The toponimy of Walser immigration in the Italian Alps since the 13th century. A survey in the Formazza Valley

[Autom. eng. transl.] The Walser are a population of Alemannic origin who, starting from the twelfth century, migrated in successive waves to western Austria, Liechtenstein, southwestern Switzerland and finally colonized some valleys of the western Italian Alps. Here, their peculiar ability to adapt to the difficult environmental conditions of the high mountains, allowed them to live in relative isolation and to preserve their cultural characteristics, including the language, belonging to the Germanic lineage. In the first half of the twentieth century, the economic development of the localities at the bottom of the valley pushed the Walser to emigrate from their mountain locations which slowly depopulated. The twenty years of Fascism tried to erase the traces of their culture and today the communities that still preserve their own language are reduced to a few individuals. Toponymy, often linked to oral tradition, has also been ignored by official cartography and has only been attempted in recent decades to recover it. However, the work of the linguists has not yet produced a complete cartography of the Walser toponyms. This work represents a first attempt to reconstruct the Walser cartography in the municipality of Formazza, whose population has largely still preserved the Germanic cultural characteristics, proposing a method for reconstructing, in the future, the toponymy of the entire Italian Walser area. Abstract