Surnames of Abruzzo

Abruzzo’s surnames, people by people

Before Rome, the valleys of Abruzzo belonged to the Italic peoples: the Vestini, Marsi, Peligni, Marrucini, Frentani and Pretuzi. From the Pretuzi, who lived around Teramo, comes the medieval name of the region, Aprutium. In 90 BC they rebelled against Rome to win citizenship and made Corfinio their capital under a new name: Italia. They lost the war but won citizenship, and Latin became their language.

At the end of the 6th century the Lombards arrived, then the Franks of Charlemagne, and their warrior names mixed with Latin names. Berardo was so loved in Abruzzo that it alone gave rise to an entire family of surnames, from Berardinelli to Di Giamberardino. Between the 11th and 12th centuries the Normans conquered the region, which for about seven centuries belonged to the Kingdom of Sicily and then the Kingdom of Naples, until 1860.

For centuries Abruzzo was the land of the transhumance: in autumn the flocks went down toward Apulia along the tratturi, grass roads more than a hundred meters wide, and shepherds and wool merchants left their trades in surnames. Between the 15th and 16th centuries, fleeing the advance of the Turks, families from Dalmatia and the Balkans arrived on the coast, the Schiavoni (Slavs), along with the Albanians, who in 1743 founded Villa Badessa, near Pescara. From the late 1800s to the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of people from Abruzzo left: that is why you will find many of the book’s surnames in Toronto, Philadelphia or Buenos Aires.

The volume gives a chapter to each of these eight peoples and stories. For each one it lists the surnames in the book that carry their mark.

How to recognize an Abruzzo surname

In Abruzzo more than anywhere else, the surname came from the father’s name. That is why the region is full of Di, De and D’: Di Marco, Di Paolo, Di Giovanni, D’Alfonso, D’Orazio. Almost half of the 200 most common surnames in the book begin that way, and it means “son of.” Then come the Latin forms of the notaries: De Berardinis, De Laurentiis, De Flaviis. And the affectionate endings -ucci, -etti, -ini, -elli, which turn a single name into several different families.

Why De Berardinis and not De Berardini? In Latin records they wrote de Berardinis, “of the Berardini,” with the Latin plural ending. In many parts of Italy the form was translated; in Abruzzo and the neighboring regions it stayed just as it was on paper. The same name gave different surnames: from Domenico come Di Domenico and De Dominicis, from Lorenzo Di Lorenzo and De Laurentiis. The first is the parish priest’s everyday speech, the second the notary’s Latin.

Province by province

At the back of the volume an index gathers the surnames most common in each province. There are 255 surnames from the book, spread across the four provinces, Chieti, L’Aquila, Pescara and Teramo. Then comes the list of the 41 Abruzzo towns where a surname from the book is the most common. In Chieti, No. 1 is Iezzi.