L’Atlante Toponomastico del Piemonte Montano (ATPM): storia, metodi e prospettive di ricerca

The Atlante Toponomastico del Piemonte Montano (ATPM) is a project of Turin’s University, began in 1983 whose objective is the systematic collection, orally from local people, of the place-names locally used. Its research focuses on the Piedmontese mountain, which is defined by the extension of 553 municipalities. Since the 1980s to the present, the data collection, conducted according to dialectological practices involving a researcher and one or more loca informants, allowed to the ATPM’s team to store in its database 74,000 place-names from 156 Piedmontese communes. This article deals with the research directions suggested by toponymic data collected: first of all examples of toponymic analysis from a diachronic perspective will be illustrated, in order to reconstruct the previous linguistic phases through the historical and etymological study of the toponym; secondly the article illustrates the heuristic potential of a synchronous analysis of the place-names data understood as systems of signs that express the relationship between the community and the space in which this community lives and develops.