Regional Soccer Player Composites

December 3, 2011

I've been trying out this new morphing software that detects faces automatically and puts the control points in place for you. It has a few kinks but it saves a lot of time, so I made some quick regional versions of the earlier soccer player composites. They still look very similar, but breaking the samples down like this reveals minor differences not only between the North, Center and South but also within each of those areas. Many of the new samples are quite small though, and remember that some surnames may hail from neighboring regions, so these are not perfect representations.


Trentino/Friuli
(N = 10)
Veneto
(N = 49)
Lombardy
(N = 95)


Piedmont
(N = 20)
Liguria
(N = 9)
Emilia-Romagna
(N = 43)


Tuscany
(N = 44)
Marche/Umbria
(N = 21)
Lazio
(N = 44)


Abruzzo
(N = 7)
Campania
(N = 58)
Puglia
(N = 35)


Calabria
(N = 19)
Sicily
(N = 25)
Sardinia
(N = 11)


Software: Abrosoft FaceMixer

56 comments

hbd chick said...

sardinians are just good looking people, aren't they? (^_^)

any chance of doing composites of italian women? beauty contestants perhaps?

Mark said...

Liguria and Abruzzo get my vote for best-looking.

Crimson Guard said...

The one from Abruzzo looks Francesco Totti for some reason. The Sardinian one based on the players you used for your previous composite have more round faces/heads which is suggest an broaded-headed Alpine-which supposedly is rare in Sardinia unless you include those Coarse-Mediterranean/Berid which is the Mixed-Western(Alpine-Mediterranean) type of Deniker.

Anonymous said...

OMG that's amazing!!!! that's my Sardinian friend!!! ahahahah :D

Italianthro said...

Sardinia, Abruzzo and Liguria all have really small samples, so I wouldn't draw too many hard conclusions.

@hbd chick: I did a couple of Miss Italia contestant composites here. I may do more in the future since this software makes pretty fast work of it.

King_Cookie said...

surnames from Piedmont?

hbd chick said...

"I did a couple of Miss Italia contestant composites here. I may do more in the future since this software makes pretty fast work of it."

cool! very interesting. would definitely be neat to see more.

King_Cookie said...

yo dawg, do you have the list of all players so we can check out the names? I'm always suspicious about these things.

Anonymous said...

King_Cookie, look at this:

http://www.cognomix.it/cognomi-piemontesi.php

Anonymous said...

Why is there a Canadian comedian Peter Russel saying that "brown people" should go to Italy because Italian would think they are Italian? What is his problem?

Italianthro said...

>>> "yo dawg, do you have the list of all players so we can check out the names? I'm always suspicious about these things."

Yeah dawg, and it's already been provided. I'll leave it up to your superior Padanian intelligence to figure out where.

King_Cookie said...

there's a slovenian last name but I understand that you kept it because Slovenians aren't genetically or physically different from their neighbours of FVG.

Anonymous said...

That Canadian comedian was right about brown people in Italy.
A few years back I saw some Dutch tourists talking Italian to Bangladeshi or Sri Lankan stall holders near Rome's Victoe Emmanuel Monument.

Italianthro said...

>>> "there's a slovenian last name but I understand that you kept it because Slovenians aren't genetically or physically different from their neighbours of FVG."

If you want the issue addressed, provide the name you're referring to instead of being a smart-ass.

>>> "I saw some Dutch tourists talking Italian to Bangladeshi or Sri Lankan stall holders near Rome's Victoe Emmanuel Monument."

What language do you expect people in Italy to communicate in? There must be a lot of Pakistanis mistaken for English, according to your logic.

Crimson Guard said...

Oh the anecdote's that must be believed-- much like the posts of Monty-cookie ,lol.

But really what is surprising? Italy is a nation of immigration and it naturally follows immigrants have to learn the national language to some extent.

