piaggia

Forms

piaggia f (plural piagge)^[1] Old forms include Old Italian piaia, Old Italian plaia and Old Italian piagia.^[2]

Etymology

It is inherited from Late Latin plagia (“gentle slope, hillside”), a Late and Medieval Latin word.^[3][2][4][5] Nocentini derives it from Ancient Greek πλάγια (plágia, “sides, flanks”), the neuter plural of πλάγιος (plágios, “oblique, sideways”), taken as a feminine singular.^[3] GRADIT, Sabatini–Coletti, Treccani and Battaglia see the influence of, or a cross with, Latin plaga (“region, tract”),^[4][6][7][8] and Wiktionary derives it from that word alone.^[1] Battaglia records the Medieval Latin word at Teramo in 1108 and at Ravenna in 1288, and the Byzantine Greek word for a mountain slope in Calabria in 1133.^[8]

DELI quotes Schiaffini: ⟨plagia⟩ is found in a letter of Gregory the Great of July 600 and was known to Isidore, but it is commonest in the medieval charters of central and southern Italy, from Teramo to Salerno, meaning “gentle slope” or “coast”.^[9] In Campania, around Amalfi, Aversa and especially Gaeta, it also meant “beach” (⟨plagia maris⟩), and an older masculine ⟨plaiu⟩ was used near Salerno and in Apulia;^[9] Schiaffini thought the Italian word might even be a loan from the speech of coastal Campania.^[9] The beach sense lives on in Spanish playa and Portuguese praia, while French plage and Catalan platja were taken from Italian; in Italian it passed to the derivative spiaggia.^[3][9]

De Vaan compares the Latin noun, in the sense “expanse”, with the Greek adjective and with Germanic words meaning “flat”, but notes that the forms are hard to reconcile.^[10]

Earliest recorded meaning

The TLIO's first record is the Contrasto of Cielo d'Alcamo (1231–1250), a Sicilian poem copied in Tuscany, and its first sense is a slope between the plain and the steep part of a mountain.^[2] DELI cites plaia in the Laudi of Urbino around 1300 and piaggia in Dante.^[9]

Semantic evolution

Dante's pilgrim, resting after the dark wood, takes up his way again per la piaggia diserta “along the deserted slope”.^[4][11] The word also named a sloping coast and so a shore or beach: Boccaccio has a ship driven onto a piaggia of the island of Majorca.^[4][2] With the stress on the countryside rather than the slope it came to mean fields or a meadow, and with Petrarch (before 1374) a land or region.^[2][9] Old phrases such as per monti e per piagge meant “everywhere”.^[2]

The word is now literary.^[4][5] Manzoni wrote piaggia for the shore in the 1827 edition of I promessi sposi and changed it to spiaggia in 1840.^[7] French plage, used of a coast from 1456 after an isolated record in 1298, is counted among the Italianisms of French.^[12]

Timeline

• 1231–1250 – Cielo d'Alcamo uses the word in the Contrasto.^[2]
• 1287 – A record of piaggia dated by the Zingarelli dictionary.^[13]
• About 1300 – Plaia appears in the Laudi of Urbino.^[9]
• 1304–1308 – Dante uses piaggia in the Convivio.^[4][11]
• Before 1374 – Petrarch uses it for a land or region.^[9]
• 1456 – French plage is recorded in the sense “coast”.^[12]
• 1840 – Manzoni replaces piaggia with spiaggia in the final edition of his novel.^[7]

Meanings

Noun

1. (literary) A slope, the side of a hill or mountain; also a level stretch on a mountainside.^[4][5][7]
2. (literary or regional) Shore, beach (spiaggia).^[4][5][6]
3. (poetic) Open country; a land or region.^[4][5][6]

Word family

• spiaggia
• piaggiare
• piaggetta

Related words

• plaga
• French plage

References

1. ^ a b c Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini (1997–), Opera del Vocabolario Italiano, CNR, Firenze; tlio.ovi.cnr.it
3. ^ a b c Nocentini, Alberto; Parenti, Alessandro (2010), l'Etimologico: vocabolario della lingua italiana, Firenze: Le Monnier
4. ^ a b c d e f g h i De Mauro, Tullio (ed.) (2003), Grande dizionario italiano dell'uso, CD-ROM version 2.0, Torino: UTET
5. ^ a b c d e Devoto, Giacomo; Oli, Gian Carlo; Serianni, Luca; Trifone, Maurizio (2026), Nuovo Devoto–Oli: il vocabolario dell'italiano contemporaneo, digital ed., Milano: Le Monnier
6. ^ a b c Sabatini, Francesco; Coletti, Vittorio; Manfredini, Manuela (2026), Dizionario italiano Sabatini Coletti, digital ed., Milano: Sansoni / Rizzoli Larousse
7. ^ a b c d Duro, Aldo (ed.) (1986–1994), Vocabolario della lingua italiana, Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana; online ed. treccani.it/vocabolario (2008 copy)
8. ^ a b Battaglia, Salvatore; Bàrberi Squarotti, Giorgio (1961–2002), Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, 21 vols., Torino: UTET; digital ed. Accademia della Crusca
9. ^ a b c d e f g h Cortelazzo, Manlio; Zolli, Paolo (1999), Dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana, 2nd ed. by Manlio Cortelazzo and Michele A. Cortelazzo, Bologna: Zanichelli
10. ^ de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
11. ^ a b Battaglia, Salvatore; Bàrberi Squarotti, Giorgio (1961–2002), Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, 21 vols., Torino: UTET; digital ed. Accademia della Crusca, p. 13, 258
12. ^ a b Stammerjohann, Harro, et al. (2008), Dizionario di italianismi in francese, inglese, tedesco, Firenze: Accademia della Crusca; online at difit.italianisticaonline.it
13. ^ Zingarelli, Nicola (2009), Lo Zingarelli 2010: vocabolario della lingua italiana, Bologna: Zanichelli