Dear colleagues and friends,

The Joint IGU ICA Commission on Toponymy is pleased to announce the forthcoming conference entitled “Literary, polar and extraterrestrial place names”.
The conference will be held in Rome on 23 and 24 November and is organized in collaboration with the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.
The conference events will be held at the Academy’s headquarters in Rome in via della Lungara 10 and aims to illustrate and comment historically and geographically the names of places, real and fictional, inhabited and not.

In international literature of all time there are many names of places which act as backdrop of the event narrated.
In classical and in modern literature up to the most recent ones, the authors mention real, imaginary and plausible places. Some authors merge different places in a single picture, assigning fictitious names as real geographical names. Filmmakers, perhaps even more prominently, also create fancy names with the overlapping of different places. In the polar lands, for example in Antarctica, many place names recall explorers and locations of reaching and setting up research stations. The latter are also permanently inhabited by scientists, soldiers and their families.

International conventions prohibit the appropriation of places by governments, although in practice Antarctica is divided into areas of competence by some states. As for the geographical names marked on the moon since historical times and planets and satellites, including orbital stations, the survey can also be developed at historical level. The cartographic research will be a remarkable support to this topic.

The major themes to be develop are:

1. Place names in all ancient, medieval and modern literature;
2. The names of polar lands given by explorers;
3. The names given to the places of Moon, Mars and other planets and satellites in historical times and at present.

Organizing Committee

Roberto Antonelli
Piero Boitani
Mario Capaldo
Paolo Fedeli
Mario Mazza
Giorgio Parisi
Giuseppe Ricuperati

Experts in each field of research

Piero Boitani
Mario Capaldo
Paolo Fedeli
Marco Tavani
Paolo de Bernardis
Roberto Ragazzoni

Scientific Committee

Choo, Sungjae (Republic of Korea)
Ferland, Yaïves (Canada)
Jordan, Peter (Austria, ICA co-chair)
Menezes, Paulo de (Brazil, Common IGU/ICA vice chair)
Ormeling, Ferjan (Netherlands)
Palagiano, Cosimo (Italy, IGU co-chair)
Raper, Peter (South Africa)
Watanabe, Kohei (Japan)”