Surnames of Apulia

Apulia’s surnames, people by people

Before the Greeks and the Romans, Apulia was the land of the Iapygians: the Daunians around Foggia, the Peucetians in the Bari area, the Messapians in the Salento. The Romans called it Apulia, and from there comes the surname Pugliese. Taranto, founded according to tradition by settlers from Sparta, was one of the richest cities of Magna Graecia, and Greek never fully died out here: in the towns of the Grecìa Salentina the elderly still speak Griko. From that language come Calò, Chiriatti, Petrachi, Polimeno.

Then the others arrived. The Lombards made the cave of Saint Michael, on the Gargano, their sanctuary; Bari became the capital of Byzantine Italy. In 1087 sailors from Bari brought the bones of Saint Nicholas to the city, and Nicola became one of the best-loved names in Apulia: from Cola, its short form, come Colella and Colazzo. Frederick II, the “boy of Apulia,” moved thousands of Muslims from Sicily to Lucera, and their memory lives on in surnames like Saracino. With the Angevins came the Provençals of the Monti Dauni, from across the Adriatic Albanians and Slavs, and with the viceroys of Naples the Spanish.

The volume gives a chapter to each of these eleven peoples and stories, and for each one it lists the surnames in the book that carry its mark.

How to recognize an Apulian surname

Some signs are easy to spot. Around Bari the article got attached to the surname: Lorusso, Losito, Loconte, Labianca. In the Salento De dominates: De Giorgi, De Pascalis, De Santis. Many surnames are names of Apulian towns, like Altamura, Monopoli, Putignano, Rutigliano, and many end in -uzzi and -ulli, the local diminutives: Giannuzzi, Amatulli, Ferrulli. And the final -is of Iacobellis and Miccolis is the Latin of the registers, still attached to the name.

Province by province

At the back of the volume an index gathers, province by province, the surnames that weigh most there: 218 surnames from the book, spread across the six provinces from Bari to Taranto. Then comes the list of the 61 Apulian towns where a surname from the book is the most common: in Bari, for example, No. 1 is Lorusso, with the article attached.