Italian Name Generator

What the Italian name generator does

You want an Italian name. Perhaps for a character, perhaps for a restaurant, perhaps for a family tree.

This gives you Italian names. Generate a few and see what lands.

There is more worth reading, because there are two names in this list that are among the most common in Italy, and both of them mean the same thing, and what they mean is that somebody's ancestor was left in the street.

How to use it

Set the count, press Generate, and press Copy to keep the results. Each press gives a new set.

Esposito means exposed

It is the fourth most widespread surname in Italy. In Naples and across the south you cannot go a street without meeting one.

And it is not a place, or a trade, or an ancestor's first name. It is a Latin participle. Expositus, from exponere, to place outside.

Exposed. As in, exposed to the elements. As in, left out.

It was the surname given to foundlings.

From about the thirteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, across everything that eventually became Italy, a single woman who found herself pregnant was facing the loss of her own honour and her family's. So she would leave. Go somewhere else to give birth, have the baby baptised, and hand the newborn to a foundling home. An ospizio degli esposti. A hospice of the exposed.

And the child needed a surname, because a person cannot be registered without one. So the clerk wrote down what had happened.

They were called esposti because they had been exposed in a public place, and that is the name they carried for the rest of their lives, and then handed to their children, and their children handed it on.

Which means that today, an enormous number of Italians are walking around with the word for what happened to an ancestor sitting on their passport. As one genealogist puts it: many of these surnames exist to this day, and their bearers have no idea that somewhere back there was a foundling child.

It is not a coincidence that the name is so common. It is common because the practice was enormous. In Ancient Rome, estimates run that somewhere between a fifth and two fifths of children were abandoned. And around 1800, in Milan, abandoned children were roughly a third of all births.

A third. Of every three babies born in the city, one was given up.

That is the scale of the thing that is sitting inside a name on this page.

The wheel in the wall

So how do you give up a child without anybody seeing you do it?

They built a machine for it.

It was called the ruota degli esposti, the wheel of the exposed, or the ruota dei proietti, which is bleaker and translates roughly as the wheel of the thrown-away. And it was exactly what it sounds like.

A hollow wooden cylinder, laid on its side, with a little door in one face. It was set into the outer wall of a hospital or a church, or in a small village, a midwife's house. Half of it stood inside the building. Half of it stood on the street.

You put the baby in the half on the street. Then you turned it.

Inside, a woman waited. She was alerted by a bell, or by the crying. She turned the cylinder the rest of the way, and the child came into the building, and the mother walked away, and nobody had seen anybody's face.

It was built to be merciful, and it was. The alternative was the roadside, or the sea, and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries infanticide was climbing hard enough that the Church put real energy into building an option that was not that. The wheel let a woman keep her life and let the child keep its life, and it required the two of them never to meet.

And then there is the detail that I cannot put down.

Some mothers left a segno di riconoscimento. A sign of recognition. Something to go in with the baby, so that if things ever changed, if the money came, if the shame lifted, if the world turned, she could come back and prove which one was hers.

It might be an image of a saint. It might be a foreign coin.

Very often it was a piece of cloth, torn in half.

She kept the other half.

You do not tear a piece of cloth in half unless you are planning to come back. That is not a keepsake. That is a receipt. And the archives are full of the halves that were never claimed.

There is one more piece, and it is the coldest one, because it is bureaucratic. Italian civil birth records are standard things: the date, the parents' names, their occupations, the child's name.

The records for foundlings could not do that, because nobody knew the parents. So instead of who, they recorded where. The document says the child was found in the public wheel of this town, or on this street, or at this doorstep.

And the person presenting the child was given a formal title in the register. In some places it was ricevitrice dei proietti. The receiver of castoffs.

That was a job. Somebody's job was to be the one who received them, and it was written into the paperwork, in a neat hand, alongside the address where the baby had been.

In Milan, for three hundred and fifty years, every one of them was called Colombo

Different cities handled the naming differently, and once you know the codes you can read them off a phone book.

In Rome, abandoned children were often called Proietti. It comes from the Latin proicere, built from pro and jacere, which means to throw in front of oneself. Throwaway.

In Siena, a foundling home gave its children Della Scala. From the stairs. Because that is where they were found.

In Florence, the clerks got creative and would take the child's first name and make a surname out of it, pluralising it or chopping it. Amato became Amati. Serafino became Serafi. Anselmo became Selmi.

And there are the plain ones, which are the ones that hurt. Trovato, found. Innocenti, innocent. Incognito, unknown. Salvati, saved. D'Ignoto, of the unknown one. Rotile, of the wheel.

