 The Romans called the area of Sicily and the foot of Italy Magna Graecia (Latin, "Great Greece"), since it was densely inhabited by the Greeks.The ancient geographers differed on whether the term included Sicily or merely Apulia, Campania and Calabria—Strabo being the most prominent advocate of the wider definitions.With this colonization, Greek culture was exported to Italy, in its dialects of the Ancient Greek language, its religious rites and its traditions of the independent "polis".