Surnames of Emilia-Romagna

Emilia-Romagna’s surnames, people by people

Before the Romans, the Po plain belonged to the Etruscans, who called Bologna Felsina, and then to the Celts: the Boii Gauls, who according to many scholars gave the city its Latin name, Bononia. From there come Bolognesi and Cevenini. In 187 BC the consul Marcus Aemilius Lepidus built a straight road from Rimini to Piacenza, the Via Emilia, which gave the region its name. Ravenna was the capital of the Western Empire and then, for almost two centuries, of the Byzantines: the Lombards called those lands Romania, “the land of the Romans,” and that’s how Romagna was born. With the Lombards and the Franks came warriors’ names like Gandolfo, Gherardo and Lamberto, the source of Gandolfi, Gherardi and Lambertini.

Under the porticoes of the cities, a trade became a nickname and the nickname a surname: Fabbri, Calzolari, Sarti, Muratori. With the Este in Ferrara, the Farnese in Parma and Piacenza and the pope in Bologna, anyone who moved to a new city was called by the name of the one they came from: Reggiani, Mantovani, Veronesi. Babies left at the hospitals were given surnames like Degli Esposti, “entrusted to everyone’s charity,” and Incerti, “father unknown.” And from the Apennines, where chestnut flour was the bread of the poor, many people left between the 1800s and 1900s for the Americas, France and Britain.

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

How to recognize a surname from Emilia or Romagna

In Bologna, the city of notaries, people had to be told apart in legal records early on: in 1257 the Commune freed the serfs of its territory and wrote down their names, one by one, in the Liber Paradisus. Some signs are easy to spot. Shortened names: Zanni from Giovanni, Righi from Arrigo or Federigo, Naldi from Rinaldo, Pirini from Piero. Then the pet endings, -ini, -ozzi, -uzzi, -otti: so one Domenico, Mingo, gave Mingozzi, Minguzzi and Menozzi. And the final -i marks the family: the Zannoni are “Zannone’s people,” because in the notaries’ Latin records people wrote filius Zannoni, “son of Zannone.”

Province by province

At the back of the volume an index gathers, province by province, the surnames most common there: 274 surnames from the book, spread across the nine provinces from Bologna to Rimini. Then comes the list of the 51 towns in Emilia-Romagna where a surname from the book is the most common: in Rimini, for example, No. 1 is Fabbri, the smith’s family.