Toponomastica alpina in I piccoli maestri di Luigi Meneghello

Abstract

Our article deals with the toponyms used by Luigi Meneghello in his «I piccoli maestri». We raise the problem of just why the author uses so many place names in his account of an epic but grotesque civil war (he uses more than six hundred place names in a book of two hundred pages). That this is a deliberative stylistic choice is confirmed by the fact that Meneghello retained most of them during his endless rewriting of his work. We examine this feature in a wider context, and debate questions such as memory, territory bonds and reality reconstruction.