Arbëreshë people
ethnic group in Italy; Albanian ethnolinguistic group in Southern Italy
The Arbëreshë (pronounced [aɾbəˈɾɛʃ]; Albanian: Arbëreshët e Italisë; Italian: Albanesi d'Italia), also known as Albanians of Italy or Italo-Albanians, are an Albanian ethnolinguistic group minority historically settled in Southern and Insular Italy (in the regions of Abruzzo, Apulia, Basilicata, Campania, and Molise, but mostly concentrated in the regions of Calabria and Sicily).
They are the descendants of Albanian refugees settled in the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily who fled from Albania, Epirus, and later some from the numerous Albanian communities of Attica and Morea, between the 14th and the 18th centuries following the death of Gjergj Kastrioti Skanderbeg and the gradual conquest of the Balkans by the Ottoman Turks. Their culture is determined by the main features that are found in language, religious rite, traditional costume, art and food, still zealously preserved, with the awareness of belonging to a specific ethnic group.
Over the centuries, the Arbëreshë have managed to maintain and develop their identities, thanks to their cultural value exercised mainly by the religious communities of the Byzantine Rite.
Nowadays, most of the fifty Arbëreshë communities are adherents to the Italo-Albanian Church, an Eastern Catholic Church. They belong to two eparchies, the Lungro, for the Arbëreshë of Continental Italy, the Piana degli Albanesi, for the Arbëreshë of Sicily, and the Monastery of Grottaferrata of Lazio, whose Basilian monks come largely from the Albanian settlements of Italy. The church is the most important organization for maintaining the characteristic religious, ethnic, linguistic and traditional identity of the Arbëreshë community.
The Arbëreshë speak Arbërisht, an old variant of the Albanian language which derives from the Tosk Albanian spoken in central-southern Albania and Epirus. In Italy the Albanian Arbëresh language is protected by law number 482/99, concerning the protection of the historic linguistic minorities.
The Arbëreshë are scattered also in other parts of Italy.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Arbëreshë people” as ethnic group in Italy; Albanian ethnolinguistic group in Southern Italy. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q56975. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Arbëreshë people” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.