Neapolitan

The Neapolitans are the people of the southern Italian mainland, from Naples across Campania, Calabria and Apulia. Their speech, Neapolitan, is an Italo-Dalmatian Romance language grown from Vulgar Latin with an Oscan substrate, never standardized but sustained by theatrical and musical tradition.

The Normans first united the south, when Roger II annexed the Duchy of Naples in 1137 into his Kingdom of Sicily; after the 1282 Sicilian Vespers the island passed to Aragon and the mainland remained with Charles of Anjou, whose Angevin dynasty ruled Naples in 1337. Alfonso V of Aragon reunited the kingdom to his dominions in 1442, the French seized it briefly in 1494, and Spain held it fully by 1504; two centuries of viceroyalty followed, during which the 1647 tax revolt briefly proclaimed a Neapolitan Republic.

The 1714 Treaty of Rastatt gave Naples to the Austrian Habsburgs, until a Bourbon prince conquered it in 1734 and ruled as Charles; after the Napoleonic interlude it joined Sicily in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1816.