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I nomi tra suono e figura: la lezione di Giovanni Pozzi

Luigi Sasso — 2025-10-01

La cultura greca arcaica, l'onomastica e l'origine delle idee sul linguaggio

Serena Mirto — 2025-10-01

Onomastic Movement of the ‘Pupi’ in Buttafuoco’s Novel "Le uova del drago"

Angelo Campanella — 2025-10-01

In Le uova del drago (2005) by Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the shift from a theatrical mode of writing—specifically that of the teatro dei pupi, referenced in the subtitle Una storia vera al teatro dei pupi—to a broader narrative framework entails a process of adaptation and transformation of the names of the paladins of France and other characters from the Carolingian cycle. These names are recontextualized in relation to the final phase of the Second World War, particularly the arrival of the Americans in Sicily, which historically marked the beginning of liberation from Fascism. Buttafuoco reinterprets these events from an unconventional perspective, replacing the notion of liberation with that of American occupation and placing at the center of the narrative the remnants of “Fascist resistance”—the so-called “dragon’s eggs”—as observed from within, through the voice of the protagonist, the German spy Eughenia Lenbach. What unfolds is a dynamic movement of names drawn from epic tradition, within a continuous interplay of temporal planes, where spies, soldiers, traitors, and the betrayed move through the Sicily of 1943–1947 as if upon the stage of a theatre. This paper focuses on the onomastic transformations of three emblematic characters: Turi Orlando, Angelica La Bella, and Eughenia Lenbach.

A Name on the Move in a Shifting Europe: Orlando in Brandenburg by Rosso di San Secondo

Marina Castiglione — 2025-10-01

Orlando in Brandenburg is a novel conceived in the late 1920s and long absent from Rosso di San Secondo’s bibliography—a disappearance resulting from the author’s own decision, a personal act of damnatio memoriae. Written during his stay in Berlin, in a Germany morally shattered by the aftermath of World War I, the novel reflects the Sicilian playwright’s fascist ideology through the vitalistic energy and coarse demeanor of its protagonist. The central figure is Paoluccio Criscemi, a young immigrant from Giardini, in the province of Messina, who repeatedly changes his name and titles throughout the narrative, mirroring the transformative experiences that shape his journey.

“But this business of changing names is new to me!”: Onomastic Metamorphoses in Brancaleone alle crociate (1970)

Mario Chichi — 2025-10-01

This article examines the use of personal names in Brancaleone alle crociate (1970), directed by Mario Monicelli, with particular attention to their narrative and symbolic functions. Following a preliminary survey of selected naming practices and their contextual relevance, the analysis centers on the film’s representation of female characters—most notably, the evolving appellations of the Witch. The study explores mechanisms of self-naming and heteronymy, drawing interpretive insights from comparisons between the original screenplay and the film’s spoken dialogue.

Mutations of Proper Names in The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments: Literary and Televisual Transformations

Simonetta Falchi — 2025-10-01

This paper analyses the development and significance of proper names in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and The Testaments (2019), as well as their adaptation in the 2017 television series The Handmaid’s Tale by Bruce Miller. The research investigates the function of naming as a means of control, identity construction, and defiance in the dystopian society of Gilead. Through a comparative analysis of the novels and the TV series, this article highlights how the onomastic choices reinforce themes of oppression, power dynamics, and empowerment. Significant attention is directed towards the changes in the names of key characters, such as Offred, Agnes Jemima, and Baby Nicole, in different media, demonstrating how these alterations reflect a hypertextual narrative and ideological issues.

Rejection of One’s Origins, Self-nomination, and Circumstantial Variants. The Case of the Humanist Giulio Pomponio Leto

Maria Teresa Laneri — 2025-10-01

This study offers, for the first time, a detailed examination of the structure and potential origins of the humanist name adopted by the renowned Lucanian intellectual, a direct descendant of the powerful Sanseverino family, specifically its branch of the Counts of Marsico. The consistent use of this name appears to have been a deliberate strategy to obscure his noble lineage in the public eye. The analysis focuses on three key aspects: first, the distinctive trinominal form Julius Pomponius Laetus, clearly modeled on Roman naming conventions, whose first element may preserve the author’s baptismal name; second, the gentilician Pomponius, plausibly inspired by the namesake dedicatee of a first-century BCE inscription still visible on a shrine embedded in the façade of the main church in Teggiano—his birthplace and home to the family’s castle residence; and finally, the mobility of the third element, which, in its occasional substitution, seems to reflect the shifting inner states of the man himself.

