Italian Surnames: What They Mean and Where They Come From

Italian surnames come from four things: the name of an ancestor, a trade, a place, or a nickname. Italy has roughly 330,000 of them, more than almost any other country in Europe, because they formed locally, village by village, over seven centuries, and were never standardized from above. If your family name is Italian, it is a small piece of information about where your people were and what they did, and it is worth reading correctly before you draw a conclusion from it.

Where Italian surnames come from

The system took shape between the ninth and the sixteenth centuries. At first an extra word was added to a given name only to tell two men apart. By the twelfth century Italian documents regularly show people with a name and something after it. The Council of Trent, in 1563, required parishes to keep baptism registers, and that is what fixed surnames in place and made them hereditary in the modern sense.

Scholars, following the classification of Emidio De Felice, sort them into three broad groups, which in practice look like four kinds of name:

• From a personal name. Di Giovanni, D'Angelo, De Luca, Martini, Lorenzi. The prefix Di or De usually means "son of."
• From a trade. Ferrari and Fabbri from the blacksmith, Molinari from the miller, Sartori from the tailor, Pastore from the shepherd, Barbieri from the barber.
• From a place or a people. Romano, Napolitano, Siciliano, Lombardi, Calabrese, Greco, Albanese, plus thousands taken from the name of a specific village.
• From a nickname. Rossi for red hair, Bianchi for fair, Basso for short, Grasso for heavy, Mancini for left-handed.

The most common Italian surnames, and what they mean

Rossi is the most common surname in Italy, carried by about 0.39 percent of the population, and it comes from the nickname for red hair or a red beard. Russo is the southern form of the same word and dominates Sicily, Campania and Puglia. Between the two of them they cover the country.

After those come names that each tell you something:

• Ferrari, the blacksmith, most common in Emilia-Romagna and Lombardy.
• Esposito, the name given to abandoned children, most common in Campania.
• Bianchi, the fair-haired, northern and central.
• Romano, from Rome or from the personal name Romano, everywhere.
• Colombo, concentrated in northwestern Lombardy, where it was also given to foundlings.
• Ricci, curly. Marino, from the sea or from the name Marino. Greco, the Greek, common in the south where Greek communities were real and recent.

A surname that is common nationally is rarely useful for research. A surname that is common in one province and rare everywhere else is the one that helps.

Why so many Italian surnames mean "abandoned"

This is the part of the subject that deserves a straight answer, because a lot of Americans carry one of these names without knowing it.

Until the late nineteenth century, foundling hospitals across Italy took in children left in the ruota, a revolving wooden cylinder set into the wall of a convent or hospital, which let a mother leave a newborn without being seen. The institution then gave the child a surname. Different cities used different ones: Esposito in Naples and its province, from esposto, exposed; Proietti in Rome and Lazio, from the Latin proiectus, thrown out; Degli Innocenti in Florence, after the Ospedale degli Innocenti; Trovato and Trovatello, found; Casadei and Diotallevi and Sperandio, which put the child in the care of God.

Esposito is now among the most common surnames in Italy. It is not a mark of anything except that, somewhere back, a child came into the records through that door, often during a famine or an epidemic, and the family that carried the name forward is as much a family as any other.

What does a Sicilian surname look like?

Sicilian surnames carry the island's layers, and they are unusually easy to read once you know the pattern.

• Greek and Byzantine, often ending in the stressed vowels -ò or -à: Cannavò, Spanò, Sgrò, Laganà, Aricò, Mandalà.
• Arabic, from the two centuries of Muslim rule: Macaluso, Zappalà, Mulè, Morabito, Fragalà, Cangemi, Zambuto.
• Norman and feudal, from titles and military roles: Barone, Conte, Scuderi, Paladino.
• Spanish, from the long Aragonese and Spanish period, and northern Italian, from the Lombard settlements of the Middle Ages.

Sicilians also kept the nciuria, a family nickname that runs in parallel with the official surname and is often the name people actually use in the town. If your relatives in Sicily seem to know your family by a word that is not on any document, that is what it is, and it is worth writing down: in a small town it identifies a household faster than a surname does. Our guide to eastern Sicily and our Sicily page cover the part of the island most Sicilian Americans come from.

Rare, and royal

Rare Italian surnames are usually rare for one of two reasons: they belong to a single valley, or they are dying. Italian news regularly reports lists of surnames at risk of disappearing, and they are typically names with few carriers concentrated in one area and an aging population.

As for royal and noble names: the reigning house of Italy until the referendum of 1946 was Savoia. Before unification, Borbone ruled the south from Naples and Asburgo-Lorena ruled Tuscany. The great Italian families that ran cities and popes are a different list: Medici in Florence, Sforza and Visconti in Milan, Este in Ferrara, Gonzaga in Mantua, and in the countryside around Rome Colonna, Orsini and Caetani, who appear in our guides to Anagni and Fiuggi because they were still fighting each other there in 1303. Sharing a surname with one of these families means very little: retainers, tenants and foundlings of a great house often took its name.

Your surname changed in America, and not at Ellis Island

The usual family story is that an official shortened the name on arrival. It did not happen: no names were recorded at Ellis Island, and the manifests were written at the port of departure. The changes came later, and they came from the family. The common patterns are worth knowing, because they are what you have to undo when you search Italian records:

• Accents dropped and double letters simplified, since neither survives an American typewriter.
• Respelling for English pronunciation, usually of the sounds gl, gn, sc and ci, which English readers cannot guess at.
• Prefixes fused or dropped: Di Nardo becomes Dinardo or Nardo, Lo Cascio becomes Locascio.
• Translation of the meaning: Ferrari into Smith, Bianco into White.

When you search in Italy, search the sound rather than the spelling, and search the province rather than the country.

What a surname can and cannot tell you

It can tell you a region, usually. Surname distribution across Italy is uneven enough that a name often points at a province or a cluster of valleys, and distribution maps built from telephone and residence data are freely available online.

It cannot tell you the town on its own, and it cannot tell you a family line. For that you need a document with a place name on it: a passenger manifest after 1906, a naturalization file, a draft card, a marriage record. Our guide to finding your family's town in Italy sets out the order to work in, and our guide to Italian immigration to America explains which records exist for which years.

And be careful with the commercial surname pages that promise a coat of arms. Arms belonged to specific families, not to everyone sharing a name, and a certificate that sells you one is selling you a decoration.

When the name leads to a place

Once you have the town, the trip changes shape. It stops being a tour of Italy and becomes two or three days in one valley: the parish, the cemetery, the archive in the comune, the house if it is still standing, and the long lunch with whoever turns out to be a cousin. Our guide to visiting your ancestral town covers how to prepare for it.

That is the trip we like building most. Tell us the surname and the province in Design your trip, and our founder, who reads every request herself, will tell you honestly what is possible with the time you have.