Surnames of Liguria

Liguria’s surnames, people by people

Before Rome these mountains belonged to the Ligurians, a people of shepherds and warriors who lived in fortified villages on the heights, the castellari. Little remains of their language: a few place names, a few words of the dialect, and the suffix -asco, one of the oldest in Italy, which still lives on in surnames like Cevasco. Then came the Romans, with their roads and their Latin, the source of almost every word in Genoese, and the Lombards, who brought warriors’ names: from the Germanic Guglielmo, in Liguria, came Ghiglino, Ghiglione and Ghigliazza.

From 1099 Genoa governed itself, and power lay with the great families, gathered into alberghi: not inns but clans, groups of allied families who took the same surname. With Andrea Doria’s reform of 1528 the noble families were divided into 28 alberghi, and whoever joined one gave up his own surname and took the clan’s. The Genoese traded from the Black Sea to Flanders, and in 1407 the Banco di San Giorgio was founded.

For five centuries Genoa ruled Corsica. The descendants of the coral fishermen of Tabarca, the little island off Tunisia, moved to Sardinia in the 1700s and founded Carloforte and then Calasetta, where Tabarchino, a Ligurian dialect, is still spoken. Millions of emigrants later left from the port of Genoa, and the Ligurians started before the others: by the mid-1800s they were already in Argentina, Uruguay, Peru and California. In Buenos Aires they settled in the port neighborhood, La Boca.

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 Ligurian surname

Some signs are easy to spot. The diminutive in -ino and the augmentative in -one: Baccino, Zunino, Bruzzone, Ghiglione. The “De” or “Della” in front of the family name: De Ferrari, De Martini, Dellacasa, Dellepiane. And many surnames that tell of a place: the village in the valley, the locality, the “fascia,” a strip of land. They are the surnames of families who came down from the mountains to the sea for work and carried with them the name of the place they had left.

Province by province

At the back of the volume an index gathers, province by province, the surnames most common there: 275 surnames from the book, spread across the four provinces from Genoa to Savona. Then comes the list of the 66 Ligurian towns where a surname from the book is the most common: in Genoa, for example, No. 1 is Parodi, and in Rapallo it is Canessa.