Anthroponyms and Toponyms Across Europe: From Machiavelli’s Belfagor to Belphegors Gifftermaal in Early Modern Danish

Mauro Camiz — 2025-10-01

This study aims to examine some of the most significant character and place names featured in the earliest Danish adaptation of Niccolò Machiavelli’s Favola di Belfagor. On one level, the analysis underscores the critical role these names play in reconstructing the editorial and translational trajectory that connects Machiavelli’s original narrative to its Early Modern Danish version. On another, it offers linguistic and philological insights into the names themselves, contextualizing them within the broader linguistic and cultural framework of early modern Denmark. This is achieved through a detailed examination of the distinctive features of the Scandinavian text—including its typographic and linguistic characteristics—as well as through a comparative analysis with the original Italian text and its intermediary versions.

Creation of Space in Selected Works by Olga Tokarczuk

Magdalena Graf — 2025-10-01

Travel constitutes a fundamental and recurring motif in the prose of Olga Tokarczuk. Notably, the Polish Nobel Laureate frequently approaches the theme in ways that depart from conventional representations. In her narratives, travel often unfolds not only across geographic space, but also within the psychological or imaginative realms of the protagonist and, by extension, the reader. This article investigates the concept of travel in Tokarczuk’s work, focusing particularly on the role of naming practices—whether through the intentional use of proper names or, conversely, through the deliberate omission of onyms—in both the original Polish texts and their English translations.

Plautus’ Onomastic-Linguistic Awareness

Patrizia Paradisi — 2025-10-01

Plautus is among the most extensively studied authors from an onomastic perspective, with a substantial body of scholarship devoted to recurring character types across his comedies and to the relationships between them within individual plays. This sustained interest stems from his use of nomina loquentia (‘speaking names’), derived from Greek models and systematically assigned to both major and minor characters—an element that Italian translators have sought to replicate with varying degrees of success. Yet, beyond this formal feature lies a deeper reflection on the intersection of proper names and the broader ‘question of language.’ In this light, Plautus emerges not only as a representative of a genre-wide convention, characteristic of the palliata, but also as an author who exhibits a distinctive onomastic-linguistic awareness. This awareness, though subtly woven into his texts, belongs to the wider spectrum of expressive originality long recognized in his dramatic work. This article presents a selective analysis—through exempla and specimina—of key passages from Plautus’ comedies, highlighting how proper names function not merely as comedic or rhetorical devices, but also as vehicles for expressive and artistic innovation.

In the Spirit of Arcimboldo: Onomastic Portraits in Portuguese Baroque Poetry

Matteo Rei — 2025-10-01

Poetic portraits—particularly of women—constitute a recurrent motif in Portuguese Baroque poetry. Certain texts within this corpus appear to transpose into the literary domain the compositional technique associated with the Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo. In these instances, the human body is metaphorically reconstructed through the substitution of its various parts with heterogeneous elements such as flowers, jewels, or confections. This paper examines three poems that constitute a distinctive subcategory within this tradition. Uniquely, these texts replace anatomical features not with tangible objects, but with onomastic elements—specifically anthroponyms, noble titles, and toponyms. The resultant juxtapositions and substitutions are frequently underpinned by wordplay, drawing on homonymy or phonetic resemblance to quotidian vocabulary to evoke the form, color, or dimension of the corresponding bodily features.

Pseudonyms and Heteronyms in Romanesco Dialect Literature

Andrea Riga — 2025-10-01

This paper examines strategies of authorial concealment—namely pseudonymy and heteronymy—in Romanesco dialect literature. It analyzes a corpus of 214 fictitious names identified in anthologies, catalogues, and bibliographic compilations of dialectal literature and poetry, as well as through targeted research in the Schedario Lazio of the Rivista di Dialettologia Italiana and in Google Books. The study aims to offer a comprehensive interpretive framework for this phenomenon, with particular emphasis on the functions, structures, and rhetorical uses of the pseudonyms and heteronyms surveyed.

Revisiting Interpretatio Nominis: Naming Strategies in Selected Recent Italian Novels

Leonardo Terrusi — 2025-10-01

This essay highlights a sustained metalinguistic focus on onomastic strategies, as well as a deliberate interpretatio nominis, in Alessandro D’Avenia’s novel L’appello (2020). This phenomenon is likewise evident in the corpus of Premio Strega laureates, most notably in Sandro Veronesi’s Il Colibrì (2019). Possible interpretative frameworks include: a symbolic significance ascribed to proper names in contemporary cultural consciousness; a deliberate emphasis on the work’s metanarrative structure; or, alternatively, a certain stylistic impoverishment accompanied by an orientation toward an inexperienced Implied Reader.