"At the start of 2010 there were 4,235,059 foreign nationals resident in Italy and registered with the authorities.[123] This amounted to 7.1% of the country’s population and represented a year-on-year increase of 388,000.[124] These figures include more than half a million children born in Italy to foreign nationals—second generation immigrants are becoming an important element in the demographic picture—but exclude foreign nationals who have subsequently acquired Italian nationality; this applied to 53,696 people in 2008.[125] They also exclude illegal immigrants, the so-called clandestini whose numbers are difficult to determine. In May 2008 The Boston Globe quoted an estimate of 670,000 for this group.[126] Since the recent enlargements of the European Union, the biggest wave of migration has been from Eastern Europe, but also increasingly from China,[127] replacing North Africa as the major immigration area. Some 950,000 Romanians, around 10 percent of them being Romani,[128] are officially registered as living in Italy, replacing Albanians and Moroccans as the largest ethnic minority group. The number unregistered Romanians is difficult to estimate, but the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network suggested that in 2007 that there might have been half a million or more.[129][note 4] As of 2009, the foreign born population origin of Italy was subdivided as follows: Europe (54%), Africa (22%), Asia (16%), the Americas (8%) and Oceania (0.06%). The distribution of foreign born population is largely uneven in Italy: 87% of immigrants live in the northern and central parts of the country (the most economically developed areas), while only 13% live in the southern half of the peninsula.

According to Eurostat, in 2010 there were 4.8 million foreign-born residents in Italy, corresponding to 8.0% of the total population. Of these, 3.2 million (5.3%) were born outside the EU and 1.6 million (2.6%) were born in another EU Member State."

"The island of Sicily has a population of approximately five million, and there are an additional ten million people of Sicilian descent around the world, mostly in North America, Argentina, Australia and other European and Latin American countries. Like the rest of southern Italy, immigration to the island is very low compared to other regions of Italy because workers tend to head to Northern Italy instead, due to better employment and industrial opportunities. The most recent ISTAT figures show around 100 thousand immigrants out of the total five million population, that is nearly 2 percent of the population; Romanians with more than 17 thousand make up the most immigrants, followed by Tunisians, Moroccans, Sri Lankans, Albanians, and others mostly from Eastern Europe."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicily#Demographics

Crimson Guard said...

There is between 30-50,000 Sri Lankan's with even some estimates of around 80,000 living in Italy. They came to Italy during the 1970's and more so during the 80's & 90's.

Source:

The Sri Lankan Diaspora in Italy by R Henayaka-Lochbihler - 2004

And what other language are Dutch tourists supposed to speak in Italy, besides either their native tongue and whatever Italian they know? Chinese?!

Rome is one of the biggest multicultural cities in Italy, in fact most of the major cities in Italy whether North or South contain a large portion foreign immigrants--cept the percentage is higher for the Industrialized Northern regions.

"Immigration to Italy began in significant numbers in the 1970s and grew
steadily throughout the 1980s in the context of economic growth and the
near absence of immigration controls (Calvanese and Pugliese 1988;
Guarrasi 1982a; Montanari and Cortese 1993). During the period
1986-90, Italy replaced West Germany as Europe's largest recipient of
mass immigration (King 1993b: 283). By 1990's end, 781,000 foreigners
possessed residence permits in Italy, a figure that would rise to 896,767 the
following year (Monticelli 1992: 64). Although present throughout the
country, foreigners are concentrated in urban areas in the center and
north. Regions with the largest foreign populations (in 1990) include:
Lazio (197,000 or 25.2 percent), Lombardy (117,000 or 15 percent), Sicily
(62,000 or 7.9 percent), Tuscany (61,000 or 7.8 percent), and Veneto
(50,000 or 6.4 percent) (Montanari and Cortese 1993: 286)."

Source: The New Racism In Europe : A Sicilian Ethnography; By Jeffrey Cole

_________

*Sorry about the deletions, had to fix a typo and condense a bit.

Anonymous said...

Nah.

North Europeans just think all brown people in Italy are tanned Italians.

Anonymous said...

