Accisa: storia di una parola, storia di una metonimia, in «Archivio per il Vocabolario Storico Italiano» (AVSI), VI 2023 [ma 2024], pp. 171-178.

The article aims to provide an etymological and linguistic analysis of the term accisa and its plural accise. From a reconstruction through the consultation of the main historical dictionaries (the lemma passed from Latin to French and then into the vernacular, undergoing a certain confusion with the Old French assise and the Middle Latin assisia), the authors arrive at the consideration that the well–known expression taglio delle accise does not indicate the request for a cut, but the ‘cut of the cut’. This is in fact a sensational repetition, since the study will demonstrate that the word is nothing other than the expression of an interesting rhetorical figure, metonymy.