Talk:Comune

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Comune is within the scope of WikiProject Italy, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to articles on Italy on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
Start	This article has been rated as Start-Class on the Project's quality scale. (If you rated the article please give a short summary at comments to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses.)
High	This article has been rated as High-importance on the importance scale.

[edit] Comune / Commune

There seems to be some confusion as to whether "commune" is a legitimate translation of comune. The OED is a little vague; it only mentions "commune" as specifically a French thing, but has a catchall definition that includes almost any kind of communal association, typically referring in the modern day to hippies sharing a house. :-) It would be the most careful of us just to use comune/comuni everywhere. Stan 11:51, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I second that. (The French commune and the Italian comune share historical roots and in their modern forms are similar; but the English word "commune" sets up strange ideas in the mind of the reader, might as well take advantage of the Italian word, at least, being spelled differently.) Bill 22:36, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I agree. "Commune" is an old-fashioned English spelling and is not correct for an Italian comune. The word "comune" has great historical significance in Italy. The closest equivalent would be municipality or township. The spelling of commune, with 2 m-s, has an immediate connotation of Hippie commune or Israeli kibbutz to anyone under 60 who is experienced, well read and not insulated from current events. Basically the spelling of an Italian comune using 2 mms (commune) is a hold over, generally used by elderly people or people who are more provincial. It is incorrect to use it in reference to an Italian comune even though one will find that definition in some archaic Italian to English dictionaries, which are simply reprints or regurgitations of dictionaries from the 1950s or earlier. Some people use it because an English "spell-check" in Word and other such programs gives a prompt to change comune to commune. This does not make it correct. There are, to this day "hippie communes" in North America, Australia, UK, Belgium, Netherlands and many other places where the "60s" live on or have been recreated by younger generations. They are not identical to an Italian Comune. pmn 06:43, 17 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Consolidation of Comuni

While there is a trend in that direction, it is partly offset by the opposite trend — the occasional comune splitting off — and certainly, it would be wrong to attribute the frazioni and the rural areas inside comuni as being principally, or even very often, due to consolidation. Maybe we need to make it clear that there is no such thing as an unincorporated area (as are common in the USA): every place in Italy, including farmland, belongs to one comune or other; I can't figure out how to state this without unnecessary elaboration. . . . At any rate the composition of the comuni is primarily due to incorporating uninhabited and sparsely inhabited areas. — Bill 00:34, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

I always thought that there has been a huge commune-merging in Italy in recent decades, like what happened in Germany and Belgium. Does somebody has any informations about it ? Revas 01/06/05