Firenze e come un albero fiorito -- l'Arno, etc.

Bruni's etymology for "Firenze": "Fluentia", not
(really) "Florentia"

In his History of Florence (I Tatti, Latin), Bruni argues that "Firenze" comes from "Fluentia", not "Florentia".

One wonders if there a serious etymological discussion of this?

Rinuccio's aria in Puccini's "Gianni Schicchi" opens with the line

"Firenze is like a flowering tree'

Firenze e come un albero fiorito

and given that librettist Forzano spends some time (a full 6-line stanza) on the river metaphor (the Arno and its _afFLUENTs) I would like to think Bruni is right, in part?


Dennis M. McHenry II comments:

There's a tradition that "Florentia" (Firenze) was _once_ called "Fluentia", on the
dubious authority of a brief line in Pliny, whose manuscripts say that the
"Fluentini" live by the 'flowing' Arno.

flventini praeflventi arno adpositi

-- the usual explanation, by those who do accept this equivalence, is that the town
of these Fluentini -- presumably "Fluentia" -- did 'flower', and so changed its
name -- hence "Florentia".

Many regard, however, Pliny's "fluentini" as a corruption for "florentini" -- Poliziano, for example, mentions the possibility of corruption.

Macchiavelli's brief discussion in his "History of Florence" is sound and sensible.

But beyond that, there's no linguistic basis for a derivation from one to
the other.

There is, however, an easy source for the corruption: the proximity of "Florentini" and "praefluenti".

But it doesn't need to be true to be rooted in a real tradition, and the
question has been a lively one among many and varied writers.

Bruni is wrong, but it doesn't matter because librettist Forzano is responding to a
tradition not of etymology but of *origins*: the idea (if not the reality)
that "Florentia" was _once_ called "Fluentia".

Mark Keith adds: "Off the top of my head, I can say that the Romans did call the town on that site "Florentia" and the old Italian name, based on the Latin, was
"Fiorenza". Both seem to derive from the Latin "florere", to flower, to bloom; to prosper. The notion that it is related to "fluere" is an interesting one, but I
need to be convinced."