Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Italic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family whose earliest known members were spoken on the Italian Peninsula in the first millennium BC. The branch includes ancient languages such as Latin, Faliscan, Oscan, Umbrian, and South Picene, as well as the modern Romance languages descended from Vulgar Latin.
The modern Italic languages are the Romance languages, which descended from Vulgar Latin between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD. They include French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, Catalan, Occitan, Romansh, Sardinian, and Galician, with a combined native speaker population exceeding 900 million.
The ancient Italic languages other than Latin became extinct in the first centuries AD as their speakers were assimilated into the Roman Empire and shifted to Latin. The Romanisation of the Italian Peninsula was essentially complete by the 1st century BC.
Antoine Meillet (1866-1936) is credited as the founder of the theory that the ancient Indo-European languages of the Italian Peninsula formed a single Italic branch of the family. The unitary theory he proposed remains dominant in contemporary scholarship, though it has faced significant criticism.
French is the earliest attested Romance language, with written evidence dating from 842 AD. Italo-Dalmatian, including Italian and Dalmatian, is attested around 960, and Ibero-Romance, which includes Spanish, Portuguese, and Galician, appears around 1075.
Around 700 BC, Ionian Greek settlers from Euboea brought the Western Greek alphabet to the coast of southern Italy, having learned it from the Phoenicians. The alphabet spread quickly across the entire peninsula, and local communities produced several Old Italic alphabets through minor adaptations in letter shapes and the addition or removal of a few characters.