Da Carmniell o' srngr a Semmentavecchia e Taplass. Tra soprannomi e 'gentilizi' dell'area metropolitana e isolana: valori culturali e documentari del territorio partenopeo

This paper aims to describe and comment a corpus of about 400 obituary posters collected in Naples, Ischia and the Penisola sorrentina, all containing the dialectal nickname of the dead. Such texts, whose phenomenology has no correspondence in other metropolitan areas, represent an interesting form of memory, as they constitute real ‘paper monuments’ interlocking the public sphere with the private one, which deserve to be studied both from a sociolinguistic and an anthropological point of view, also because this tradition is certainly receding. As a matter of fact, such texts testify aspects of Neapolitan popular culture, for instance mentioning ancient crafts, as 'o cuzzcar, 'o graunar, a gassusar, etc., or, as in Forio d’Ischia, in reporting parallel family names, whose semantics or motivation are no more transparent, as Semmentavecchia, Settiqua', Spstigghie, Taplass, Terzofiasco, etc. Our texts, besides providing interesting material from a linguistic point of view, bear also witness for the survival of archaic forms of representing a personal identity and show popular ways of celebrating the dead, which are no less ritual than higher forms of commemoration, as gravestones or obituaries in newspapers. Actually, our paper intends to be a pilot study, introducing a wider and more systematic research.