On the origin and persistence of praedial toponyms in central Italy

This paper recognises the origin of the current series of praedial place names, through successive transcripts, in the Roman land ownership system of republican and imperial times, experimenting with some methodological aspects of the use of digital cartographic sources. Acknowledging the widespread presence of praedial place names in modern cartography and medieval notarial sources, the research reconstitutes the history of the land ownership system, considering the landscape as “quella forma che l'uomo, nel corso ed ai fini delle sue attività produttive agricole, coscientemente e sistematicamente imprime al paesaggio naturale” [“the form that man, in the course and for the purpose of agricultural production, consciously and systematically imposes to the natural landscape”] (Sereni, 1961, p. 29). The two sets of data, morphology and toponymy, are proposed here as an antonymic dyad representing the symbolic relationship between population and territory. The research considers two case studies: the valley of the river Savio, and the territory belonging to the abbey of Subiaco in the Lazio region. After the close examination of toponyms in the Italian official map (scale 1:25,000) a list of praedial names was selected and, with a GIS, was correlated with another set of place names extracted from medieval notarial documents (IV-XII cent.). For some of these place names it was possible to track back the history of the site to the Roman praedium and in three cases to identify the Roman owner, through the analysis of literary and epigraphical sources. Starting from these three specific praedia it was therefore possible to infer the origin and the history of praedial place names in central Italy. Nevertheless, the persistence of these names until today was possible only through the medieval notarial transcriptions, showing some continuity in the land ownership system through the Middle Ages.