roughly goes like this: Italic > Latin/vulgar Latin > Romances languages (Italian/Spanish/French/Romanian/etc).

But what we know as Italian is the standardized version (mostly based on the dialect spoken in Florence) of many different dialects of roughly the same language. Some of them, such as Sardinian, Friulian, modern Ligurian etc, are not exactly sub-groups that fall under standard Italian/Florentian dialect, but rather related dialects. On the other hand, central Italian, Tuscan, Corsican (France), Sassarese etc directly fall under the standard dialect, while Sicilian and Neapolitan are somewhat of an in-between zone. They are not dialects of Tuscan, but a lot more closely related than the first group. But what is certain about each mentioned group or sub-group regardless or being closely or more loosely related, is that they are all Italic, and in that essence Italian.

Now ethnically, all those groups share Italian ethnicity (and that includes some ethnic sub-groups outside of Italy, such as Corsicans).

As for the ancient peoples of Italy, it really depends on whether they are Italic nor not. Latins, Oscans, Umbri (together with their sub-groups such as Sabines), Falisci, Veneti, Liguri (they were to some extent a Celtic-Italic mix), Siculi and a few other minor tribes were Italic.
Dauni, Peuceti and Messapi were in the south-east. They were Iapygians (Greek related, but not Greeks - possibly some group that Greeks shared common ancestry with, before they evolved into Dorians/Ionians/Aeolians/Achaeans etc). So, not Italic.
Then there were Celts to the north, Greeks to the south, and Etruscans just north of Latium (who spoke a totally distinct language, not even a part of Indo-European), and a couple of minor tribes with disputed origin.

Either way, all ancient peoples residing in Italy, regardless of being Italic or not, were eventually overrun and/or assimilated by the Romans and essentially became not only Latins, but Romans themselves (except for Greeks who did get the citizenship, and also preserved their culture, language and identity, because for Romans it was a matter of prestige to be associated with Greek culture or to speak Greek). Even to this day there are small Greco communities in the south, speaking a dialect of Greek (later Byzantine reconquest helped them a lot, though).