The question for today is whether Italians are really black people pretending to be white or white people pretending to be black. The same might be said of all brown people. Italians and Spaniards all look almost the same to us white people and they all speak a Latin-based language with some variations. So we don't really notice the Italians in the crowd but they know who they are. Take for example these Alfaros. Are they Spanish or Italian?
Spanish: Habitational name from a place in Logroño province named Alfaro, apparently from Arabic al ‘the’ + Old Spanish faro ‘beacon’, ‘lighthouse.
Italian: First found in Calabria, a territorial district of Italy. Ancient Calabria was in Lecce. Modern Calabria is in the southern extremity of Italy coasting the straits of Messina. Reggio and Messina are the cities of note. This beautiful region produces wine, olive oil and fruit. Reggio was heavily bombed during WWII because of its strategical link with Sicily. In those ancient times only persons of rank, the pedestal, clergy, city officials, army officers, artists, landowners were entered into the records. To be recorded at this time, at the beginning of recorded history, was of itself a great distinction and indicative of noble ancestry.
So from this information we can imagine that perhaps somehow, someway, our high school classmates Carmen Alfaro and Joanne Calabrese might be distant cousins of some sort given their ancient roots in Italy's Calabria district, sort of, maybe. Also, we see that these Italians all think that they are descended from ancient nobility, making their blood somehow of higher caliber than us plain folks, which explains why these people imagine themselves the stars of the show in Boccaccio's "Decameron," isolated as they are in the villas of Florence.