My God, I have commented the videos of that "comedian", Peter Russel, asking people to have a look at the videos of "il contadino HQ" or "bravissimissima" on youtube to spot the Indian siblings among a bunch of Italians and my comments have always been flagged as spam.
Why? Why can't lies be dispelled?
When I was in London (I've lived there for one year) I've noticed that most "Italian" bars and restaurants were run by Arabs. Now I presume same thing in USA... Also, I found lots of Arabs wearing anything possible displaying the Italian flag. I assume they just want to change the image of Italians as they feel ashamed for what they really are, but this makes me so angry! It is even turning me racist, although I have never been. I think it is not that bad being racist at who's with themselves...
... now I am even afraid that the tourists coming to Italy think that the wild bunch of homeless Arabs running the edges of our streets are tanned Italians? With those hooked noses?! Showing off that poorness? O_o
Louise

Anonymous said...

Anyways... do have a look at "il contadino HQ" or "bravissimissima" on youtube and tell me whether you can spot the Indian siblings among the Italians! Who's brown?
Have a look at the Zecchino!
And at the time of emigration? Italians were like today and you can see on youtube searching for example for the most famous children songs. I do not know what type of photos have been used on the books making up stories of African (!) blood and on TV on Jersey Shore (they were saying that those fake Italians were the real descendants of... and then they displayed an image of brown poor children). Do have a look at the following and related vids:
Zecchino was already on at that time. You can have a look at the most pop songs like:
"Il caffè della Peppina" - Simonetta Gruppioni/Marina D'Amici
Popoff - Zecchino D'Oro 1967 HD
"Il valzer del moscerino" - Cristina D'Avena
"Il torero Camomillo" - Michele Grandolfo
"Il Corsaro nero nero " - Gabriele Silvestri
Volevo un Gatto Nero - Zecchino D'Oro 1969
Sorry for invading your space, but I'm so fed up hearing, seeing shit about Italians and Italy!
Louise

Anonymous said...

... and you can see the Sardinian kids of today on youtube searching for "Arriva lo Zecchino - Audizioni a Olbia"
Hoping also lies about Sardinians will die.
You can see more random (we should make up like a TM for this adjective...) Italian stuff on my channel
http://www.youtube.com/user/LouiseHans10

Anonymous said...

Veneto: "Arriva lo Zecchino - 1° Puntata" (there are an African girl and an Italian girl side by side)
Sicily: "Arriva lo Zecchino - Audizioni a Siracusa"

Anonymous said...

you can keep watching Arriva lo Zecchino - 2° Puntata, Arriva lo Zecchino - 3° Puntata etc obviously. You can see also adults per region (... and our beautiful cities from North to South). There's also Naples. Do you know that Naples counts the highest numbers of gingers in Italy? Gingers are spread all over the country, some areas have more, but Naples hits anyone.

Anonymous said...

Use especially little team. I made this with Atalanta of Bergamo "primavera" team.

http://imgbox.com/aaaFJLpQ

King_Cookie said...

yo dawg, I was serious but if that bugs you I suspect that Mattielig is from the slovenian minority of the Natisone even if those ones are pretty much italianized now unlike the slovenians from Gorizia and Trieste.

Anonymous said...

I think Mattielig is Friulano.
His look doesn't seems slavic really.

http://veneziacalcio.wordpress.com/about/daniele-mattielig/

Anonymous said...

Why don't you study the Americans, the French and the British? Is it too hard to understand what they are prevalently?

Italianthro said...

>>> "I suspect that Mattielig is from the slovenian minority"

>>> "I think Mattielig is Friulano"

I wondered about that surname too, but the Northeast has a lot of un-Italian sounding surnames. If you Google "Mattielig -Daniele", you only see it after first names like Marino, Andrea, Bruno, Luigi, Alessio, Rafaella, Francesco etc., so I figured it was Italian enough to include.

Caudium said...

Lots of ultimate vowel dropping in Italy's Northeast, like Friuli.

For instance, someone in Italy may be named "Biancolino" or "Biancolini" (meaning "white hills"). But in FVG that name could well be just "Biancolin".

King_Cookie said...

Mattelig which is very similar is listed as slovenian here, and if you look at the white pages those people have all pretty much italian first names.
http://www.vallidelnatisone.com/cultura-cognomi-cognomimno.html
but given the genetic similarity between the two populations I understand that you left it.

Crimson Guard said...

