![]() ![]() So, what is Italy’s most common last name? This is easy to guess for an Italian: we all know it is Rossi. Over time, family names were inherited and took on greater importance for public purposes than the personal name. Born Jacopo Robusti, he was nicknamed Tintoretto because of his father's profession, dyer of silk fabrics. Another example is Tintoretto, one of the most important Venetian painters of the Renaissance. To be precise, his original name was Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, Leonardo son of Piero from Vinci. Just think of the name of the most famous Italian: Leonardo da Vinci (Leonardo from Vinci). In this phase, surnames and nicknames overlapped: to identify people, an added name was used that could refer to one of their characteristics, such as their occupation, place of origin, social status or simply the name of the parents. The use of a second name to recognize and distinguish people within a community reappeared in the late Middle Ages and took a long time to become established, from the 12th to the 16th century, with differences throughout Europe. This three-element nominal system disappeared with the fall of the Roman Empire, and, in the early Middle Ages, a single name was the norm. The origins of last names can be traced back to ancient Rome, which used a three-name system: a praenomen, the individual name a nomen, which identified the group of families with common origins (or gens) and the cognomen, or nickname. ![]() The way they formed and spread reflects the country’s history, from the development of Lordships in the Middle Ages to the migrations of the 20th century. In reality, the use of surnames in Italy is the result of a thousand-year-old complex process. We tend to take last names for granted, because we all have one. Some last names extend throughout the country, others are only typical of a region or area. This is due to the country’s history of linguistic fragmentation. Italy has the highest number of last names in Europe: 350,000.
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