There exists, in the mountains of Upper Corsica, a village called Sorio. It is a commune of one hundred and twenty-nine inhabitants, perched at four hundred metres of altitude on the eastern flank of the Tenda massif, overlooking the Gulf of Saint-Florent. From Bastia it can be reached in just under an hour by road, along a narrow and winding route en corniche that crosses the villages of the Nebbiu, the mystical and pastoral region that the Corsicans call the Conca d’Oru — the Golden Bowl.
When one stumbles upon this coincidence for the first time, a question comes naturally: is there a link between this Corsican Sorio and the Venetian Sorio of Gambellara, Vicenza, Verona? An ancient migration, a common ancestor, a transfer of people or of names across the medieval Mediterranean? It is worth trying to answer, because the case of Sorio in Corsica is interesting in itself — it is a small village steeped in history — and because it is also an opportunity to reflect on how toponymic coincidences work: which are often not entirely coincidences at all.
Where it lies, what it looks like
Sorio — Soriu in the Corsican language, sometimes also called Sorio-di-Tenda to distinguish it from other places of the same name — belongs administratively to the département of Upper Corsica (Haute-Corse), to the arrondissement of Calvi, and to the canton of Biguglia-Nebbio. It counts a little over one hundred and twenty inhabitants — the population was one hundred and forty-two in 2008 and is in slow decline, like many mountain villages of northern Corsica. It covers an area of fifteen and a half square kilometres, from the four hundred metres of the inhabited centre up to the sixteen hundred metres of the Tenda ridges.
The commune is made up of two hamlets: A Valle (the “lower” hamlet) and A Croce (the “upper” hamlet). The latter was, until the eighteenth century, an autonomous commune: then the two communities merged into a single administrative entity. The presence of the two separate cores is still visible today as one walks through the village: a serpentine of grey stone houses, narrow alleys, vaulted fountains, old bread ovens, washhouses — all testimonies of an age when Corsican life was pastoral, agricultural, self-sufficient.
At the entrance to the village stands the church of San Filippu Neri — Saint Philip Neri — with an imposing five-storey exposed-stone bell tower, built in 1622 in what local sources describe as “Pisan heritage”. In front of the church, on the square, faces the smaller chapel of Santa Croce with its ochre façade, today converted into a multipurpose hall. Lower down, hidden in the greenery, lies the chapel of Santa Margherita, a twelfth-century Romanesque building, listed as a Historic Monument in 1936. There is also a baptistery of San Giacomo, also of the twelfth century, and just outside the inhabited centre the restored oratory of Sant’Antonio Abate.
On an architrave of a house in the hamlet of A Croce is carved the date 1370. It is the oldest firm evidence of a settlement at this point of the Nebbiu. But the most ancient traces of human presence in the territory date back to the late Neolithic: at the Bocca di Tenda, the pass that separates the Nebbiu from the Ostriconi valley, three statue-menhirs dated to 1400–1300 BC have been discovered — Murello, Bucentine and Mortula — today preserved in front of the parish church of San Quilico in the neighbouring commune of Piève.
The medieval roots: the pieve of San Quilico
To understand the origin of Sorio one must know the Corsican system of pievi. The pieve (in Corsican piève, from the Latin plebs, “people”) was a medieval territorial and ecclesiastical district, a sort of extended parish that grouped several villages under a single mother church. The Corsican system of pievi was set up around the eleventh century, in the period in which the island, freed from the Saracens by the Pisan-Genoese coalition, was placed under the ecclesiastical administration of the diocese of Pisa (1077). From that moment, and for two centuries — until Pisa’s naval defeat at the battle of Meloria in 1284 — Corsica was effectively a Pisan domain. It is the period that has left on the island its most visible traces: the white Romanesque churches and the green serpentine archivolts found throughout the Nebbiu are, in large part, the work of Pisan builders.
Sorio belonged to the pieve of San Quilico (Santo Quilico), together with the neighbouring villages of Piève (seat of the pieve), Rapale, Morato Soprano, Morato Sottano, Loreto, Petra di Loreto. The pieve counted roughly two thousand inhabitants at the start of the sixteenth century, recorded in a census of 1520. A century and a half later, a manuscript by the abbot Francesco Maria Accinelli, written on behalf of the Republic of Genoa in the early eighteenth century for military purposes, recorded in popular Latin: «Scorgesi la Pieve di S.Quilico con 950 abitanti le di cui ville sono Morato soprano, Morato sottano, Rapale, Sorio, Croce, e Pieve» — Sorio and Croce together counted 267 inhabitants. The pieve was, in other words, a small farming and pastoral community living on the slopes of the Tenda for at least eight centuries.
