Surnames of Sicily

Sicily’s surnames, people by people

In 734 BC the Greeks founded Naxos, below Taormina, and for more than a thousand years Greek remained the language of church and village. From there come surnames that are names of cities, saints and trades: Trapani, for example, comes from drépanon, the sickle. And from the Greek rite, with its married priests, come Privitera, the priest’s wife, and Iacono, the deacon.

Then the others arrived. The Arabs, who landed at Mazara in 827, left citrus fruit, sugar cane and hundreds of words: Calta- means castle, Favara is the spring, the gebbia is the water tank. With the Normans, who made Palermo the capital of a kingdom, came names like Malgerio, the source of Maugeri, and the settlers from the North whom Sicilians called “lombardi”: from them comes Lombardo. Four centuries of Aragon and Spain added Catalano and Maiorca, and in the ports of Messina, Palermo and Trapani whoever stayed became, to the neighbors, “the Genoese” or “the Maltese.”

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

How to recognize a Sicilian surname

Some signs are easy to spot. The article in front, Lo, La, Li, is typical of the island: Lo Presti, La Rosa, Lo Giudice. Di means “son of”: Di Stefano, Di Mauro. The accent at the end, as in Calì, Patanè and Zappalà, is often a clue to a Greek or Arabic word. And many surnames are towns, because whoever left Licata or Modica became, in the new town, “Licata” or “Modica.”

Province by province

At the back of the volume an index gathers, province by province, the surnames that weigh most there: 197 surnames from the book, spread across the nine provinces from Agrigento to Trapani. Then comes the list of the 77 Sicilian towns where a surname from the book is the most common: in Palermo, for example, No. 1 is the name of another city on the island.