List of Celtic place names in Italy

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The Celtic toponymy of Italy are the place names that, through the reconstruction of the historical and linguistic origin, are attributed to language of Celts allocated once in Italy, between the northern regions and in some areas of central Italy.

Contents

Small Celtic lexicon
ambe- ‘river’
banna-, benna- ‘tip, top’
-bona ‘foundation’, ‘oppidum’
briga ‘hill’, ‘fortress’
brīva ‘bridge’
cambo- ‘curve, meander’
cumba 'Cavity', 'valley'
dubus, dubis ‘black’
dūno- ‘fortress’, ‘mountain’
duro- 'square, market'
eburo- ‘yew (sacred tree)’
-ialo- ‘glade’
lāno- 'plain' / 'full'
-late ‘swamp’
lindo- ‘liquid’, ‘pool’
mago- ‘field’, ‘market’
nantu-, nanto- ‘valley’, ‘creek’
nemeto- ‘sacred grove’, ‘sanctuary’
-rāte, rātis- ‘wall’, ‘forte’
redo- ‘to ride’, ‘to travel’
rito- ‘woad’
verna, verno, sberna, ‘alder’
vindo- ‘white’, ‘bright’, ‘sacred’

It deals with linguistic varieties of "fragmentary attestation " from two strands of Celtic peoples: 1) the oldest, perhaps already settled in the Bronze Age, the ancestors of the Celts of Golasecca culture, who spoke a language (the so-called Lepontic language) which is more archaic, more conservative Gaulish language; 2) groups of Gauls that penetrated in Italy in the fourth century BC (and probably also in earlier stages) .

Groups and categories of place names

The linguist Giovan Battista Pellegrini [1] (1921-2007), has divided the toponymy of Celtic origin in the four "strands":

  1. «those attested since the ancient times»;
  2. «attested in medieval times (but attributed with certainty to the Gaulish strand)»;
  3. «Predial place names with -acum likely of Gallo-Latin origin»;
  4. «derived from names of Celtic origin with installations which may be even recent and therefore of modest historical interest». [2]

The place names in the first group are names that document pre-Roman Celtic settlements, especially Gaulish, or foundations not before the Roman period. Usually found in forms hellenized and/or Latinized, both in morphology (Celtic endings replaced by Greek and Latin ones) and in phonetics and spelling (see for example the case of the name Milan). In many cases, we have received more variants of those ancient place names. Everything depends on whether they are mentioned by Greek and Latin authors (who in quoting or copy second hand may have altered some names), or used in other written sources, mostly inscriptions and routes, that of Celtic names report either adaptations (and alterations) operated by different Latin speakers or those adopted by the Roman state, in its different parts and historical phases.

The second group includes those place names which, attested in forms transmitted from medieval documents, while not appearing in Greek-Latin inscriptions or authors, can be attributed equally to the Gauls or the Gallo-Romans, so attesting their allocation in ancient times. They are of more ancient formation than the names of the fourth strand (microtoponyms) and may be also than the names of the third one(predials).

The third group includes Gallo-Roman land (rustic names of terrains) or predial toponyms, formed by an ancient anthroponym (but not always Celtic) and one of the Gaulish suffixes -ācum, -āca, -īcum, -īca. It is a group that was productive in the early Middle Ages too, when predials with Celtic suffix from Germanic anthroponyms were born. They may be associated with place names consisting of an ancient Celtic anthroponym + suffix -ate, probably from an ancient -ates, with the value of ‘the men or the relatives and descendants of’ (home of a race or family). This especially where -ate, or sometimes -ato, They may have replaced an older Celtic predial suffix; for example in the case of Lovernato: *Lovernaco (vico Luernaco, attested in 807), from personal name *Louernus (Louernius or Louernacus) < louernos ‘fox’.

The fourth group is the largest. It consists usually of microtoponyms, that is, names of smaller towns, cadastral units, ecc., derived from common words (appellatives) [3] of Celtic or rather Celtic-Latin origin; names that can be found in most topographic maps rather than in road atlases (for example, the Lombard Broletti, from Gaulish *brogilos ‘orchard’). In his articles Pellegrini lists several appellatives that are derived from these toponyms: «beccus, betulla, broga, brogilos, brūcus, cumbo, *camminus, cumba, *glasina, *lanca, ligita, nantu, *pettia, *rica, *tamisium, *tegia, verna ecc.», ambli and *barros. [4]

The membership to these groups will be indicated at the end of each entry with, respectively, the following groups of symbols: [I], [II], [III], [IV].

Like all toponyms, even the Celtic ones can be divided in categories:

List of rivers

Many rivers preserve old Celtic and pre-Roman Indo-European names, most notably larger ones:

List of cities

See also

Related Research Articles

Alaunus or Alaunius is a Gaulish god of healing and prophecy. His name is known from inscriptions found in Lurs, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence in southern France and in Mannheim in western Germany. In the latter inscription, Alaunus is used as an epithet of Mercury. The feminine form Alauna is at the origin of many place-names and hydronyms across Europe, including the Roman-era names of Valognes in Normandy, Maryport and Watercrook in Cumbria, Alcester in Warwickshire, Ardoch in Perthshire, and Learchild and the River Aln in Northumberland.

Belisama is a Gallo-Roman goddess. She was identified by Roman commentators with Minerva by interpretatio romana. The name also appears in various river names of Gauls and Britain, including Belisama and Le Blima (Tarn).

Lepontii

The Lepontii were an ancient Celtic people occupying portions of Rhaetia in the Alps during the late Bronze Age/Iron Age. Recent archeological excavations and their association with the Golasecca culture and Canegrate culture point to a Celtic affiliation. From the analysis of their language and the place names of the old Lepontic areas, it was hypothesized that these people represent a layer similar to that Celtic but previous to the Gallic penetration in the Po valley. The suggestion has been made that the Lepontii may have been celticized Ligurians.

