Surnames of Tuscany

Tuscany’s surnames, people by people

Before the Romans, Tuscany was the land of the Etruscans, and even its name comes from them: the Romans called them Tusci and their land Tuscia. Their language died out almost two thousand years ago, but it lives on in place names, and places sometimes gave rise to surnames: Volterrani comes from Volterra, one of the great Etruscan cities. Then the Romans founded Lucca, Pisa and Florence, and their Latin became Tuscan, the basis of Italian.

In 568 the Lombards arrived, and in Tuscany their main center was Lucca. Names that later became surnames already appear in the Lucca charters: a deed from 720 names a cleric Geminiano, one from 760 a priest Frosino. In the Middle Ages Pisa’s ships sailed as far as Constantinople, and newcomers from far away often got a nickname saying where they came from. In Florence everything revolved around the Arti, the trade guilds, and a trade could become a surname: Mugnai is the miller, Ciabatti the cobbler.

In 1445 the Spedale degli Innocenti opened in Florence, where children whose families could not raise them were left: Innocenti, Degl’Innocenti and Nocentini come from there. In the late 1500s the Medici opened Livorno to merchants of every nation and faith. And from the mountains, from the Garfagnana to Amiata, many people left in the 19th and 20th centuries, for the Americas, France and Scotland.

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

How to recognize a Tuscan surname

Some signs are easy to spot. In the workshops and streets nobody went by their full name: Francesco was Cecco, Giovanni was Vanni, Bartolomeo was Meo, Gregorio was Goro. From them come Cecchi, Vanni, Meoni and Gori, and more than half the surnames in this book come from a personal name. Then come the pet endings, one on top of another: -ini, -ucci, -etti, -ozzi. So a single Iacopo gives Puccini, Puccioni and Puccinelli.

The final -i marks the family: the Puccini are “Puccino’s people,” his children and grandchildren. In the notaries’ Latin records they wrote filius Puccini, “son of Puccino,” and that form stuck. Tuscany was one of the first parts of Italy to use surnames: in the 13th- and 14th-century records of Florence, Pisa, Siena and Lucca, many family names are already the ones we know today.

Province by province

At the back of the volume an index gathers the surnames most common in each province. There are 280 surnames from the book, spread across the ten provinces from Arezzo to Siena. Then comes the list of the 59 Tuscan towns where a surname from the book is the most common. In Florence, No. 1 is Innocenti, the foundlings’ surname.