The map of Italy holds almost eight thousand municipalities and tens of thousands of hamlets, and in a list that long it was inevitable that a few names would make people smile. They really are on the road signs, and the people who live there stopped finding them funny a long time ago. Behind each one there is a serious story, often documented for centuries, sometimes with three competing explanations and no winner. Here are the twelve strangest, taken from the Almanacco dei Campanili, BigItalia's daily almanac, each with its full entry.
The twelve names
1. Bastardo, a hamlet of Giano dell'Umbria
On the Via Flaminia, in the province of Perugia, an old post station was known as the Osteria del Bastardo, the Bastard's Inn: the village grew around the inn and inherited its sign. As early as 1933 there was talk of changing the name, and proposals were not lacking, Villa Romana, Lignilia and even Termoelettropoli. Not one of them passed (2 September).
2. Strangolagalli, in the Ciociaria
The name means «strangle roosters», and it has three explanations and no certainty: a round-shaped village, from Byzantine Greek joined to a Lombard word; the fourteenth-century nickname of a lord who strangled roosters; the villa of a Roman patrician named Astragalo Gallo, the guess of a seventeenth-century scholar. The town's coat of arms does not help the defence: a rampant fox clutching a rooster (19 September).
3. Casa del Diavolo, a hamlet of Perugia
The Devil's House had more than a thousand residents at the 2001 census. Scholars keep three leads open for the name: an old den of brigands and idlers, the devastation left by Hannibal's troops, the discovery of medieval urns holding the remains of children who died unbaptised. The hamlet does have a church, though, dedicated to Saint Rita (9 September).
4. Bomba, in Abruzzo
Overlooking the artificial lake of the Sangro, the village has no explosive in its name: scholars derive it from an onomatopoeic Latin word, a rumble, probably of water. The lake below the houses is an addition of 1957. Bertrando and Silvio Spaventa, patriots of the Risorgimento, were born here (15 September).
5. Paperino, a hamlet of Prato
Paperino is the Italian name of Donald Duck. On the southern edge of Prato there is a thirteenth-century church dedicated to Saint Martin and a name documented since the twelfth century, probably from the papyrus reeds that grew in this wet plain. The Disney theory is famous and false: when the duck reached Italy, Paperino had already existed for eight centuries (3 September).
6. California, a hamlet of Lesmo
One of the three hamlets of this Brianza town, in the province of Monza, with its houses and even its own church, dedicated to the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple. How the name of the American state landed among these hills, the sources do not say. People who live here can say, without lying, that they live in California (10 September).
7. Polenta, a hamlet of Bertinoro
The name suggests the dinner table; the history speaks of castles and of Dante. The castle of Polenta gave its name to the Da Polenta family, lords of Ravenna from 1275 to 1441: Francesca da Rimini was one of them, and it was Guido Novello da Polenta who hosted Dante in his last years. The hamlet keeps the parish church of San Donato, documented since 911, to which Carducci dedicated an ode (28 September).
8. Purgatorio and Paradiso, from Custonaci to Pocenia
Purgatorio, Purgatory, is a hamlet of Custonaci, in the province of Trapani, road sign included. Paradiso lies at the other end of the country: a hamlet of Pocenia, in Friuli, some seventy souls, two historic villas and a small round seventeenth-century church. In between lies the whole of Italy, and for once the journey from Purgatory to Paradise can be made by car (20 September).
9. Ne and Re, the shortest
The shortest municipal name in Italy fits in two letters, and the record is shared. Ne, in the Graveglia valley inland from Genoa, comes from the Latin nemus, wood, with a paradox: a village called Ne does not exist, since it is a scattered municipality whose town hall stands in Conscenti (5 September). Re, in the Vigezzo valley, is the last municipality before Switzerland: a tiny name and an enormous sanctuary, the Madonna del Sangue with its 51-metre dome (2 October). The third of the group is Vo', near Padua.
10. San Valentino in Abruzzo Citeriore, the longest
At the opposite end, in the province of Pescara: thirty letters, the longest municipal name in Italy. It is too long for some forms, and for certain payments residents have to use other channels. The village lies between the Maiella and the Morrone, partly inside the national park (13 September).
11. Pocapaglia, in the Roero
The name sounds like a shrug, «little straw», and instead describes a landscape: the Rocche del Roero, ravines and badlands opened in the sand when the river Tanaro changed its course. Folklore prefers a quicker version: Beelzebub himself is said to have dug the hills in a single night (12 September).
12. Mezzojuso, inland from Palermo
Two stories compete for the name: half the village «down below» the square, on the steep hill where the houses stand, or Manzil Yusuf, the farmstead of Joseph from the Arab age, mentioned by the geographer Idrisi. Around 1444 Albanian soldiers settled there, and much of the village still keeps the Byzantine rite of its founders (16 September).
Off the list: two names that mislead
Ventimiglia does not count twenty miles: the name comes from Albium Intemelium, the capital of the Intemelii Ligurians, shortened over the centuries. The misunderstanding had an easy life, though, because some road signs abbreviated it as XXmiglia and the town really is about twenty nautical miles from Nice (24 September).
Sanremo has no Saint Remo: the saint is Romulus, a fifth-century bishop of Genoa, and it was the Ligurian dialect that transformed him. The spelling was fought over until yesterday: a royal decree of 1928 fixed «San Remo» in two words, and only between 1991 and 2002, with the town statute, did the single word become the only correct form (5 October).
Where to go from here
Every town on this list has its own page on BigItalia, with its history, the places to see and the festivals. Place names are one of the columns of the Almanacco dei Campanili: almost every day a new one comes out, and the list of apparent jokes is still long.