At a recent press conference Rome’s mayor slipped into the vernacular, referring to the city’s supreme court building as “Il Palazzaccio”. The nickname, which nearly all Romans use for the limestone-clad behemoth next to the Castel Sant’Angelo, literally means “ugly building”.
The over-complicated early-20th-century mix of statues, columns and fountains may draw the admiration of tourists but has long been sniffed at by Romans. And when the mayor himself calls it Il Palazzaccio, it is clear the name has stuck.
It points to an unusual Italian passion, dating back to the Middle Ages, for giving very literal, irreverent, evocative and often bawdy names to places.
Take Bastardo, a small town in Umbria which was named centuries ago after an inn of the same name owned by a man with uncertain parentage.
Or how about the Tuscan hamlet of Belsedere, which translates as “nice bottom”, and gets its name from a local legend about a vain noblewoman who loved to wear fine clothes until a witch made her vestments vanish when she was in church, leaving her naked.
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Elsewhere in Tuscany is Femminamorta, or “dead woman”, which got its name from the discovery of a female corpse there in the 17th century.
“There has been a tongue-in-cheek attitude to naming places in Italy,” Beppe Severgnini, a journalist and writer, said. “We don’t have Shakespeare but there is something very Shakespearean about it.”
The use of mirthful and brutally honest monikers also applied to surnames, Severgnini said, reeling off common names like Basso, Grasso, Calvi and Zuppi, which roughly translate respectively as short, fat, bald and limping.
“It’s true we have surnames linked to places of origin like Milanese and Napolitano, or jobs, but there is also a kind of non-politically correct attitude behind many surnames,” he said.
Other memorable Italian surnames are Bellabarba — meaning “beautiful beard” — and Gambacorta, or “short leg”, while the Lazio region is a hold-out for people with the surname Ammazzalamorte, or “slaying death”.
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Ermanno Paccagnini, a retired Italian literature professor, said that some parents were keen to give their children first names that exalted their odd surnames.
“My favourite was a woman called Culetto, which means small backside, whose first name was Rosa, meaning pink,” he said.
The love of literal names survives in Chioggia, near Venice, where nicknames have been de rigueur for centuries thanks to so many people having the same surname, including 8,000 residents called Boscolo.
Many of the nicknames added on derive from professions, but stand-outs include “mad”, “peasant” and “effeminate”. In 2009 the town won a legal battle to let residents make the nicknames a formal part of their surnames.
By comparison, the British have some decently creative surnames to offer — the former MI6 boss Sir Richard Dearlove comes to mind — but cannot match Italy for creativity, with trades and towns more likely to be the inspiration.
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There are plenty of weird and wonderful place names in the UK, but they are often an accidental evolution of words that have a more prosaic origin.
Crackpot in Yorkshire is not named after a lunatic but derives from the Old English words for a crow and a hole in the ground, while Great Cockup in the Lake District probably derives from the Old English for a valley filled with birds.
Severgnini said Italians were so surrounded by place names that tell a story that they tend to ignore them.
“I recently visited Scannabue in Lombardy with my granddaughter and realised it means ‘cutting the throat of an ox’. I think that by contrast, the British have been a bit more timid and formal with their names,” he said.