The Ligurian language was spoken in pre-Roman times and into the Roman era by an ancient people of north-western Italy and current south-eastern France known as the Ligures.

Cisalpine Gaul Roman province

Cisalpine Gaul was the part of Italy inhabited by Celts (Gauls) during the 4th and 3rd centuries BC.

Lepontic language Ancient Celtic language

Lepontic is an ancient Alpine Celtic language that was spoken in parts of Rhaetia and Cisalpine Gaul between 550 and 100 BC. Lepontic is attested in inscriptions found in an area centered on Lugano, Switzerland, and including the Lake Como and Lake Maggiore areas of Italy.

Eburones Gallic-Germanic tribe

The Eburones were a Gallic-Germanic tribe dwelling in the northeast of Gaul, in what is now the southern Netherlands, eastern Belgium and the German Rhineland, in the period immediately preceding the Roman conquest of the region. Though living in Gaul, they were also described as being both Belgae and Germani.

The Volcae were a Gallic tribal confederation constituted before the raid of combined Gauls that invaded Macedonia c. 270 BC and fought the assembled Greeks at the Battle of Thermopylae in 279 BC. Tribes known by the name Volcae were found simultaneously in southern Gaul, Moravia, the Ebro valley of the Iberian Peninsula, and Galatia in Anatolia. The Volcae appear to have been part of the late La Tène material culture, and a Celtic identity has been attributed to the Volcae, based on mentions in Greek and Latin sources as well as onomastic evidence. Driven by highly mobile groups operating outside the tribal system and comprising diverse elements, the Volcae were one of the new ethnic entities formed during the Celtic military expansion at the beginning of the 3rd century BC. Collecting in the famous excursion into the Balkans, ostensibly, from the Greek point of view, to raid Delphi, a branch of the Volcae split from the main group on the way into the Balkans and joined two other tribes, the Tolistobogii and the Trocmi, to settle in central Anatolia and establish a new identity as the Galatians.

Insubres Gallic tribe

The Insubres or Insubri were an ancient Celtic population settled in Insubria, in what is now the Italian region of Lombardy. They were the founders of Mediolanum (Milan). Though completely Gaulish at the time of Roman conquest, they were the result of the fusion of pre-existing Ligurian and Celtic population with Gaulish tribes.

Icovellauna was a Celtic goddess worshiped in Gaul. Her places of worship included an octagonal temple at Le Sablon in Metz, originally built over a spring, from which five inscriptions dedicated to her have been recovered, and Trier, where Icovellauna was honored in an inscription in the Altbachtal temple complex. Both of these places lie in the valley of the river Moselle of eastern Gaul in what are now Lorraine in France and Rhineland-Palatinate in Germany. One such inscription was, somewhat unusually, inscribed on a copper tablet in Roman cursive letters.

Mediomatrici Belgic tribe

The Mediomatrici were according to Caesar a Gaulish tribe at the frontier to the Belgicae dwelling in the present-day regions Lorraine, Upper Moselle during the Iron Age and the Roman period.

Bormida (river) Italian river

The Bormida is a river of north-west Italy.

Bubona Roman goddess of cattle

In ancient Roman religion, Bubona is thought to have been a goddess of cattle, but she is named only by Saint Augustine.

The Orobii were a Celto-Ligurian tribe dwelling around present-day Como and Bergamo during the Iron Age.

Cadorino dialect

Cadorino, a dialect of Ladin, is the language of Cadore, at the feet of the Dolomites in the province of Belluno. It is distinct from neighboring dialects, and though it has received relatively little attention, it is important to an understanding of the linguistic history of northern Italy.

Pierre-Yves Lambert is a French linguist and scholar of Celtic studies. He is a researcher at the CNRS and a lecturer at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Celtic linguistics and philology. Lambert is the director of the journal Études Celtiques.

The Ambisontes were a Gallic tribe dwelling in the upper Salzach valley during the Roman period.

The Vergunni were a Gallic tribe dwelling in the valley of the Riou, near the Verdon river, during the Iron Age.

References

  1. G. B. Pellegrini had identified and collected a prominent part of the Celtic toponymy of Italy already in 1981, in the article Toponomastica celtica nell'Italia settentrionale, in I Celti d'Italia (edited by E. Campanile). Later, he reproposed his article in Ricerche di toponomastica veneta (1987) and in the manual Toponomastica italiana (1990), and a few years later he was one of the authors of the Dizionario di toponomastica (1990) edited by UTET. Oltre a queste opere di riferimento fondamentali, sia per ulteriori approfondimenti e integrazioni, sia per spiegazioni etimologiche più recenti o confronti con toponimi simili riscontrabili in altri Paesi (si pensi, ad esempio, a Bologna e Boulogne-sur-Mer), si possono consultare poi i lavori di altri linguisti e filologi: P. Anreiter, P. de Bernardo Stempel, X. Delamarre, L. Fleuriot, St. Gendron, G. Frau, Ch.-J. Guyonvarc'h, J. Lacroix, P.-Y. Lambert, M. Lejeune, E. Nègre, D. Olivieri, G. Rohlfs, G. D. Serra, P. Sims-Williams, M. G. Tibiletti Bruno, J. Vendryes, Fr. Villar, per ricordarne solo alcuni.
  2. Pellegrini (1990): p. 109.
  3. appellatives of local dialect.
  4. Pellegrini (1990): p. 129.

Further reading

Studies and collections of Celtic place names of Italy:

Other works: