Surnames of Basilicata

Basilicata’s surnames, people by people

Before Rome, this land belonged to the Lucanians, an Oscan-speaking people who came down from the mountains around the 5th century BC. On the Ionian coast the cities of the Greeks already stood: Metaponto, Siris, Heraclea. In 291 BC Rome founded the colony of Venosa, where the poet Horace was born.

In the 6th century came the Lombards: most of the region became part of the Duchy of Benevento and then of the Principality of Salerno. In the 9th and 10th centuries the Byzantines retook much of the region, and with them came the Italo-Greek monks, who carved dozens of rock-hewn churches into the tufa at Matera and in the ravines around it. In the 11th century came the Normans, with Melfi as their first capital in the South, and then Frederick II of Swabia, who had his laws published in Melfi castle in 1231. In the Middle Ages settlers from northern Italy also came south, called Lombards here: in Tito, Picerno and Trecchina people still speak Gallo-Italic dialects.

Between the 15th and 16th centuries thousands of Albanians crossed the Adriatic and founded or resettled towns like Barile, Maschito and San Paolo Albanese. In the 19th and 20th centuries the region lost whole generations, who left for the United States, Argentina and Brazil and then for Switzerland, Germany, Turin, Milan and Rome: that is why many surnames in the book are found today more in Piedmont and Lombardy than in Basilicata.

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

How to recognize a Lucanian surname

Some signs are easy to spot. In Basilicata many surnames stayed in the singular, as in the rest of the South: Romaniello, not Romanielli. But there are plenty in -i too, like Carlucci or Gesualdi. The pet endings are -iello, -illo and -icchio: Bochicchio, Muscillo, Romaniello, Russillo.

Then there is the article that stayed stuck to a nickname: Labanca, Lagrutta, Laguardia, Lapadula, Larocca. The nickname was spoken with its article, la guardia, “the guard,” la rocca, “the rock,” and when the parish priest or the town clerk wrote it in the registers, he often wrote it as one word. And almost every Lucanian town has also become a surname, in a region of towns far apart from one another.

Province by province

At the back of the volume an index gathers the surnames most common in each province. There are 224 surnames from the book, spread across the two provinces, Matera and Potenza. Then comes the list of the 42 Lucanian towns where a surname from the book is the most common. In Matera, for example, No. 1 is the name of another Lucanian town, Montemurro.