UNA CURIOSITà SCIENTIFICO-LETTERARIA:IL “TOPO VOLANTE DEL SALENTO”

In his Fauna del Regno di Napoli, published in Naples after 1829, Oronzo Gabriele Costa, one of the most famous Italian zoologists, attributes the popular denomination “surice ulante” to the Mus meridionalis, while his son Giuseppe, a zoologist too, in his Fauna salentina, published in Lecce in 1871, attributes the popular denomination “surge ulateu” to the Crocidura hydruntina, a species of shrew he had discovered. Because in the dictionaries of local dialects both denominations appear translated as “flying mouse” and are attributed to a bat, one wonders why on earth in popular belief the ability to fly is also given to a harvest mouse and a shrew.