Near Sorio stood another village, Asigliani (or Azzigliani), today entirely abandoned — on the hill of San Niculaiu only the ruins of its church survive, the thirteenth-century Chjesa Nera. An ethnographic note of some significance: the family names once recorded at Asigliani are still in use today at Sorio and Piève. When the village was abandoned, probably between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, its inhabitants moved to the neighbouring communes, bringing their surnames with them. This detail tells us a great deal about the depth of the local roots of the village.
The Petriconi: a small village nobility
Small as it is, Sorio had its own modest local nobility. On 5 February 1774, after the cession of Corsica to France (1769), the Petriconi di Soriu family was recognised as Corsican nobility within the general decree by which the French monarchy, on the initiative of the comte de Marbeuf, regularised the pre-existing noble statuses of the freshly annexed island. It was an act of political consolidation: the aim was to bind the local elites to the new regime by granting them official recognition.
The Petriconi di Soriu were a military family. As early as 13 September 1768, a year before the definitive French conquest, a Captain Anghjulu Luigi Petriconi di Soriu had left Bastia as a prisoner, in a convoy of thirty-four officers and one hundred and two Corsican soldiers captured by the French, bound for Toulon. He was one of the officers loyal to Pasquale Paoli, the Corsican national hero who from 1755 to 1769 had governed the short-lived Corsican Republic, eventually defeated by the French at the battle of Ponte Novu on 9 May 1769.
When the war ended and Corsica became French, the Petriconi — like many other Corsican families — passed into the service of the new power. Two of them reached the rank of brigadier general during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars:
- César-Mathieu Simoni de Petricone, born in Soriu in 1727 and dead in Bastia in 1794, brigadier general from 1791.
- Philippe Simoni de Petricone, born in Soriu in 1770 and dead at Verona in 1796, brigadier general in that same year.
The second name deserves a pause, because we shall return to it in the closing section: a young Corsican general of twenty-six, born in a small village of Upper Corsica called Sorio, dead in the Veronese city to whose province the other Sorio — the Venetian one — also belongs. They are two Sorios that brush against each other for a few months, at the end of the eighteenth century, through a young officer who probably did not even know the other namesake village existed.
The following centuries: the slow decline of a mountain village
After annexation by France, the history of Sorio is that of many Corsican villages: a slow demographic erosion, with the population shifting towards the coastal cities (Bastia, Saint-Florent, Calvi) or to mainland France, seeking work in the public services, the army, the French colonial administrations. In 1962 the village had one hundred and fifty-four inhabitants, in 2008 it still had one hundred and fifty-four, in 2022 it had fallen to one hundred and twenty-nine. A formal stability that masks a difficult turnover: few young people remain, and the population ages.
And yet the village has not given up. In the past twenty years Sorio has experienced a small heritage and tourist revival: the alleys have been restored, the fountains recovered, a sentier du patrimoine has been traced following the ancient transhumance paths towards the Tenda massif. The patronal feast of San Filippu Neri is celebrated each 26 May. In summer the square hosts dances, lotteries and traditional festivals. The waterfall of Sorio, a natural pool fed by the Raghiunti stream, is a destination for walkers. It is, in short, one of those small Corsican villages that survive on a fragile balance between memory and slow tourism, working their past as one would work a meagre soil.
And now the question: is there a link with the Venetian Sorio?
We come to the question from which we set out. Does an etymological or historical link exist between the Sorio of Corsica and the Sorio of Gambellara, San Giovanni Lupatoto, Vicenza and Verona? The honest answer — based on what the sources allow us to say today — is composed of three converging observations.
First observation: no documentary source connects the two place names. Neither the Corsican local histories nor the Venetian onomastic studies suggest any kind of genetic relationship between the two names. They are two villages bearing the same name, with no recorded ancient migration, no transfer of population groups, no notarial act linking the two localities. They are simply “two Sorios”.
Second observation: the two etymologies are probably independent. The Venetian Sorio, as we have reconstructed elsewhere on this site, has a well-documented origin: it derives from Sanctus Georgius (Saint George) through the Venetian dialect form Zorzo, in a process of phonetic evolution typical of the Treviso and Verona March between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. It is a hagiotoponym connected with rural churches dedicated to the warrior saint.
