The last Romans are still around

This is strictly about linguistic similarity and not genetic similarity.

On a genetic map, a PCA plot, Romans and Romanians simply don't overlap. Romanians cluster with their Balkan neighbors, (1) on account of massive Slavic migration from around the 7th century AD, and (2) on account of strong historical and genetic evidence to suggest that the Roman colonists sent to Dacia were largely recruited from neighboring Balkan provinces (like Moesia and Pannonia), rather than from the city of Rome.

Genetically, the nearest populations to Ancient Romans are Cypriots and certain other Mediterranean types, including Anatolians. But it's not neat; there's no clear unambiguous descent. A lot can happen in >1000 years!

Just wait for Hollywood to create a film about Roman mythology and not cast a single Roman!

But less tongue-in-cheek, the other thing is that the legacy of the Romans is pretty much all around us. The Roman Calendar (with July and August both referencing a Roman leader), the Latin alphabet (with the additional letters like 'y' being added later on to support Greek), the roads we can travel, etc.

I'm a bit surprised that the "people from modern Rome" only got an honorable mention. After all, Rome still sees itself as the successor of the Roman Empire. When first visiting it, I was surprised to see the famous SPQR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPQR) acronym all over the place - on trash cans, manhole covers etc. etc.

My name is Roman (father was Italian born in Rome and identifies as a Roman) and I always find it interesting that people try to speak something that sounds like Russian to me. Never thought about the fact they might think I’m Romanian and are speaking Romanian!

Besides Romanians, there are several more eastern european romance-language-speaking peoples ("Vlachs") like Aromanians, Megleno-Romanians and Istro-Romanians. I think they might also deserve a mention.

I bought a torrone (Italian nougat dessert) in local Auchan (French supermarket chain) today and while briefly researching the dessert history found out that it was popular in Ancient Rome named as cupedia and in some Southern parts of Italy it still called as cupeta.

Just imagine to make recipe so good that it not just transferred across generations through 2000 years, but also evolved to come in supermarket in Russia.

As an American with mostly Western European ancestors (according to a popular DNA testing site), I've always considered Romans as some distant/tangentially related group.

It was surprising to find out that I have "ancient" DNA matches with a couple of Roman and Etruscan individuals.

Small world!

My grandfather was a smith in deep rural Spain. He made and fixed many roman ploughs, well into the 70s. They were called that because they were pretty much the same tool the Romans used.

"Where are the Romans now?" "You're looking at them." - Tony Soprano

Feel I should mention the Istro-Romanians (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istro-Romanians), a small group of Romanian speakers who settled in Istria (now Croatia) some centuries ago. Mostly gone now but one grandmother was from one of the Romanian speaking villages.

[dead]

No mention of the Romansch, that's quite disappointing. But learning more about Romania and Romanian culture still made for a wonderful read, kudos to the author.

Rome had negligible demographic impact in Europe. An overhyped "empire"

I am not my grandfather, and neither current descendants of Romans are Romans.

Don't glorify Rome too much. It was a slavery based society that progressed sciences, technology and civilization little from what they inherited from the Mesopotamian's/Greeks. Heck written Latin didn't even have punctuation marks, not even spaces. That's because it was only used by slave scribes. The nobility that could write, did so in Greek.