Surnames of Northern Italy

Northern Italy’s surnames, story by story

Before Rome, the Po plain belonged to the Celts and the Ligurians. They left the names of rivers, mountains and cities, and from those places, many centuries later, came surnames like Milani, Brambilla, Galbiati and Locatelli. The Romans laid out the Via Emilia and divided the fields into a checkerboard. The Lombards, who came down from Friuli in 568, made Pavia their capital and left personal names like Gandolfo, Bernardo and Rinaldo, and one word: sala, the lord’s house.

After the year 1000 the Lombard communes governed themselves, and in the countryside people told one another apart by the name of the place: Villa, Riva, Sala, Corti. Venice, a republic for a thousand years, gave everyone the name of their homeland: Trevisan, Visentin, Bressan, Furlan. The foundlings of Milan’s Ospedale Maggiore were long given the surname Colombo, today the most common in Lombardy. Then there are the worlds apart: the farmsteads of South Tyrol, where the surname is the name of the house, like Hofer and Pichler; the Aosta Valley of Franco-Provençal, with Favre, Chenal and Bionaz; Friuli with its own language; Genoa and the Piedmont of merchants and workshops.

The volume gives a chapter to each of these ten stories, with the surnames in the book that carry its mark.

How to recognize a surname from the North

Every region has its signature. In Lombardy place names win: the hometown, like Brambilla, Perego, Molteni and Viganò, or the spot where people lived, like Villa, Riva and Pozzi. In Veneto the name gets shorter: Marin, Bortolin, Zanon, Marcon. In Friuli the endings -utti and -ussi are typical, as in Bortolussi and Colussi. In Piedmont the trade ends in -ero: Ferrero, Barbero, Panero. And the same blacksmith became Ferrari in Emilia and Lombardy, Ferrario in Brianza, Ferraris in Vercelli, Ferrero in Turin, Fabbri in Romagna, Favaro around Treviso and Favre in the Aosta Valley.