The Corsican Sorio, on the other hand, does not have an equally documented etymology — it is one of the many Corsican micro-toponyms whose roots are lost in the early Middle Ages, and none of the onomastic studies of the island that I have been able to consult proposes a precise derivation. The plausible hypotheses are at least two, both different from the Venetian one:
- A derivation from a Latin or Romance personal name, following a toponymic model very common in Corsica (Pieve, Loreto, Rapale, Murato are all place names formed on similar bases).
- A derivation from an element of the landscape, perhaps connected to the Corsican word soriu or to a local pre-Latin root, today no longer clearly identifiable.
What is significant is that the Corsican Sorio does not have a church or chapel dedicated to Saint George. Its parish church is dedicated to San Filippu Neri, and its historic chapels to Santa Margherita, Santa Croce, San Giacomo and Sant’Antonio Abate. If the etymology had been the same as the Venetian one — Sanctus Georgius → Sorio — we would expect to find at least some trace of the cult of Saint George in the surrounding area. There is none. This is an element that weighs in favour of the independence of the two place names.
Third observation: the coincidence is real but statistically normal. Short Italian place names, of four or five letters, are by their very nature subject to independent homonymy: they arise in different places from different linguistic roots and end up resembling one another. There are other examples: there are at least three villages called Coreglia in Italy (in Tuscany, Liguria and Piedmont), with unrelated etymologies; there is Soriano in Calabria and Soriano nel Cimino in Lazio, with completely separate histories; there is a Sorico on Lake Como, and it is likely that there are also other micro-Sorios that never made it into the main toponymic repertories. The fact that two villages should both be called Sorio, one in the Veneto and one in Corsica, is a coincidence worth noting, but it does not in itself constitute proof of a link.
The coincidence of Philippe Simoni de Petricone
There is, however — and on this it is worth closing — a small historical moment in which the two Sorios touch, without knowing it. We mentioned it at the opening of the section on the Petriconi, and it deserves a conclusion.
Philippe Simoni de Petricone, born in Soriu in Corsica in 1770 to a noble family of military officers loyal to Pasquale Paoli, became a brigadier general of the French army in 1796, at just twenty-six years of age. He died that same year, at Verona, during Napoleon Bonaparte’s first Italian campaign. The 1796–97 campaign saw the revolutionary French armies cross the Venetian plain in pursuit of the Austrians: the young Corsican general, formed in the wars of the Republic, died in that foreign land where, a few months later, the French would impose their dominion.
Verona, the city where Philippe Simoni died, is the same city where, thirty-nine years later, was born Bartolomeo Sorio (1805–1867), the Dante-scholar Oratorian philologist of the Congregation of Saint Philip Neri — the same congregation to which the parish church of Philippe’s native village in Corsica was dedicated. A small, accidental historical symmetry: a young Corsican general from a village called Sorio dies at Verona in 1796; nine years later, in that same city, is born a priest by the name of Sorio who will devote his life to the editing of medieval texts. The two did not know each other, did not know of each other, and history does not record in any document that their stories ever crossed except geographically, by pure chance.
And yet it is precisely this kind of coincidence — the young Corsican who dies in the city of the Veronese philologist, both linked for different reasons to the word Sorio and to the name of Saint Philip Neri (the parish church at Soriu, the congregation of membership at Verona) — that reveals something of the way in which names travel through history. Not through reconstructible genealogical lines, not through documented migrations, but through independent resurfacings, through accidental repetitions, through the discovery of namesakes who did not know they were so.
The two Sorios remain two. But perhaps, knowing them both, one understands better what it means, and what it does not mean, to bear a name. It means having a story. It does not mean having the same story as everyone else who bears it.
Sources consulted: Wikipedia entry “Sorio” (French, Italian and English); official tourism site of the Saint-Florent–Nebbiu Conca d’Oru Tourist Office (corsica-saintflorent.com); entry “Noblesse corse” on French Wikipedia; entry “Piève (Haute-Corse)” on French Wikipedia; entry “Rosoli” on French Wikipedia; Francesco Maria Accinelli, “L’histoire de la Corse vue par un Génois du XVIIIe siècle” (manuscript, c. 1730–1750, p. 223); Daniel Istria, “Pouvoirs et fortifications dans le nord de la Corse: du XIe siècle au XIVe siècle”, Ajaccio, Éditions Alain Piazzola, 2005; Geneviève Moracchini-Mazel, “Les Églises romanes de Corse”; portals Corsicatheque, Nuvellaghju, Villages de Corse.