In 2021, the council of Valdoro faced an old problem: too many streets named after generals, kings and a certain Archduke whom nobody could identify. A new proposal was simple. For one year, residents could nominate an ordinary person from the city's past to replace an existing name. By December, there were 4,000 suggestions.
The winners were not famous. Baker's Lane became Mrs Alvarez Street, after the woman who ran a small bakery for fifty years and sold bread on credit to anyone in need. A square was named after a bus driver, Mr Ndiaye, who for thirty years waited for passengers who ran. A tunnel was named after a nameless cleaner "who knew every shortcut", an entry that moved even the mayor.
The practical consequences were immediate. Taxi drivers complained. The postal service needed new maps. Some residents refused to use the new names, and one man, Mr Vega, still puts "Archduke Street" on his letters out of loyalty to a person he has never met.
The council's solution was gentle. The new signs show both names for five years, one above the other, and each new plate carries a short, two-line story. "People stop to read," says the mayor. "A street name has never been so popular."
The experiment raises a question that no city has completely answered: who deserves a street? Fame is a poor measure, and virtue is a risky one. Valdoro has chosen something else: usefulness to the people who lived there. A name, after all, is a kind of memory that works every day, without a museum, on every corner where someone is lost.
Fiction note: All people, places and events in this text are fictional.