It is possible it a Slavic derived Northern Italian surname by way of Hebrew as it ultimately means "Matthew":

""Matelic is almost unique, Matelich, very rare, is specific to Trieste, Mattelic is almost unique, it is almost Mattelich, Mattelig, very rare, is Udinese Matteligh, almost unique, is also Udinese, should all derive from Slavic patronymic forms, where the suffixes-ic,-ich,-ig,-igh, are for the child, referring to the founders, whose father was called with the name or Matel Mattel (see MATELICA), forms ipocoristiche Biblical name of the slave Matthaeus (Matt)."

http://www.cognomiitaliani.org/cognomi/cognomi0011at.htm


It is is found primarily in Fruili Vebezia Giulia and the variant "Mattelig" is found in Friuli but also Emila-Romagna and Abruzzo. Both types are very not very common.

http://www.gens.labo.net/it/cognomi/genera.html

Caudium said...

The name is INCREDIBLY uncommon. I don't understand why it warrants so much commentary.

Anonymous said...

what if he had been adopted and his actual surname was Rossi, or what if someone's name is Rossi, but actually has been adopted from another side of the world?

Ebod said...

Sardinian sample is quite bizarre, because sardinians haven't round faces, but very elongated ones,different shape of eyes etc.

i'm wondering from where those 11 sardinian soccers are taken.

In addition soccer players are not really rapresentative of a whole population, considering that in sardinia many of them range as cromagnids, and cromagnids don't represent great part of sardinians.

Italianthro said...

Sardinians don't have elongated faces:

"...Sardinians are low-vaulted dolichocephals and mesocephals, with short faces and skeletally mesorrhine noses."

Source

Ebod said...

Sardinians have long faces and they resemble iberians in the look, so posting link about physical anthropology studies realised 80 years ago is quite senseless, because recent anthropometric studies show a stature +10cm higher, brachicephalization of the skull, high foreheads, so enormous changement compared with people analyzed before the II world war, when enviroment conditions, poverty, malnutrition and the presence of malaria contributed to determine particular physical aspects today disappeared.

Onur Dincer said...

As explained in Italianthro's link, Sardinians are short-faced dolichocephals (long-headed people) and mesocephals (medium-headed people). Head size and face size are different things and should not be confused with each other. Sardinians are also famous for their short stature (they are still short by European standards) and relatively dark pigmentation.

nanuk said...

I have been in Sardinia many times and i have never noticed particular differences in term of pigmentation with other italians, apart a lot of tanned people, considering that beaches are the main attraction there, so i think you have never been there.
This recent study about the stature of sardinians show an average of 1,74 cm, so comparable to the rest of Italy.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_bfM9TCzpcpVm5BLUo1MFNDZkk/edit

Onur Dincer said...

This recent study about the stature of sardinians show an average of 1,74 cm, so comparable to the rest of Italy.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_bfM9TCzpcpVm5BLUo1MFNDZkk/edit


174 cm is short by European standards. Italians in general, too, are short by European standards.

Onur Dincer said...

I have been in Sardinia many times and i have never noticed particular differences in term of pigmentation with other italians, apart a lot of tanned people, considering that beaches are the main attraction there, so i think you have never been there.

Your personal experiences are worthless, especially considering the high number of people tanning.

nanuk said...

I think that between 1,62cm as reported in the previous link and 1,74 cm there is an abnormal difference, the interesting fact
is that sardinians are incrementing stature enormously, so i agree with the user that has written before that said that posting obsolete anthro surveys is not right.

nanuk said...

Opinions by people who speak about people or places that they have never visited is more worthless!

Onur Dincer said...

I think that between 1,62cm as reported in the previous link and 1,74 cm there is an abnormal difference, the interesting fact
is that sardinians are incrementing stature enormously, so i agree with the user that has written before that said that posting obsolete anthro surveys is not right.


There is a general trend of height increase in humans in recent decades due to the improvements in nutrition, etc., so while Sardinians and Italians in general increased in height in recent decades, nearly all other ethnic groups increased in height as well during the same period, and as a result, Sardinians and Italians in general are still short by European standards. Head measurements of Coon still preserve their validity, as Coon specifically measured the stable parts of human head in his physical anthropological studies.

