Surnames of Lombardy

Lombardy’s surnames, people by people

Before the Romans, the Lombard plain belonged to the Celts: the Insubres around Milan, the Cenomani between Brescia and Cremona. According to tradition it was the Insubres who founded Milan, and its Latin name, Mediolanum, very likely has Celtic roots: a place in the middle of the plain. From there come Milani and Milanesi. With the Romans, Lombardy became a land of cities, and between the 3rd and 5th centuries Milan was one of the capitals of the Empire: most Lombard surnames come from Latin, like Calvi, Magri and Grossi. In 568 the Lombards arrived, made Pavia their capital and gave the region its name, Langobardia. Their names lived on for centuries in documents and passed into surnames like Garavaglia, Arnaboldi and Castoldi.

After the year 1000 came the communes and their notaries, and from the gonfaloniere, who carried the commune’s banner, comes Confalonieri. Under the Visconti the name Galeazzo became fashionable, and from it came Gallazzi. Bergamo and Brescia remained Venetian from the 1400s to 1797; Milan was Spanish for almost two centuries. The foundlings of the Ospedale Maggiore, which had a dove in its emblem, were often given the surname Colombo, today the most common in Lombardy; others got a good-omen name, “Dio ti allevi,” “may God raise you,” which gave Allievi. And in the valleys, from Valtellina to Val Camonica, towns were small and families few: that’s why so many surnames, like Acquistapace and Gusmeroli, are extremely rare outside their valley.

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

How to recognize a Lombard surname

In Lombardy surnames were born early, in the notaries’ deeds, and that’s why so many are names of towns: Arosio, Brivio, Cazzaniga, Vimercati. Some signs are easy to spot. The final -i marks the family: Colombo gives the Colombi, Rosso the Rossi. The ending -aghi comes from towns ending in -ago: Casirago gives Casiraghi, Cislago Cislaghi, Cambiago Cambiaghi. And around Bergamo the notaries’ Latin ending survives, as in Cortinovis and Maffeis.

Then there’s the family nickname, which in many towns of Brianza and the valleys still passes from father to son. 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: 274 surnames from the book, spread across the twelve provinces from Bergamo to Varese. Then comes the list of the 153 Lombard towns where a surname from the book is the most common: in Lissone, for example, No. 1 is Arosio, the name of a town in the Brianza near Como.