Sunday italian toponomastics
On this balmy yet rainy Sunday afternoon, I was planning to transcribe a couple of Hexes for my ongoing Mythic Bastionland solo campaign from my notebook into a blog post; instead I moved towards a random train to Dublin city centre and back. While waiting for the train and smoking a cigarette an inspiring post by Magnolia Keep ended up under my eyes.
On the train back, I saw a Garda car (the police, here in Ireland) and suddenly felt nostalgia for my hometown in Italy, which - non casually - sits on the shores of a magnificent lake which shares its name with the police here: Lago di Garda. On the 16th of August, there, the sun would be shining, not like here where the oppression of stuffy grey clouds pushes on my neck with the weight of seventeen oxen.
In any case, Garda - as in irish police - is short for An Garda Síochána (in Irish, guardians of peace). Garda here comes from Old French guarde, from guarder (“to guard”), from Frankish *wardēn, from Proto-Germanic *wardāną.
In the case of my lake, it comes from Longobard warda, ‘guard post, observation point’, which is unsurprising given that starting A.D.568, the lake sat in between the lands of the Longobards and those of the Romans; additionally - Lombard - the language the Longobards spoke, is of proto-germanic derivation.
Once the communion of terms fell into place, I compared it to the possibilities that Lizzie from Magnolia Keep gives in her blog post, and found a Springfield for myself.
The origin of the name of my hometown Rivoltella - the one I long for and suppose to be sun-kissed right now - is not, in fact, fully certain (however, in any case, falling into Springfield territory): some say it comes from a 'tall shoreline (riva alta)', others, from the fact that there once stood a Roman mansio ad flexum, a resting station on the road between Brescia, Verona and Trento, sitting on a svolta or rivolta, a turn in the Roman road.
And since we're on the subject: the Selva Lugana lending its name to this blog was a dense forest:
The Selva Lucana (Lugana) extended from Rivoltella, and particularly from San Rocco, as far as Peschiera, and to the south as far as Castiglione, Solferino, Cavriana and the Mincio. The undulations of the terrain are of frontal morainic formation, lowered and broken up: the subsoil is clayey with a thin layer of topsoil, in which the vine takes root very well, and the low-lying ground forms an immense reedbed. Peat layers are not uncommon, and at considerable depth prehistoric Stone Age tools are found. The history of the area does indeed reach back to distant times: in 1875 a prehistoric bronze object was discovered here.
The Selva appears in the crest of the town Rivoltella (here with the town colors), which can be described as: an oak tree growing on a grassy base, flanked by a boar rooting to the right and a roe deer to the left, rampant against the trunk and holding a branch in its mouth. The reason the Selva mattered enough to be represented in the town crest is that for many years the town's main economic resource was hunting there, which brought with it a great deal of interesting lore.