Vita Gazette – Cervinia, the well-known Italian ski resort, part of the Municipality of Valtournenche, has changed its name. Cervinia changed its name and will be called Le Breuil.

The president of the Valle d’Aosta Region, Renzo Testolin, has decided to eliminate the town’s name officially. Le Breuil, this is what the hamlet of 700 inhabitants in the municipality of Valtournanche will soon be called.

The mayor of Valtournenche, Elisa Cicco, announces an urgent meeting with Testolin for today: “The objective is to find a solution together with the regional administration. We want to address the problem and understand what we can do. We will ask to be able to rectify the name and keep the name Cervinia.”

One night to solve the problem: “We need to understand how to proceed from a legal point of view.” Never happened. Breuil (pronounce it ‘breil’ and they will be patient up there) is the original name deriving from the Franco-Provençal breuill or braoulè, which in the Aosta Valley dialect means “land of many waters”.

The intention was to erase residual autarkic suggestions of fascism, which also scattered in the mountains by Italianizing the French-speaking names, from Cormaiore (Courmayeur) to Salice d’Ulzio (Sauze d’Oulx).

Cervinia, founded in 1934, refers to Mount Cervino, deriving in turn from the toponym mistakenly written by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure in his Journey to the Alps as Mont Cervin instead of Mont Servin to confuse things.

It is the result of research started in 2011 by the Municipality of Valtournenche to arrive at the official determination of the toponyms of the small Aosta Valley town. A technical commission began to sift through the archives, finding the ancient names of villages, hamlets and localities in the area. Thus, the Breuil basin, where Cervinia is located, a tourist resort known worldwide, regained its old name and became Le Breuil.