Prontuario dei nomi locali dell'Alto Adige

The Prontuario dei nomi locali dell'Alto Adige (Italian for ''Reference Work of Place Names of Alto Adige'') is a list of Italianized toponyms for mostly German place names in South Tyrol (''Alto Adige'' in Italian) which was published in 1916 by the Royal Italian Geographic Society (''Reale Società Geografica Italiana''). The list was called the Prontuario in short and later formed an important part of the Italianization campaign initiated by the fascist regime, as it became the basis for the official place and district names in the Italian-annexed southern part of the County of Tyrol.

It has often been criticized by the German-speaking population of the province, on the grounds that the new names often have little perceived historical relevance. However, important academics like Giovan Battista Pellegrini or Johannes Kramer have positively judged the work of Tolomei, considering it as founded on valid criteria.

Development

In the 1890s Ettore Tolomei founded a nationalist magazine "The Italian Nation", and in 1906 the "Archivio per l'Alto Adige". His intention was to create the impression that South Tyrol had originally been an Italian territory, that the German history of South Tyrol was merely a short interruption and that as a consequence the land rightfully belonged to Italy.

Toponymy played a major part in Tolomei's struggle right from the beginning. In the articles he wrote for ''The Italian Nation'' he already used Italianized names, although these early attempts lacked the method and purpose of his later activities. In those days he would use the name ''Alto Trentino'' for South Tyrol, not having yet come upon and revived the Napoleonic creation ''Alto Adige'', which would become the official Italian designation for the province after World War I and up to this day. Likewise, he used to call the Brenner Pass "Pirene", which in his later publications would become "Brennero". His work became more systematical with the founding of the ''Archivio per l' Alto Adige'', through which he began to propose Italianized names for villages and geographical features in South Tyrol. In 1916, a year after Italy, instigated by Allied promises and its own nationalist tendencies, entered the First World War, a commission was set up to find Italian names for places in the "soon to be conquered territory". The commission (composed of Tolomei himself, the Professor of Botany and Chemistry Ettore De Toni as well as the librarian Vittorio Baroncelli) reported almost 12,000 Italian place and district names on the basis of Tolomei's studies. In June 1916, this list was published as ''Volume XV, Part II'' of ''Memorie'' of the ''Reale Società Geografica Italiana'' as well as in the ''Archivio per l'Alto Adige''.

Methodology

Tolomei explained the methodology for creating Italian names in his introduction to the ''Prontuario''. The main principles are:

# Ladin names would be adapted to the current Italian pronunciation;
# Pre-existing Italian names: e.g. ( Bozen/''Bolzano'', Meran/''Merano'') were not changed, though there are exceptions;
# Names of pre-Romanic, Rhaetic origin were not changed when adopted by the Romanic population. Germanized Rhaetic names were replaced by the original version or by a historic Latinized form. The same method was applied in the case of names with a Celtic origin;
# German names going back to a Romanic form were to be returned to their Latin antecedent;
# Irreducibly German names were translated into Italian or substituted with Italian names. This was done by phonetic reduction, where the name was simply Italianized (normally by adding a vowel to the end of the name): e.g. Brenner/''Brennero'', Moos/''Moso''. Or by direct translation, e.g. ''Lago Verde'' (green lake) for ''Grünsee''; this was a frequent source of mistakes, as ''Linsberg'' was translated with ''Monte Luigi'', a name also used as the translation of ''Luisberg''; Blumau was wrongly interpreted as flower valley, and translated to meadow Prato all'Isarco. Alternatively, the name of the patron saint of the town was used, e.g. Innichen/''San Candido'', or the Italian name was inspired by geographical derivations: e.g. ''Colle Isarco'' (''Hill-upon- Isarco'') for Gossensaß.

