Toscana or Tuscany? A note on names

Italian wine regions sit at an awkward crossroads. In Italian they are Toscana, Piemonte, Sicilia. In English they become Tuscany, Piedmont, Sicily — sometimes. Mostly. Almost always when the wine writers are American, occasionally when they're British, never when the importer is trying to sound serious.

When this map started, Tuscany was Toscana in the database. Hard for an English-speaking visitor to find. So we renamed it.

What broke

A few things at once:

1. The hardcoded region cards on the homepage all said Toscana.
2. The image import pulled French wineries fine; Italian wineries were filed under whichever region happened to be first in regions.id order. (A bug worth its own post.)
3. Anyone who had bookmarked /regions/toscana would 404.

The fix on (3) is a permanent 308 redirect — permanent: true in next.config.ts is the line that tells search engines the page moved for good. The pages it redirects from are still in the sitemap from someone's old crawl; they're not anymore.

What didn't break

Coordinates. The lat/lng didn't move when we renamed the row. Tuscany still sits at 43.5°N, 11.0°E whether you call it Toscana or Toscany or Tuscaglie. The map doesn't care. Place names are politics; geometry is geography.

A small philosophical aside

Wine regions are one of the few things where the local name and the exported name diverge for genuinely defensible reasons. Bordeaux and Burgundy stay in French because that's how they're labelled on the bottle. Tokaj is Hungarian. Rias Baixas is Galician, not Spanish. Saint-Émilion keeps the accent because Saint Emilion is somebody else.

If you're building a database, you pick a side, document it, and write a redirect. We picked English-speaker-friendly. The Italian spelling lives on as the slug pointing at the same place.