Where the Falletta surname comes from
For Falletta, scholars point to two paths, and neither is certain. The first leads to the Sicilian dialect, where falletta or faddetta is the skirt, the woman’s apron. The first Falletta would have been given a nickname, perhaps as a joke, that then passed to his children.
The second path leads to a Sicilian baptismal name. Both theories, and the teasing sense of that nickname, are in the PDF.
The town on the rock
The surname first appears in the records of Sutera, a village in inland Sicily huddled around a crag over eight hundred meters high. It has a quarter with an Arabic name, a castle mentioned in 9th-century chronicles and a mine that lasted only a short time. The PDF reveals what that rock has to tell, and what ties Sutera to Campofranco.
Where the Fallettas live today
Falletta is a Sicilian surname: there are about 610 families in Italy, and the great majority live on the island. Its heart is in the provinces of Caltanissetta, Palermo and Agrigento. Campofranco, in the Platani valley, is the town where it’s the most common surname. Outside Sicily you’ll find it mostly in Piedmont and Lombardy, where many families arrived in the 1900s to work in the factories. The map and the countries around the world the Fallettas reached are in the PDF.
Variants
Falletta has a close form, Faddetta, nearer to the dialect word. The misspellings to look for in foreign records are in the PDF.
FAQ
What does the surname Falletta mean?
Its origin is debated. It may come from the Sicilian falletta or faddetta, the skirt or apron, used as a nickname. Or from a pet form of Cristofalo, the Sicilian form of Christopher.
Is Falletta a Sicilian surname?
Yes. The great majority of Fallettas live in Sicily, mostly in the provinces of Caltanissetta, Palermo and Agrigento. The families in the North arrived with 20th-century migration.
Where do the Fallettas originally come from?
From central Sicily, in the Platani valley. In 19th-century records the surname appears in Sutera from 1804 and in Campofranco from 1809, then in Montedoro, Milena and San Biagio Platani.
Are all Fallettas related?
Not necessarily: a surname can attach itself to several families in the same town at different times. In a town as small as Campofranco, though, the odds go up quite a bit. To find out you need birth records and parish registers.
Is the Falletta surname noble?
No: it was born from a nickname or a baptismal name, not from a noble house. Almost all Falletta families never had a coat of arms.
Is there a Falletta family coat of arms?
No single coat of arms belongs to every Falletta. If you find one for sale, it was the mark of a single family, never of the whole surname.
