Ordinate, ascisse e curve.L’onomastica della Venere dei terremoti di Manlio Santanelli

Abstract

The study focuses on the onomastics of La Venere dei terremoti, novel by Manlio Santanelli, showing an intense and hyperbolic style, great variety of idioms and registers. Santanelli enjoys the pleasure of mentioning and connoting characters by using wordplays and semantic references to allude to their personali- ties. The surname of Luigino Impagliazzo refers to the puppet he is in the hands of his mother, while Fortuna (the Italian for fate, chance), object of Luigino’s desire, represents the unrestrained component of life, celebrated in Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto. Moreover, in Santanelli’s work of fiction, the names and the defined descriptions related to them are signs of the controversial relation between the Neapolitan storyteller and his hometown, damaged and morally compromised by the earthquake in 1980.