Italian names

Gallery: Gravedona Cemetery

May 5, 2009

^ This (doubtless allegorical) statue just begs for a funny caption. Any ideas? (Click on the image to see a larger version.) While visiting friends on the other side of Lake Como, we stopped by the lakeside town of Gravedona and visited the cemetery. As you can see, family vaults are kept over generations and [...]

Read the full article →

Old-Fashioned Italian Baby Names

May 6, 2007

A monument to Varenna’s WWI dead. If your last name was Pensa (“think”), why would you name your child Innocente? Monuments like this also give clues to names which were once common but have now fallen out of popularity: Gaspare [GAHS-pah-ray], Eliseo [ell-lee-ZAY-oh], Oreste [oh-RES-tay], Sigismundo [sih-jiss-MOON-doh] and Corrado [cor-RAH-doh] are very rare today. War [...]

Read the full article →

Italian Baby Names I Happen to Like

June 14, 2006

Some less common but still current Italian baby names that I happen to like: Alessandra [ah-less-SAHN-dra] Corrado [cor-RAH-do] – I’ve only ever seen this on an older (now dead, in fact) television personality, but have always liked it. Equivalent to the English Conrad. Dario [DAH-ree-oh] From the old Persian Darius, the name of several kings. [...]

Read the full article →

Italian Surnames: The Funny, Surprising, and Just Plain Weird

March 14, 2006

Death announcements in Lecco. Note the surnames Turba (“disturbs”) and Barbagelata (“frozen beard”) Il Corriere della Sera reports today that Italy has the largest number of surnames in the world: 350,000. The ten commonest surnames cover only 1% of the population. And, with many surnames, you can also tell something about its origins by its [...]

Read the full article →

Unusual Italian Baby Names

March 10, 2006

photo taken in Mantova Dino [DEEN-oh] is a common nickname for a number of names. This guy must have a sense of humor: “Dino Nosari” sounds like dinosauri – dinosaurs. photo taken in Mantova I’d never heard the name Modestino [mod-ess-TEEN-oh] (literally “little modest one”), but it’s rather sweet, especially in combination with his surname, [...]

Read the full article →

Italian Orphan Names

November 13, 2004

Italy has a millennia-old tradition of abandoning unwanted infants. The Romans exposed them on remote hillsides to be (hopefully) adopted by someone who needed a child or (more likely) eaten by wolves. In more recent times, babies were left on church steps, in most cases to be raised by the Church. Since no one knew [...]

Read the full article →

Italian Law and Naming Your Baby

May 28, 2004

“What were they thinking?” department: This monument to those fallen in WWI in the Lake Como town of Gravedona shows someone whose parents named him “Troppotardi” – “too late”. An article in Il Corriere della Sera points out that Italian law aims to prevent children being given “ridiculous, shameful, or embarrassing” names by their parents. [...]

Read the full article →

Changing Names: Italian Women Keep Their Own Upon Marriage

September 8, 2003

Women in Italy don’t change their names when they marry. In the US this is the norm; most women when they marry change their surname to their husband’s, and there are simple, routine procedures in place for them to do so. It’s so usual that Americans are confused if you don’t do it. Years ago [...]

Read the full article →