Everyone, once in their life, has visited a place with an absurd name: you’re on holiday, you visit an unknown place, find out its extravagant name and it seems inconceivable. Or you’re driving by an isolated town with a crazy name but you’re going so fast so you can’t stop to take a picture. And then you think: I wonder if, somewhere in the world, there is an archive of places with the strangest names.

In Italy, there is, we have just discovered it, it’s called Toponimia and it’s an Instagram profile that has been active for more than two years.
Its creators, Clementina Grandi and Delfino Sisto Legnani, define it as “a cartographic journey through Italian topography“, but we believe it is, without mince words, an incredible and extravagant project as the names it contains.

The images published on Toponimia are minimal and essential, in some ways almost poetic, providing us with the name of the place, its province, the coordinates and the English translation. They are screenshots from the phone app Maps and do not give us much more information about the surrounding environment: just the course of a river, the stretch of a road, a few bends, a hairpin bend, patches of green, or the sea near the coast.

Toponimia collects the strangest and funniest places in Italy. It is a sardonic catalogue of the country, sometimes romantic and sentimental, other times provocative and politically incorrect.
We have selected the most absurd locations for you here, but to discover the entire archive visit the official profile on Instagram.

Words by Federica Cimorelli