From Historical to New Place Names. The Case of Italy

This book presents research on geographical naming on land and sea from a wide range of standpoints on: theory and concepts, case studies and education. Space and place naming or toponymy has a long tradition in the sciences and a renewed critical interest in geography and allied disciplines including the humanities. Place: location and cartographical aspects, etymology and geo-histories so salient in past studies, are now being enhanced from a range of radical perspectives, especially in a globalizing, standardizing world with Googlization and the consequent ‘normalization’ of place names, perceptions and images worldwide including those for marketing purposes. Nonetheless, there are conflicting and contesting voices. The interdisciplinary research is enhanced with authors from regional, national and international toponymy-related institutions and organizations including the UNGEGN, IGU, ICA and so forth. My work, in particular : Place names, which were created by the need to identify their setting and, as a result, to proceed to their organization, are a basic component of historical memory of a territory. Thus they are a valuable part of the cultural heritage and the expression of the perception by generations throughout the centuries of their environment. This is all the more important in today’s world which is subject to enormous processes of certification and standardization. They deserve to be protected and foregrounded by way of careful data collection and specific enquiry into the complex links between place names and individual landscape and territorial categories (waterscapes, vegetation, shapes and characteristics of the land, settlements, historical road systems and human activities) as well as the complex relationship between the whole place name corpus of a territory and its landscape, and the birth of new place names, originating, for example, in the tourist industry. After the general geographical lines of development of place name research in Italy, an outline will be presented of a number of examples both nationally and regionally relevant to the above mentioned themes.