Reading a river valley through its place names

Place names outlast the people who give them. A farm, a stream or a hill can keep its name for centuries, and the name holds traces of how earlier settlers spoke. Silvio Pieri’s study, printed in Rome in 1919 by the press of the Accademia dei Lincei, applies that idea to the valley of the Arno in Tuscany.

His method treats each name as a document. Set beside older recorded forms, a familiar modern name can reveal an earlier one underneath, and with it something about who settled a place and how the local language changed. It belongs to a major strand of Italian scholarship, historical and regional philology, the study of a language through its records, and it reads as much like local history as like linguistics.

This copy is in a sound binding, with moderate toning to the paper. Its folding map of the valley’s place names is present and can be opened and used, though the folds have not been checked for tears, and the text and indexes have not yet been collated.