For many years in Valenza, as in all towns where almost all the inhabitants knew each other, it was customary to give almost all fellow villagers a nickname, in stradinòm.

The nickname was necessary in order to identify a person whose name or surname was often unknown.

This custom became almost indispensable in cases of homonymy, since, as it was traditional to renew the name of a relative to the unborn child, one found oneself (e.g. for males) with an endless series of Luigi, Francesco, Giuseppe.

Even for the surname, which was sometimes the same, people were often asked: what does he do with his nickname? ('cmé c'àl fa ’d stradinòm?) since the nickname was what distinguished him and made it his distinguishing mark. Compared to surnames, nicknames had an advantage: they were more appropriate to the person due to their characteristics, or had been inherited from the family. Sometimes they were affixed in a brutal manner and referred without hypocrisy to obvious physical defects, despite which they were almost always tolerated by the people concerned themselves, without expressing any opposition. But who established the nicknames? Well... who knows!

In addition to those coined recently, the list below includes those that have been handed down, partly written and partly orally, for over a century. Ginetto Prandi, one of the most popular Valencians, a passionate devotee of dialect, flanked and assisted by the inseparable Franco Castellaro, wonderfully mentioned several of them in one of his characteristic musical compositions, published in the 1994 collection ‘Comunicare’.