Using past slavery as means of justifying SOME Italian's dark complexions is baseless. First of all, almost every nation in Europe was under the Roman Empire, basically meaning that these Middle Eastern/North African slaves not only settled the Italian peninsula, but France, Spain, Portugal, Britain, Germany etc. In fact, besides Rome, there were actually no other large cities on the Italian peninsula. Also many slaves that the Romans had were Balkans, Slavic people from Eastern Europe, as well as Germanic peoples from northern Europe as the Roman Empire continued to spread. However, there were large Roman cities in France, Spain, Turkey, Britain, and southern Germany. Even before Rome, Italy is just a border skip away from France, Switzerland and Austria, so there is no meaning in Sicily being 85 miles from the coast of Tunisia.
When the Germanic tribes spilled over the Alps and brought Rome to an end, the Arabs raided the peninsula but did not settle it. Instead they captured what history calls "white slaves" off the coasts of Spain and Italy and plundered the coast which as a result, much of the coastal populations fled inlands and in the mountainous regions. There are ancient and historic communities to this day in Calabria, and Sicily that are on high mountainous altitudes. France was subject to Arab raids as well. The Arabs controlled Sicily and the southernmost parts of Italy for 75-200, but the Normans did a crusade on the island ousting Islamic rule and much of its adherents. For three hundred years, the Normans established its influence in southern Italy (architecture and people; called: Normanni), which is much more apparent in the architecture along with Byzantine (Greek) Sicily rather than Arab.