Names Between Gender Subversion and Form of Resistance in Lubiewo by Michał Witkowski

Alessandro Amenta — 2025-10-01

This paper aims to examine the anthroponymic repertoire in Michał Witkowski’s cult novel Lubiewo (2005). Combining camp aesthetics, irony, and nostalgia for Socialist Poland, the novel portrays a unique speech community: a pre-emancipatory queer subculture marked by the use of feminine linguistic markers to refer to men, including female pseudonyms and nicknames. An analysis of the onomastic material in the novel reveals a rich inventory of both collective and individual names, as well as antonomastic and intertextual references. On one hand, this practice of renaming seeks to subvert the gender binary; on the other, it functions as a form of resistance—both against the repressive policies of Communism and against the identity homogenization brought about by the gay liberation movement.

The Women of Petronilla: Female Onomastics in the Recipes of Amalia Moretti Foggia

Paola Cantoni — 2025-10-01

Amalia Moretti Foggia, a pediatrician, wrote for La Domenica del Corriere and other periodicals between 1926 and 1947, using various pseudonyms according to the audience and subject matter. She adopted the masculine pseudonym “Dr. Amal” for the medical advice column, while “La massaia scrupolosa” and “Una mamma” were used for topics related to domestic education and childcare. In the culinary column Tra i fornelli, the pseudonym “Petronilla” animates the otherwise rigid recipe format by introducing female characters, whose presence serves both narrative and dialogic purposes. Onomastics plays a significant role in constructing gender-based complicity and fostering the loyalty of a female readership, supporting an overarching aim of verisimilitude. The names used often correspond to real women, reflect the bourgeois milieu of the time, and occasionally carry diastratic connotations. There is also a notable preference for names tied to regions familiar to the author, including instances of so-called “portrait names.”

«To Live to the Side of My Name»: Instances of Onomastic Lateralization in Contemporary Literature

Samuele Fioravanti — 2025-10-01

This paper introduces the concept of onomastic lateralization to denote the partial dissociation between the self and one’s proper name. Drawing on an interview with Judith Butler as a theoretical point of departure, the study will investigate the motivations and mechanisms underpinning this phenomenon, with particular attention to its manifestations in non-fiction (Naomi Klein), fiction (Sally Rooney), and poetry (Julia Serrano). Through comparative analysis, the advantages of onomastic lateralization will be illuminated—specifically, its function in fostering moral and affective autonomy from the responsibilities and injuries projected onto one’s name, whether erroneously or arbitrarily. The inquiry will subsequently concentrate on contemporary Italian poetry (including the work of Accerboni, Di Spigno, Fiori, and Scialpi), with a focus on gender dynamics and trans experience. It will be argued that the imperative to establish a critical distance from one’s name—without necessarily renouncing it—derives from the propensity of anthroponyms to accrue connotative significations.

Gender Shifts in Célestine by Genlis

Fabio Vasarri — 2025-10-01

The novella Célestine (1813) by Félicité de Genlis is a secular rewriting of the legend of Saint Marina, a novice who disguises herself as a boy. This article aims to examine the onomastic and referential strategies employed by the author to portray the androgynous character and to facilitate the character’s gender transition—from female to male and back to female. For once, aided by the playful context of the mock diary La Feuille, in which the novella is embedded, Genlis sets aside her public persona as a devout Catholic and anti-Enlightenment moralist to present a story that is at once ambiguous, innocent, and daring.

Three Names for a Seductive Indian, Two Novels for Ernesto Ferrero

Silvia Corino Rovano — 2025-10-01

In the mid-1920s, European theatre audiences found themselves gripped by a collective fascination with the exotic allure of distant lands. For some noblewomen, an encounter with a traveling Indian performance troupe turned into a beguiling entanglement with an extravagant and calculating con artist: Chief White Elk. Gifted with charm and the mesmerizing talent of a natural storyteller, he skillfully exploited their generous hospitality and opulent offerings. Eventually denounced, unmasked, and convicted, his tale captured public attention, filled the pages of newspapers, and culminated in a substantial trial file at the Turin Court in 1926. The story also stirred the imagination of Turin novelist Ernesto Ferrero, who first heard it from his mother during childhood. So powerful was its impression that he later penned two novels inspired by the case, written nearly two decades apart: Cervo Bianco and L’anno dell’Indiano. In these works, the motif of the name emerges as a central theme—not merely as a device for deception, but as a symbol of layered identity. The Indian’s three names, each in a different language, embody and elevate the allure of an unknown world, the idealized image of the noble savage, and the enigma of the storyteller himself. Through the shifting identities of the American impostor, Ferrero delves into the intricate psyche of a criminal mind—one that deftly weaves together truth and illusion, narrative and manipulation.

