I lose some braincells whenever I hear people say that dark age Romans (yes they existed) are from Rome who are Italians who are Lombards who are the papal states etc.
Lombards stand to Italians as much as Franks stand to French or Visigoths to Spaniards or Suebians to Portuguese or Vandals to Africans. They were just Germanic people who happened to control those Roman lands for a while in the dark ages.
French are descendants of Gallo-Romans, Spaniards are descendants of Hispanic Romans, Italians are descendants of Italo Romans and so on… With just an inch of Germanization that persisted in certain aspects (some Germanic words, names, customs etc).
The tribes who invaded the Roman empire were just too few in numbers to make any difference with the native “Romans” (in late antiquity being Roman simply meant being born on Roman soil so no Romans are not the inhabitants of Rome and not even Italy, legally after Caracalla you were Roman if you lived in Britannia as much as if you lived in Egypt which is what later led to the “are byzantines Romans?” controversy).
The only areas that lost their Romanness were Africa because of the Arabs (we don’t have Latin Africans nowadays, the language went extinct during the middle ages), Britannia because Romano-britons and their Latin language went extinct around the 7th century AD because of Anglo-Saxons (you could make a case for Welsh but they reverted to their Celtic past rather than clinging to the Roman experience) and other small poorly Latinised areas like Pannonia and Belgium.
So only Arabs and Anglo-Saxons were able to break the Roman hegemony over these lands but nowhere else occupants managed to survive the occupied. They just didn’t have the structure and organisation they found in Roman lands so they simply adapted (slowly accepting Christianity for example and most military titles like dux, comes that would evolve in duke, count etc) until they lost their identity.
Every country is a peculiar case but in the case of Italy actually Lombards managed to hold a grip a little longer than say Vandals or Visigoths. The Lombard language went extinct towards the 10th century iirc but Lombards continued to exist through the norman conquest of south Italy until the 12th century I think (?)
And as you said Italians ironically defined their identity in contrast to Romans (this was probably the biggest heir of Germans: nationalism/regionalism in contrast to Roman universalism/imperialism) and it’s ironic cause they were relatively close to ancient Romans. Dante spoke very bad of Romans (as of people in Rome, which was where at that point the designation was confined) in contrast to Italian (Florentine) people.
Also ironically (but makes sense if you think that Roman identity was becoming a status marker and that the city of Rome lost its importance since the 4th century AD) Italy is the country where you can find less Roman people in the dark ages. Maybe no Italian wanted to be Roman anymore after the devastating gothic war led by the “Roman” emperor Justinian. No other ex province of the empire had to endure such a disaster despite having been invaded by Germans as well and Roman identity lived on for long in Gaul, Hispania and even Africa.
The heart of the old empire was actually the first to abandon its roots, just when everybody started to squabble over it. The “Roman” emperor of the west in 800 was a Frank and he was fighting over Rome itself with the other “Romans”, the byzantines. And none of them were in control of Rome the city. Everyone “felt” Roman except Rome lol. I think nothing shows more transparently how you can manipulate identities when you need it.
Anyway yeah I’d be fine if they would simply take away Lombard kings from Italian ai names. That’s the thing that makes less sense.
Mauritius Galba was a magister militum per Venetia so it’s almost ok as Italian although it’s better if he was either Roman or Byzantine (although Roman sounds more appropriate) at least until there’s not a Venetian civ.