How Beautiful Adventure Is... Between Rocambolesque Feats and Little Tigers: Names from 19th-Century Adventure Literature in Italian Lexicography

Abstract

This essay examines the names of several characters—both major and minor—from adventure novels published in the nineteenth century. These names, due to their widespread popularity or notoriety, have given rise to antonomasias still in use today in the Italian language, to the point of being recorded in Italian dictionaries. Names such as Rocambole, the Count of Monte Cristo, and Tartarin have left a lasting mark on the collective imagination, leading in turn to the formation of enduring linguistic expressions, frequently used in both everyday speech and journalistic writing. Some of these names enjoyed only brief relevance and have since fallen into obsolescence; others are surprisingly absent from dictionaries. Yet a few continue, more than a century and a half later, to hold a stable and significant place in our lexicons.