Ettore Tolomei (1865 - 1952) advocated for the support of Italian identity in regions not belonging to the Kingdom of Italy (such as Nice, Malta, Dalmatia, etc.) since 1890, in the spirit of irredentism. From around the turn of the century, he focused on achieving the state border against Austria along the watershed of the Alpine main ridge, regardless of the demographic structure. In 1906, he coined the name Alto Adige for the German-speaking area south of the Brenner, which would later be known as South Tyrol in the German-speaking world. Tolomei was obsessed with the idea that this was originally a Latin-Romance—thus, in his view, Italian—region that had been Germanized in the Middle Ages; he believed that the task of the new Italy was to rectify this historical misdevelopment by restoring the resident German-speaking population to Italian identity.

In this context, place and personal names play a significant role. Tolomei was convinced that the Italianization of place and personal names would make an important contribution to the actual integration of the region into the Italian cultural context. His three criteria were restituire, sostituire, creare: etymological restitution of the 'distorted' Romanesque original form altered by Germanization according to Italian phonetic rules, replacement of German names with Italian translations, and the invention of new names. The place names designed according to these rules in 1916, numbering around 16,000, gained legal force through laws enacted in 1924 and 1936 and remain the official names to this day. In contrast, the Italianization of personal names, for which detailed plans also exist, was never truly implemented on a large scale.