This methodology was however not applied in a uniform, consistent manner, so that often the choice of name seems to have been arbitrary — thus increasing the perception of imposition. While the aim of Tolomeis toponymy was that of bringing the Latin history back to the surface, more often than not it has been perceived as to bury the Romanic roots of historically grown names even deeper due to the relative linguistic incompetence of Tolomei and his team. This can be exemplified by the name of the village ''Lana'', which probably goes back to a Roman landholder named ''Leo'', whose territory was called ''(praedium) Leonianum''. In the High Middle Ages the name was pronounced ''Lounan''. In the Bavarian dialect, the vocal ''ou'' changed to ''a'' in the 12th century, leading to ''Lanan'', which became today's ''Lana'' in German. Contrary to his stated methodology Tolomei kept the name Lana, probably because it sounded Italian and in Italian "lana" means "wool". The correct Italianization would have been "Leoniano" (although exact reconstruction may have been abandoned in favor of pragmatism and aesthetics). The same applies to German Trens and Terenten, derived from Latin ''torrens'' (stream), which were Italianized as Trens and Terento, not recognizing the Romanic roots still present in the German name.

Apart from the frequent mistakes and inconsistencies of Tolomei's toponymy, its main fault is the loss of historical information contained in the historically grown geographical names, an effect which was fully intended by Tolomei. Instead of bringing back Alpine Romanity which spoke a Rhaeto-Romance language, he superimposed the Tuscan dialect, on which Standard Italian is based, on the local Romanic traditions. A case in point is the name ''Vipiteno'', derived from Latin ''Vipitenum''. Tolomei preferred this Latin name to ''Sterzen'', the name commonly used by Italians at that time. In doing so, however, he unwittingly chose a name which had undergone Germanization. The original Alpine-Romanic name would have been ''Vibidina''; the German sound change in the 8th century changed this into ''Wipitina''. As such it was first mentioned in the medieval Latin manuscripts, and in the more recent ones it was further Latinized into ''Vipitenum'', a name which sounded as if it could have been of ancient Roman origin and thus was chosen by Tolomei.Kühebacher 1998, p. 284.

Notes

See also

* Related to Italy and the German-speaking world:
** 1938 renaming of East Prussian placenames
** German as a minority language
** History of South Tyrol
** Italianization of South Tyrol
** List of renamed places in Italy
* Commission for the Determination of Place Names in the territories annexed by Poland after World War II.
* Geographical name changes in Greece
* Geographical renaming
* List of city name changes
* List of renamed places in South Africa
* Neighborhood rebranding in New York City
* Renaming of cities in India

References

* F. Bartaletti (2002). ''Geografia, toponomastica e identità culturale: il caso del Sudtirolo'', in “Miscellanea di storia delle esplorazioni XXVII”, Genova, pp. 269–315. Reprinted i
Padani'', 51/52:37-61, 2004
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* Kühebacher, Egon (1998). ''Zur Arbeitsweise Ettore Tolomeis bei der Italianisierung der Südtiroler Ortsnamen'', in Benvenuti, Sergio; Hartungen, Christoph von (eds.). Ettore Tolomei (1865–1952). Un nazionalista di confine. Die Grenzen des Nationalismus. Trento: Museo Storico in Trento, pp. 279–94.
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Further reading

* Finsterwalder, Karl (1990). ''Tiroler Ortsnamenkunde – gesammelte Aufsätze und Arbeiten'', 3 Vols., Innsbruck: Universitätsverlag Wagner,
* Kühebacher, Egon (1995–2000). ''Die Ortsnamen Südtirols und ihre Geschichte'', 3 Vols., Bozen: Verlagsanstalt Athesia, (1: ''Die geschichtlich gewachsenen Namen der Gemeinden, Fraktionen und Weiler''), (2: ''Die geschichtlich gewachsenen Namen der Täler, Flüsse, Bäche und Seen'') and (3: ''Die Namen der Gebirgszüge, Gipfelgruppen und Einzelgipfel Südtirols. Gesamtregister'') (reference work)

External links

Online version of the Prontuario dei nomi locali dell'Alto Adige.
(Digitalised by Edoardo Mori; the Prontuario is available as a PDF file at the link of the same name, including a preface by Eduardo Mori and the original introduction by Tolomei)
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(German)

{{Authority control
Names of places in Italy
History of South Tyrol
1916 non-fiction books
1916 in Italy
Geographical renaming