Opinions by people who speak about people or places that they have never visited is more worthless!

A very stupid assertion.

Anthro Italy Blog said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Onur Dincer said...

Nanuk is right, Sardinians have elongated faces as generally have all western mediterraneans, and several surveys as for example Livi's one and more recent ones have demonstrated this fact.

Nanuk is right on what?

Just like Ebod, you are confusing face length with head length.

Anthropology Italy said...

no, I' m speaking of face lenght, I' d like to know why you're insisting

http://oi47.tinypic.com/11awsk2.jpg

Visi Lunghi=Long Faces

Sardinians 15,0 or more, avarage proportion in Italy 13,0

Onur Dincer said...

What is the source of that map?

Anthropology Italy said...

Livi.

Italianthro said...

"Anthropology Italy" is a troll. The map he posted is just for people between 160 and 165 cm in height. He photoshopped that text out of the image. Here's the full set of figures from Livi, showing frequencies of long and short faces in the whole population (top) and in the aforementioned subset (bottom).

Anyway, it doesn't provide much information, only that ~15% of Sardinians have long faces, and ~3.5% have short faces. But we don't know how "long" and "short" are being defined, or where the remaining ~80% fall in the spectrum. So the quote from Coon that I posted above still stands, especially considering that Livi was one of his main sources.

Onur Dincer said...

"Anthropology Italy" is a troll.

Just as I guessed, but I was not sure so waited for you to respond to him/her first. Now I am sure that he/she is a troll and deceiver after the link and information you provided.

Anthropology Italy said...

you should be a troll, I've found that map in Eupedia, posted by a user called HankTerry, and in any case if I compare that map with the other ones Sardinians are still people with longer faces if compared to people from other regions, while in that morph it seems they have round faces.
While about Onur, non capisco per quale strana ragione quel personaggio vuole avere sempre l' ultima parola.

Anthropology Italy said...

But also Trentino/Friuli morph is quite strange, that person in the morph doesn't look northern Italian, and Friulan people are antropologically speaking identical to people from Veneto, so it's impossible that they look so much different.
I' m sorry but your morphs are not realistic.

Italianthro said...

Livi's maps don't show what more than 80% of Sardinians' faces are like. They're probably on the shorter end of the spectrum like Coon says. And you should know that everything that comes from Eupedia is Nordicist garbage.

The Trentino/Friuli morph is made from 10 people, while the Veneto morph is made from 49 people. Use your head and try to figure out why one looks better than the other. Or read my comments in the introductory paragraph.

Now go away troll.

Anthropology Italy said...

in any case if we consider all the maps by livi you can see that longer faces in Sardinia are dominant and they are between 14,1 and 16,1 while in Italy the avarage is 14,1. So what I wrote wasn't wrong, Sardinians have generally longer faces, as many other users said. The only region that according Livi have longer heads is Liguria with its 16,1 or more.

Italianthro said...

No, those maps don't show that "longer faces in Sardinia are dominant" or even that "Sardinians have generally longer faces". You're completely wrong and not very intelligent. As I said, they don't really show anything at all, except that there's not much difference throughout Italy in face length at the extremes of long and short. But on average, Sardinians' faces are more on the short side, as Coon points out.

Your next post here will deleted, Re_Biscottino. You were banned a long time ago.

nanuk said...

@ italianthro

The theories of Coon a typical anglo saxon physical anthropologist born 112 years ago, that had never been in Sardinia shouldn't be considered seriously today in XXI century, the cephalic index of sardinian people according to recent studies is even changed, becoming less dolicocephalic, and more similar to the mainland italians .

anyway this is another morphing with 35 sardinian football player that i found on a site called anthrocivitas realised by a spanish user:
http://img834.imageshack.us/img834/891/sardiniansfootball.png

the aspect looks very different


Italianthro said...

Nanuk, don't talk nonsense. Empirical data is not "theories". Coon used Italian anthropologists like Livi as his sources. And that Sardinian morph looks very similar to the one I made. It probably includes a lot of the same players.