Narni is the modern Italian name of the town that inspired C.S. Lewis’s name for Narnia.
Narni is a town in Umbria, Italy, known in ancient Roman times as Narnia. Lewis encountered the classical name in a Latin atlas and later used it for the fantasy world in The Chronicles of Narnia. The connection is a name inspiration, not a claim that the fictional land is a direct version of the Italian town.
The spelling Narnia adds an extra final vowel to the Latin place-name Narnia, while the modern Italian town is called Narni. This small difference often leads readers to assume that Narni and Narnia are simply two spellings of the same fictional location.
Lewis’s Narnia contains its own geography, history, peoples, and mythology. Its name is one example of how classical languages, medieval literature, and European place-names fed into his imaginative writing.