Quote:
Originally Posted by Primoz
It's interesting to note that there are many German exonyms for Italian cities (like Rom, Mailand, Turin, Genua, Venedig, Neapel, Mantua, Padua) but very few French cities and towns have special German names (except in Alsace and Lorraine, of course).
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I think the reason with Northern Italy at least is that a big piece of it was once in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and hence places evolved Germanic variants: hence Brunico/Bruneck and Bolzano/Bozen. There are still German-speaking minorities in some of these regions, I believe.
IIRC the full version of "Deutschland ueber Alles" has a verse about Germany stretching from the Baltic to the River Etsch (i.e. the Adige)
BTW, Marseille is only a French corruption of the Roman name of Massillia (which is probably a version of whatever the local Gauls called it etc.).