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Why Italy’s government is angry about a ski resort changing its name

The world-famous Italian ski resort of Cervinia reverted to its pre-Fascist name of Le Breuil on Thursday, sparking an outcry from members of the nationalist government.

Published: 30 November 2023 16:04 CET
Why Italy's government is angry about a ski resort changing its name
The ski resort known as Breuil-Cervinia, or just Cervinia, has moved to switch its name to Le Breuil as of November 30th, 2023. (Photo by Marco BERTORELLO / AFP)

From Thursday, November 30th, the village in Val d’Aosta known worldwide as Cervinia will instead be called Le Breuil.

“Cervinia will not disappear in the collective memory. It is one of the most famous ski resorts in the Alps,” Jean-Antoine Maquignaz, a former mayor who began the process for the recognition of historical names in the region, told the Turin edition of Corriere della Sera.

But, he said, “the culture of the area must be taken into account. And the names must be preserved, as well as their long history.”

Le Breuil was changed to Cervinia by Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime in 1934 under a drive to remove all foreign-sounding place names.

READ ALSO: Italy’s culture minister slams foreign words in Italian language… by using foreign words

Many comuni (municipalities) in the Alpine region of Val d’Aosta, which borders France and Switzerland, had their French names replaced with Italian ones.

The process of changing the town’s name back began in 2011, and Valle d’Aosta’s regional president, Renzo Testolin, signed a decree last September which formalised the switch.

But Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy (FdI) party on Thursday issued an angry statement which said the name change was “evidently the result of ideology, out of time and place,” news agency Ansa reported.

The party said ministers would meet with regional authorities to “resolve the problem” in the coming days.

FdI Deputy House Whip Fabio Rampelli said the government must get the name changed back, describing the move as “anti-Italian” and claiming it went against the Constitution.

READ ALSO: ‘Anglomania’: Why Italy’s government wants to restrict use of English words

Tourism minister Daniela Santanchè urged the local council to “think again” saying that the winter tourism industry would be “heavily penalised by dropping a brand name that is known across the world”.

But the 700 or so local residents may have more immediate concerns: the name change is expected to result in a mountain of bureaucracy, as inhabitants will now need to update their identity cards, birth certificates, and land registry data, Corriere reported.

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POLITICS

Italy’s Meloni breaks silence on youth wing’s fascist comments

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on Friday condemned offensive comments made by members of her far-right party's youth wing to an undercover journalist, breaking weeks of silence over the scandal.

Published: 28 June 2024 16:19 CEST
Italy's Meloni breaks silence on youth wing's fascist comments

The investigation published this month by Italian news website Fanpage included video of members of the National Youth, the junior wing of Brothers of Italy, which has post-fascist roots, showing support for Nazism and fascism.

In images secretly filmed by an undercover journalist in Rome, the members are seen performing fascist salutes, chanting the Nazi “Sieg Heil” greeting and shouting “Duce” in support of the late Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

Opposition parties have been calling on Meloni to denounce the behaviour since the first part of the investigation aired on June 13.

Those calls intensified after a second part was published this week with fresh highly offensive comments directed at Jewish people and people of colour.

READ ALSO: Italy’s ruling party shrugs off youth wing’s Fascist salutes

Party youths in particular mocked Ester Mieli, a Brothers of Italy senator and a former spokeswoman for Rome’s Jewish community.

“Whoever expresses racist, anti-Semitic or nostalgic ideas are in the wrong place, because these ideas are incompatible with Brothers of Italy,” Meloni told reporters in Brussels.

“There is no ambiguity from my end on the issue,” she said.

Two officials from the movement have stepped down over the investigation, which also caught one youth party member calling for the leader of the centre-left Democratic Party (PD), Elly Schlein, to be “impaled”.

But Meloni also told off journalists for filming young people making offensive comments directed at Jewish people and people of colour, saying they were “methods… of an (authoritarian) regime”.

Fanpage responded that it was “undercover journalism”.

Meloni was a teenage activist with the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), formed by Mussolini supporters after World War II.

Brothers of Italy traces its roots to the MSI.

The most right-wing leader to take office since 1945, Meloni has sought to distance herself from her party’s legacy without entirely renouncing it. She kept the party’s tricolour flame logo – which was also used by MSI and inspired France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen when he created the far-right National Front party in 1972.

The logo’s base, some analysts say, represents Mussolini’s tomb, which tens of thousands of people visit every year.

Several high-ranking officials in the party do not shy away from their admiration of the fascist regime, which imposed anti-Semitic laws in 1938.

Brothers of Italy co-founder and Senate president Ignazio La Russa collects Mussolini statues.

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