Surnames of Friuli-Venezia Giulia

The surnames of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, people by people

In 181 BC the Romans founded Aquileia, a border colony that became one of the largest cities of the Empire. With the Romans came Latin, the source of Friulian. In 568 the Lombards entered Italy by way of Friuli itself, and at Cividale, the ancient Forum Iulii, King Alboin left the first of their duchies: the city’s name gave Friuli its own name. In 1077 Emperor Henry IV gave the Patriarch of Aquileia the rule of Friuli, and the Patria del Friuli was born, led by a bishop-prince and his Parliament. In 1420 Venice conquered Friuli and held it for almost four centuries: many names took a Venetian form, Zuan for Giovanni, Bortolo for Bartolomeo.

From the 7th–8th century groups of Slavs settled in the eastern valleys of Friuli, and Slovene, in its local varieties, is still spoken there today. In the Middle Ages German-speaking families climbed to Sauris, Timau and Sappada, and in the Val Canale German was spoken because the valley was Austrian until 1919. In 1719 Emperor Charles VI made Trieste a free port: Friulians, Venetians, Slovenes, Croats, Greeks, Serbs, Jews, Germans and Levantines arrived by the thousands, and in Trieste Furlan, meaning “the Friulian,” is the most common surname in the city.

Many surnames come from the father’s name, almost always shortened and made affectionate: Cola for Nicola, Cecco for Francesco, Tonin for Antonio. From Nicola come Colautti, Colussi and Collovati, from Bartolomeo Bortolussi, Bortolin and Bertolo. For centuries the men of Carnia spent the winter on the road: they were the cramârs, peddlers who crossed the Alps with the crassigne on their backs, a wooden cabinet full of drawers. From the 1800s into the 1900s, meanwhile, Friuli was a land of emigration, and wherever they arrived Friulians founded a Fogolâr furlan, the “Friulian hearth.”

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

How to recognize a Friulian surname

Some signs are easy to spot. The diminutives in -ut and -uss, which became -utti and -ussi: Colautti, Cecotti, Biasutti, Colussi, Bortolussi, Mattiussi. If a surname ends like that, the family almost always has roots here. The Venetian -in for “little”: Bortolin, Nadalin, Tomasin, Zorzin. And the Latin -is of the notaries: de Fabris, “of the family of smiths.” In medieval documents surnames were written in Latin, and in Friuli that notary’s form stayed attached to the family name, while elsewhere it disappeared.

Province by province

At the back of the volume an index gathers, province by province, the surnames most common there: 283 surnames from the book, spread across the four provinces from Gorizia to Udine. Then comes the list of the 64 towns in Friuli-Venezia Giulia where a surname from the book is the most common: in Trieste, for example, No. 1 is Furlan, and in Pordenone it is Santarossa.