Le voci della sera di Natalia Ginzburg: suggestioni onomastiche di un piccolo mondo

Abstract

In homage to Carlo Alberto Mastrelli and in ideal continuity with the address «L’onomastica della memoria nelle Voci della sera di Natalia Ginzburg»,given in Pisa at the first conference of Onomastica & Letteratura, this paper sets out to investigate the role assigned to names in a work considered to be «the general rehearsal» for Family Sayings. Functional to the representation of the atmosphere of the province, represented by the «country grown around the factory», the onomastic choices, sometimes mimetic, sometimes allusive, are the expression of a social code in which names and nicknames, language and dialect coexist, antithetically used as a sign of belonging or exclusion from the community. Each character has its own onomastic title, a sign of a reality more fully revealed in Family Sayings, where Ginzburg chooses to designate the characters «with the name and surname of their true identity», avoiding «all invention and all indeterminacy».