Toponymy Quotes

“History shows that changes in sovereignity and state borders as a result of conflicts, as well as the rise and fall of political regimes in different parts of the planet, often forcibly divide local populations and/or artificially modify the names of places. At all latitudes, such measures arise from the political need to impose apparent homogeneity of culture and language, according to the model of the nation-State that does not tolerate exceptions to the supremacy of its founding values.”
― Giuseppe De Vergottini, Topographical Names and Protection of Linguistic Minorities

“The need for certainty, homogeneity, rationalization and good road traffic organization, as well as the need to clearly identify the areas of an urban centre, took a back seat in respect to prevailing nationalization, driven by the need to reduce minorities and to make the State's cultural structure almost monistic. Toponymy became a cultural asset, inevitably losing its function as a "historical turnaround, or scientific furnishings that might be compared, in the order of physical events, to the different deposits studied by geologists".”
― Davide Rossi, Topographical Names and Protection of Linguistic Minorities

“At worst, the centralizing effort to remove, where possible, homonymy — and antinomy — of a Peninsula that had always been subdivided into local communities and tiny States, gave vent to an unrestrained toponymical revision, that binned millennial heritage in the name of celebratory intentions, patriotic Risorgimental evocations and moralistic efforts. The two-year period that follows Unification can be defined as a period characterized by "a sort of gutting of street names, which ... disfigured to a certain degree the topographic structure of build-up areas", redrawing streets and squares, choosing heroes and models and consciously ignoring others.”
― Davide Rossi, Topographical Names and Protection of Linguistic Minorities