Where the Quattrocchi surname comes from
Quattrocchi comes from a nickname: “four eyes,” the playful way people in town referred to someone who wore glasses. At a time when glasses were rare, that detail was enough to make a man stand out. The nickname given to the founding ancestor passed to his children and became the family’s name.
From a Palermo workshop to the big screen
The surname has left its mark in Sicily for almost three centuries. There is an 18th-century master woodcarver whose statues are still in the island’s churches. And there is an actress of today, named Best Actress in 2026. The PDF tells who they are, along with a bishop and a man declared Blessed.
Where the Quattrocchi families live today
Quattrocchi is a Sicilian surname: there are about 1,200 families in Italy, and most of them live on the island. It is most concentrated in eastern Sicily, in the provinces of Messina and Catania. Its second center is Rome, with a group too large to come only from recent migration. The families in Lombardy and Piedmont arrived in the 1900s. The PDF has the region-by-region map and the countries around the world they reached.
Variants
The same nickname produced a singular form, rare and found only in northwestern Italy. The PDF explains how it relates to the Quattrocchi families of Sicily.
| Surname | Where it is concentrated |
|---|---|
| Quattrocchi | Sicily (Messina, Catania), Rome |
| Quattrocchio | Piedmont, Aosta Valley |
FAQ
What does the surname Quattrocchi mean?
It comes from the nickname “quattr’occhi,” four eyes, given to someone who wore glasses. The two lenses on his nose looked like a second pair of eyes, and the nickname became the family’s name.
Is Quattrocchi a Sicilian surname?
Yes. Most of the families live in Sicily, above all around Messina and Catania. There is also a second group, large and long-established, in Rome and Lazio.
Are Quattrocchi and Quattrocchio the same surname?
They come from the same nickname, but they are two separate stories. Quattrocchio, in the singular, is a rare surname of Piedmont and the Aosta Valley, carried by families unrelated to the Sicilian ones.
Are all Quattrocchi families related?
Not necessarily. People who carry the surname in the same corner of Italy have a good chance of sharing distant roots. To be sure, you need birth records and parish registers.
Is the Quattrocchi surname noble?
No. It comes from a small-town nickname. A few Quattrocchi families had their own coat of arms in the past, but almost no Quattrocchi family ever had one.
Is there a Quattrocchi family coat of arms?
No single coat of arms belongs to every Quattrocchi family. One branch had arms with a clever nod to the nickname, but they belonged to that house alone.
How is Quattrocchi spelled abroad?
Almost always the same way. In the United States the spelling Quatrocchi, with a single “t,” sometimes appears: if you’re looking for relatives who emigrated, it’s worth trying that one too.
