by Gabriele Papik

Considering Christmas, which means birth: this is the perfect time to keep the promise made to readers of a historical overview, in several episodes, appropriately named, unexpected or outright bizarre in which Romagna was the melting pot. Not just a victim of curiosities: onomastics, the discipline that studies names, knows how to tell different obsessions and social customs over time. Let’s start with the early 1800s when even in Cesena, among the people, names other than the saints of the calendar appeared. For example, Malvina. From where he is? From the then famous Scottish novel: But how did it penetrate into people who were almost always illiterate at the time and then passed down through the family? To euphemism, which means sound good: You don’t need to be rich to appreciate new and unusual things. Same for Euphrosia. It was the name of a famous handyman who lived a century earlier at Tavernello (Via Tavernelle), a character famous among children because he taught how to make and fly a kite: the name Euphrosia comes from Greek and then late Latin. has come from. And it means “one who gives pleasure”. Sometimes there is some luck in the name. Meanwhile, in the early 1800s, Romagna, still under the heels of the Papal State, was boiling like a cucuma of coffee. Vincenzo Fatiboni, the Carbonaro of Cesena harshly persecuted – the plaque at his birthplace above the Giannini tobacconist in Giardini – called his daughters Zelide, Cleto, Elettra and Demarista: impeccable names, drawn from Greek culture, to anger the priests. For. Next comes the epic of Risorgimento, in which comes a flood of names Garibaldi and Mazinian. And here the rebellion against the specific religious registry of the “ancient regime” comes to the fore. Here is Anita, Garibaldi’s proud companion, who died of fever in Romagna, the land of Mantana, the city theater of a Garibaldi battle, the Adera, the plant of allegiance, the symbol of the Republicans. In masculine: Menotti and Ricotti, Garibaldi’s son, Mazzini as a proper name: Koi still. A Cessna Republican called his children Idea, Pensiero, and Ultima, because he didn’t want any more. What was that father’s name, by name? Nino Bixio, of course. Then came the wind of opera, thanks to the Municipal Theater and its sentimental gallery. Did the family rejoice for Verdi and the Italian melodrama? Here Radoms (Aida’s term) and Aida for women, the rarest Amneris (Aida’s rival), Zyra (Donizetti’s work), Norma (Bellini’s work: Curiosity, the name Norma was invented by its librettist, Felice Romani ), Valley, or Vallu (the famous work by Catalani in the early 1900s). On the other hand, from those who loved Wagner, Siegfried was born and, moreover, from German culture, Werther and even some Gontrano. But other hot social themes had entered the scene: anarchists and socialists who programmatically named their children identifiable by barricades: starting with Benito’s name, a story with an all-Romagna flavor, the implications of which are not always known. Huh. We’ll talk about that next Sunday, along with a sequence of other surprising names, but not too much when re-reading against historical light. And sometimes still around: that would be fun.