Surnames of Calabria

Calabria’s surnames, people by people

Before Rome, the Calabrian coast was Magna Graecia: Sibari, Crotone, Locri, Reggio. Greek did not disappear. It came back with the Byzantines, who ruled Calabria for five hundred years, and in many towns in the south of the region it was still the language spoken at home when surnames were born. So the butcher became Crea, from the Greek word for meat, the garlic seller Scordo, the curly-haired man Sgrò. From the title of respect given to Greek monks comes Caligiuri. In some towns of the Aspromonte, Grecanico is still spoken.

The north of the region had a different history: for a long time it was Lombard, all the way to Cosenza, and there Latin and Germanic surnames are more frequent, like Capalbo, from the Lombard name Gabualdo. The Arabs left Musolino, from muslin, the cotton cloth named after Mosul. With the Normans, who took Calabria from the Byzantines, came Bloise. Three centuries of Aragon and Spain added Garcea and Macheda. In the 1400s the Albanians arrived and founded or repopulated some thirty towns; even earlier the Waldensians had settled in Guardia Piemontese, where Occitan is still spoken.

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 a Calabrian surname

Some signs are easy to spot. The accent at the end, as in Macrì, Laganà, Praticò and Sgrò, is almost always a clue to Greek. The endings -iti and -oti mean “the people of”: the Paviglianiti are the people of Pavigliana, the Chiaravalloti those of Chiaravalle. Many surnames are towns: Cosenza, Gerace, Bova, Mendicino, Scigliano. And Levato, like Esposito, recalls the foundlings, children abandoned and raised by charity.

Then there’s the “ngiuria,” the family nickname that in many towns passes from father to son without being written down anywhere. It’s the same mechanism that, centuries ago, gave birth to surnames.

Province by province

At the back of the volume an index gathers, province by province, the surnames that weigh most there: 207 surnames from the book, spread across the five provinces from Catanzaro to Vibo Valentia. Then comes the list of the 73 Calabrian towns where a surname from the book is the most common: in Nocera Terinese, for example, No. 1 is Mendicino, the name of a town just outside Cosenza.