Prontuario dei nomi locali dell'Alto Adige

[2] His work became more systematical with the founding of the Archivio per l' Alto Adige, through which he began to propose Italianized names for villages and geographical features in South Tyrol.

In 1916, a year after Italy, instigated by Allied promises and its own nationalist tendencies, entered the First World War, a commission was set up to find Italian names for places in the "soon to be conquered territory".

In June 1916, this list was published as Volume XV, Part II of Memorie of the Reale Società Geografica Italiana as well as in the Archivio per l'Alto Adige.

The main principles are: This methodology was however not applied in a uniform, consistent manner, so that often the choice of name were criticised to have been arbitrary — thus increasing the perception of imposition.

Instead of bringing back Alpine Romanity which spoke a Rhaeto-Romance language, he superimposed a distant substitute to the area, the Tuscan dialect, on which Standard Italian is based, rather than examining a variant of Italian dialect closer to the Alpine region (local Romanic traditions).

[6] Some academics like Giovan Battista Pellegrini or Johannes Kramer have positively judged the linguistic correctness of some of the new names.