Ligurian

The Ligurians are the people of the north-western Italian coast and its Apennine hinterland, the land of the ancient Ligures, herders and pirates who resisted Rome until the deportation of the Apuani in 180 BC.

By 1337 the Genoese city, la Superba, ruled a maritime republic whose galleys had crushed Pisa at Meloria in 1284. Two years after 1337 the republic gained its first elected doge, though real power rested with merchant oligarchs, who fought Venice for Mediterranean trade and, after losing most colonies, remade Genoa into a banking centre financing the Spanish empire.

The Ligurians' language is Ligurian, a Gallo-Italic tongue whose Genoese dialect served as the republic's written koiné. Napoleon ended the republic in 1797 with the Ligurian Republic, annexed it to France in 1805, and in 1815 the Congress of Vienna gave Genoa to the Kingdom of Sardinia.