Rotile. Of the wheel. The child was named after the furniture.

And then Milan.

From 1475 to 1825, every single foundling in Milan was given the surname Colombo. Pigeon, or dove.

Three hundred and fifty years. Not a preference. Not usually. Every one.

It is now the second most common surname in Milan and the fifth most common in the whole of Italy.

Read that again, because it is doing something the other names do not. Esposito tells you what happened. Colombo tells you nothing at all, unless you know the dates, in which case it tells you everything. It is a perfect hiding place that stopped hiding anything the moment it became the most common name in the city.

Colombo is in this list. So is Esposito. Neither of them looks like anything.

The practice was finally forbidden in 1928. Italy passed a law saying that a surname may not reveal a child's origins, which is a small, late, decent thing to do, and which arrived several centuries after it would have been useful to anybody in this section.

Taking an Italian name apart

Now something lighter, and it is sitting right at the top of the list.

Rossi is in there. So is Russo.

They are the same name. Both of them mean red, as in the redhead in the family, six hundred years ago.

The difference is not meaning. It is latitude.

Italian surnames ending in -i are northern, and the -i is a plural. Rossi does not mean red. It means the reds, as in the Rosso family, the household of the red-haired man. It is the same logic as a doorbell in England that says The Smiths.

Surnames ending in -o are southern, and they stayed singular. Russo is just red.

So Rossi and Russo are one word that went two ways, and every Italian hears it. A Rossi is from up there. A Russo is from down there. Same red-haired ancestor, five hundred miles apart.

Once you have that, the whole list opens:

• Bianchi, the whites. The pale family.
• Ferrari, the smiths. From ferro, iron. It is the Italian Smith, and it is on a car.
• Greco, the Greek. Somebody was foreign and it stuck.
• Lombardi, the Lombards. Somebody was from the north and it stuck.
• Conti, the counts. Which usually does not mean anybody was a count. It means they worked for one.
• Ricci, curly.
• Marino, of the sea.

So an Italian surname is mostly a neighbour's observation that never wore off. Your hair was red. You came from Greece. You worked up at the count's house. Fine. That is you now, and your children, and their children, and a car company, forever.

How this list came together

Nothing clever, and that is deliberate.

It is a curated list, checked by a person rather than scraped, using given names Italians actually use and the surnames that are genuinely common across the country. Generate pulls at random from the list, and you get no duplicates in a batch.

It runs entirely on your side, and nothing you enter goes anywhere.

Questions people ask

Does everyone called Esposito have a foundling ancestor?

No. The name has been inherited normally for many generations now, and plenty of families acquired it in other ways. What is true is that the name exists because of the practice, and that a great many of the people carrying it are descended from a child who was left somewhere. Most of them have never been told.

What is the difference between Rossi and Russo?

Geography. They are the same word, meaning red. The -i ending is northern and it is a plural, so Rossi is the red family. The -o ending is southern and singular. An Italian reads the ending and knows roughly where the family comes from.

What does the De in De Luca mean?

Of. It is a patronymic, so De Luca is of Luca, meaning descended from a man called Luca. Di does the same job. It is the same particle as the French de and the Spanish de, and in Italian it very rarely has anything to do with nobility.

Why do so many Italian surnames end in a vowel?

Because Italian words do. It is not a naming rule, it is the language. Italian syllables want to end open, which is why the whole language sounds the way it does and why Italian surnames are so easy to sing.

Is Rossi really the most common Italian surname?

It is consistently at or near the top, yes. Which makes sense once you see what it is: a description of hair colour, applied independently in thousands of villages, by thousands of neighbours, over several centuries, with no coordination whatsoever. The most common name in Italy is an accident that happened everywhere at once.

References

1. Esposito. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esposito
2. Foundlings: Searching for Abandoned Children in Italy. Legacy Tree Genealogists. https://www.legacytree.com/blog/finding-foundlings-italy
3. Spinogatti, E. Infant Abandonment and the Foundling Wheel in Southern Italy. Abruzzo Genealogy. https://www.abruzzogenealogy.com/infant-abandonment-and-foundling-wheel-in-southern-italy-abruzzo-molise/
4. Italian Surnames of Orphans and Foundlings. Surnames in Italy. https://surnamesinitaly.com/italian-surnames-of-orphans-and-foundlings/
5. Foundling Surnames. Italian Surname Database. http://www.italiansurname.com/foundling-surnames/