Toponyms and Anthroponyms in the Reception of Fierabras in the British Isles: Barbour’s Bruce, Book III, L. 435-462

Valeria Di Clemente — 2025-10-01

The tale of Fierabras is among the most widely circulated narratives of the Carolingian cycle in the Middle Ages. Originally composed as a chanson de geste in late 12th-century France, it was later adapted into romance form and repeatedly rewritten in prose across a broad geographic area, from its native France to the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, and the British Isles. Even in the brief summary found in John Barbour’s Bruce, nearly all the key personal and place names from the story are preserved. However, these names occasionally differ in form from those found in the earliest French versions and, to some extent, from the Anglo-Norman and Middle English retellings that Barbour undoubtedly knew. Among the personal names, only those of the protagonist and his adversary father appear altered. While the emir’s name—changed from Balan to Lawyne—may reflect a relatively minor variant, the protagonist’s name, rendered as Ferambrace in Barbour’s account, might instead represent a descriptive or metaphorical reinterpretation of the original.

James Fenimore Cooper’s Novel "The Pioneers", or the Burden of Names

Volker Kohlheim — 2025-10-01

James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Pioneers (1823), the first of five featuring Natty Bumppo—also known as Leather-stocking—introduces the character as an aging, talkative frontiersman. It is only in the subsequent four novels that he acquires the legendary stature for which he is best known. The central narrative of The Pioneers follows the return, under an assumed name, of Oliver Effingham, a noble-born hero seeking to reclaim his rightful inheritance, now held by an apparent usurper, Judge Marmaduke Temple. The story unfolds in the fictional frontier settlement of Templeton, a clear homage to the historical Cooperstown—founded by the author’s father and fondly remembered by Cooper as the setting of his own childhood. The novel is notable for its richly detailed setting and its cast of characters, each bearing names that are both socially and personally resonant. Yet Cooper goes beyond simply assigning appropriate names; he also explores the social dynamics of naming, revealing how names are frequently used in ironic, mocking, or derogatory ways. For some characters, their proper names become a genuine burden.

How Beautiful Adventure Is... Between Rocambolesque Feats and Little Tigers: Names from 19th-Century Adventure Literature in Italian Lexicography

Roberto Randaccio — 2025-10-01

This essay examines the names of several characters—both major and minor—from adventure novels published in the nineteenth century. These names, due to their widespread popularity or notoriety, have given rise to antonomasias still in use today in the Italian language, to the point of being recorded in Italian dictionaries. Names such as Rocambole, the Count of Monte Cristo, and Tartarin have left a lasting mark on the collective imagination, leading in turn to the formation of enduring linguistic expressions, frequently used in both everyday speech and journalistic writing. Some of these names enjoyed only brief relevance and have since fallen into obsolescence; others are surprisingly absent from dictionaries. Yet a few continue, more than a century and a half later, to hold a stable and significant place in our lexicons.

Adventures, languages and naming systems

Jean-Louis Vaxelaire — 2025-10-01

Studies have shown that onomastic systems often align with specific literary genres—but can this also be said of the adventure novel? To address this question, we examine a selection of works that, while exhibiting the typical features of adventure fiction, also belong to other genres: Hobb’s Ship of Magic, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and Blas de Roblès’s L’Île du Point Némo. We also consider the translations of these novels to assess whether the semantic weight of proper names is preserved across languages. Hobb’s onomastics are grounded in the English language; Tolkien’s are intricately crafted to support the invented languages and reinforce the internal coherence of his fictional universe; while Blas de Roblès employs names of varied origins to reflect the global trajectory of his characters and to underscore the parodic dimension of his narrative. Ultimately, each onomastic system serves a distinct purpose, closely aligned with the author’s literary aims.

Turandot: How Did Puccini Pronounce It?

Marco Beghelli — 2025-10-01

A century after Giacomo Puccini composed his final opera, Turandot (1926), debate over its correct pronunciation continues. Linguistic scholars advocate for a return to its Persian roots, Tūrān-dukht, insisting on a clear articulation of the final t. Traditional audiences, however, remain steadfast in their omission of the final consonant, clinging to an entrenched habit. This article delves into the reasoning behind Puccini’s preferred pronunciation when setting the opera to music, drawing on historical sources that illuminate the practices of the composer and his early performers.

Milan Majtán and the Beginnings of Literary Onomastics in Slovakia

Iveta Valentová — 2025-10-01

The article highlights the significant contributions of Slovak linguist and onomastician Milan Majtán (1934–2018) to the field of literary onomastics. His theoretical and methodological foundations played a crucial role in shaping the study of literary proper names in Slovakia. As a pioneer in the discipline, Majtán’s work inspired a new generation of linguists and literary scholars to further develop and expand the field. The text explores the key characteristics of his research, with particular emphasis on his studies of literary onomastics and the distinctive features of proper names in the works of Slovak authors, as identified through his scholarship. In conclusion, the article notes that Majtán’s contributions to literary onomastics were republished in the volume Štúdie z literárnej onomastiky (“Studies in Literary Onomastics”) to commemorate the 90th anniversary of his birth.

Ricordo di Luigi Surdich e Giusi Baldissone

Luigi Sasso — 2025-10-01