It's impossible to have a rational discussion about this without the paper in front of us.
If, by "Romans" being more "Aegean" like they mean some samples from Ostia, Rome's biggest port, then that conclusion is just plain stupid.
I can't put it any more clearly than that.
I mean, I know not everybody has a PHD or an IQ of 140+, but for crying out loud if some people don't have the mental capacity to examine these kinds of claims with some degree of intelligence they should just shut up.
Of course, then there are those with agendas or mental health issues who muddy up the waters as well.
Sorry to be so blunt, but I'm losing patience, not, I hasten to add, with you, but with the general level of stupidity and agenda driven content in the hobby as a whole.
You have to define your freaking terms to make sense of all of this. If you don't, even having the samples in hand won't help. The people who built the first huts on the seven hills of Rome are not necessarily exactly the same people who belonged to the various tribes of the Republic, and those people are not necessarily completely similar to the inhabitants of Imperial Rome as defined as the city of Rome itself in the time of Augustus and after.
To think that samples from Ostia, which more than likely might have been mostly merchants or sailors from lots of different parts of the empire, but predominantly perhaps from the east, should serve as the standard genetically for "Romans" is a whole different level of absurdity.
All of that will have to be kept in mind when we have the actual samples, see their isotope values, their burial contexts, where they were found, and their dates.
That isn't to say that I don't think there was steady gene flow from southern Italy north, because I think there was.
I'll post later about some other findings from my book on Northern Italy during Roman times.