L'Italo-Americano

L'Italo-Americano THURSDAY, JANUARY 11, 2018 www.italoamericano.org 8 CHIARA DE ANGELIS W e carry our own history in our name: it often tells about our rel- atives, after whom we may be named, or about name trends in the year we were born. It speaks of our parents' tastes and prefer- ences, whether they liked novel- ty or tradition, the new or the old. Surnames are even more important, because they hold so much information about whom we and our family are: they tell us about our relatives, ancient and new, they trace in letters centuries of relationships, love and affection. For the Italians of America, they may speak of a far away land, unknown and famil- iar all at once. There are about 300.000 dif- ferent surnames in Italy today, but so many disappeared and were created throughout the cen- turies. Created, you say? Well, yes: people transcribing them into parish and town registries were not always the best at writ- ing or even listening. Truth is the history of our surnames is pretty interesting, nay, fascinating and less predictable than we may expect. For a start, and unlike many other things and mores of Italy, they don't have a Roman origin; some of you may know ancient Romans had a tripartite name system with a praenomen associ- ated with the paternal family, a nomen with the gens and a cog- nomen that was a bit like our first name today. This method, though, was abandoned with the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, towards the end of the 5 th century: we could say, then, that Italian surnames as we know them all originated in the Middle Ages, but it's not this simple. In the early medieval period, peo- ple used to have only one name: there was little or no mobility and no need to be identified among others with the same name. If the need occurred, you'd be simply the "son or daughter of," your father's name used to specify your family of origin. Things began to change around the 11 th century, when people moved around more and bureaucracy became more com- plex, often calling for the neces- sity to specify an individual's origin in detail. It is at this stage that, to avoid cases of homonymy, surnames were cre- ated. The process to make up this first historical batch was simple: paternity, provenance, profession, looks and personality traits were used as an inspiration. So we had our Di Stefano, De Marco or De Simone (literally, "of Stephen," "of Mark," "of Simon") and our Milani, Fer- rarese, Romano or Napolitano, but also some Fabbri (black- smith) and Calzolai (shoe maker), Bianchi (white) and Biondi (blonde). How do we know all this, you may wonder: thanks to written sources of course, but it hasn't been simple to patch everything together, because the anagrafe, or civil registry to say it in Eng- lish, as we know it wasn't a thing until the 16 th century when, after the Council of Trento, in 1563, the Church began keep track of all the people being born, marry- ing and dying in each and every parish. Mind, the Romans already did it, but laziness took hold of the Medieval Italian Man and very little was recorded for a good amount of centuries. Having records, of course, made it easier to track our family history, but paradoxically also created some confusion, as we mentioned already. Clerks and parish priests all had a different way of writing, making it diffi- cult to copy names from a regis- ter to the other, so "a" sometimes became "o" or "z" became "s." That's why in Italy, every now and then, you'll find people relat- ed in the first degree with their surnames being different for one single letter. We said how medieval sur- names came into being, but not all of them are that old or have originated that way. Take the very popular Southern Italian surname Esposito (and its many declensions, from North to South, like Esposti or Esposto): it was often given to children who were abandoned in front of hos- pitals in the once common ruote degli esposti, were unwanted babies were "exhibited, shown" (esposti) so that hospitals' nuns would rescue them. In some parts of Italy, you'll find cognomi chilometrici ("kilometers-long surnames"), which surprise for their peculiarity and the origin of which can only be guessed: enter then the Paternoster (Our Father in Latin), the Abbracciavento (hug the wind), the Ammazza- lamorte (kill death), the Boccadi- fuoco (fire mouth) and even the Senzaquattini (without money). Just to let you know, the region where cognomi chilometrici are most common is Campania. In some areas of Italy, even today, getting to tell people apart is hard, in spite of their surname: it's the case of Chioggia, in Veneto, where the extremely high diffusion of two surnames, Boscolo and Tiozzo, forced the town's civil registry to enter also nicknames in its official records. Yes, nicknames, so we have the Boscolo Bachetto and the Bosco- lo Forcola, the Tiozzo Fasiolo and the Tiozzo Napoli. Of course, not everyone is happy with their surname. And how could you blame them if they have very funny or vulgar ones? According to statistics, our cognomi parolaccia, swear word surnames, are 111, carried by around 38.000 people; among the most unfortunate certainly Ms Rosa Chiappa (pink buttock) and Ms Benvenuta Vacca (welcome cow), who certainly didn't thank their parents for their name choices. After all this history, in the end, what are Italy's most com- mon surnames? On top of them all the ubiquitous Rossi, extreme- ly common a bit everywhere in the peninsula, followed by Russo, Ferrari, Esposito and Bianchi. We also have plenty of Gallo and Ferrero, Fabbri, Tre- visan and Parodi. Many are the Greco and the Messina, the Mancini and the Colombo. How many among them, made it all the way across the Atlantic? Italy's most common last names: is yours among them? LA VITA ITALIANA TRADITIONS HISTORY CULTURE There are about 300.000 surnames in Italy today

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