Where the Bargelletti surname comes from
In the Middle Ages the bargello was the chief of a city’s guards. He kept order, arrested the guilty and watched over the prisons. Bargelletti would come from bargelletto, the diminutive of this word, already recorded in old dictionaries. But no dictionary of surnames has an entry for Bargelletti. The bargello path is the most likely one, but it remains a theory.
A name under Rome
In 19th-century Rome the surname ended up on the city map. The credit goes to a quarry on the Via Casilina and to an underground discovery made in 1883. There is also a poet who had a Bargelletti tell a legend of the Roman countryside. Their stories are in the PDF.
Where the Bargelletti live today
Bargelletti is one of the rarest surnames in Italy: fewer than twenty people carry it in the country. The few families live mostly in Lazio and the Marche. The old records find it in Osimo, in the province of Ancona, as early as 1789. Then it appears in Abruzzo, in Cepagatti, where the Bargelletti records cover a whole century, from 1809 to 1911. The map and the countries around the world where the Bargelletti live today are in the PDF.
Variants
The records also show the form Bargelletto, in the singular. The PDF lists no other widespread variants.
FAQ
What does the surname Bargelletti mean?
Probably “little bargelli.” The bargello was the chief of the guards in a medieval city, and the word comes from the medieval Latin barigildus, of Lombard origin. It’s a theory: no dictionary of surnames has an entry for it.
Where do the Bargelletti come from?
The oldest traces are in the Marche, in Osimo in 1789, and in Abruzzo, in Cepagatti, where the records run from 1809 to 1911. Today the few families live mostly in Lazio and the Marche.
Are Bargelletti and Bargelletto the same surname?
Yes. Bargelletto is the singular form, recorded among the variants. In old records surnames were written in different ways, and it’s worth searching for both.
Do Bargelletti, Bargellini and Bargelli have the same origin?
Most likely they all come from the word bargello. That doesn’t mean the families are related: each one may have arisen on its own.
Are all the Bargelletti related?
No one knows: the surname has no known founding ancestor. With so few people, though, rebuilding your own tree means rebuilding a good part of the story of all the Bargelletti. To do it you need birth records and parish registers.
Is the Bargelletti surname noble?
The surname itself is not a sign of nobility. It may have come from a trade or a nickname, and most Bargelletti families never had a coat of arms.
Is there a Bargelletti family coat of arms?
There is no coat of arms that belongs to all the Bargelletti. If a Bargelletti family had one, it was the mark of that one branch.
