Piedmontese surnames are the surnames held by people in the Piedmont region lying primarily in north-western Italy. Historically the Piedmont region lay not just in Italy, but also in adjoining parts of south-eastern France and a corner of south-western Switzerland. Consequently, surnames here have been complicated by dent of having been influenced by different lingual traditions in France, Italy and Switzerland. That said, Italian has been the primary influence, a development which means many people of Piedmontese extraction who have been born, lived in and died in the French Piedmont will often carry Italian-sounding names.
History of Piedmontese surnames
Prior to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries surnames demonstrated considerable more variety across Europe than they do today. This was owing to the fact that vernacular languages had not yet been extensively standardised and regional dialects abounded. That began to change in the sixteenth century as more powerful centralising, Renaissance states began imposing national standards, buttressed by the printing revolution. Thus, the English of southern England and London was imposed across the country. Castilian became the dominant Spanish dialect, while the French of Paris and northern France became dominant over dialects like Occitan and Provencal. Similar developments did not occur in Italy, as the peninsula was divided into dozens of states down to the nineteenth century and there was no central authority to impose a uniform standard of Italian.[1] As a result, regional surnames survived to a much greater than they did in many other countries. One such regional surname tradition was that of the Piedmont in north-western Italy along the border with France. The term Piedmont literally means ‘the foot of the mountains’ and refers to the region lying at the western end of the Swiss Alps.[2]
The nature of Piedmont surnames is further complicated by the fact that the Piedmont region is not completely confined to Italy. Most of it does lie in north-western Italy in the region running approximately from Genoa North to Turin and then westwards to the border with France. However, for historic reasons, the Piedmont also includes parts of south-eastern France from around Nice North to the Alps. This is because this part of France was typically considered to be part of Italy in times gone by. It was ruled by the Italian dukes of Savoy between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries and only became part of France when the Savoyards gave it to France in return for French aid against Austria in the Second War of Italian Unification between 1859 and 1861. Owing to this, one will often find people with Italianate Piedmontese surnames in the south-eastern corner of France still today. A small corner of south-western Switzerland is also considered part of the Piedmont and Piedmont surnames are found here too.[3]
Piedmontese naming conventions
Piedmontese surnames are very similar to wider Italian surnames, generally speaking. But there are some regional variations. The most notable difference is that the suffix ‘-ero’ generally replaces the suffixes ‘-aro’ or ‘-aio’ that is more common in other parts of peninsular Italy. Thus Bottero is more common that Bottaro, Cravero is more common that Cravaro and Cordero is more common than Cordaio.[4]
A good example of this is Alessandro Barbero, a native of Turin and a historian, author and essayist. Fittingly, he teaches in the University of the Eastern Piedmont based out of several Piedmont towns in north-western Italy like Alessandria and Novara. His surname is an occupational one, Barbero indicating that an ancestor was a ‘barber’, something which did not necessarily mean he was a hairdresser, a ‘barber surgeon’ being a kind of doctor that engaged in primitive surgery and bloodletting in medieval and early modern times. Barbero is the Piedmontese version of this surname. It would be more commonly spelled as Barbaro in other parts of Italy.[5]
Most popular Piedmontese surnames
Most common surnames, based on turn of the century research, are as follows:
- Ferrero - The most common surname in the Italian Piedmont, with nearly 10,000 people bearing it.
- Bruno – A very common surname, one which again describes an ancestor’s hair colour, in this case being brown. It might also indicate a swarthy or particularly tanned complexion.
- Gallo – Gallo as a surname is ultimately derived from a Roman surname or Roman-era cognomen, Gallus, which was used to describe somebody was from ‘Gaul’ the Roman name for the region approximating to France and the Low Countries today. Hence Gallo indicates that someone in the Piedmont region was perceived as being particularly ‘French’ for a person in Italy.
- Giordano – This is a species of toponymic surname, one with a religious slant, Giordano being an Italianate version of Jordan, i.e. the River Jordan in the Holy Land.
- Rosso – This is the most common surname in Italy as a whole and features relatively high up the list in the Piedmont region too.
- Rossi – Another surname indicating an ancestor with red or fair hair or features.[6]
Famous Piedmontese individuals
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- Vittorio Alfieri – An acclaimed Italian poet and dramatist of the late eighteenth century, one who hailed from Asti in the Italian Piedmont.[7]
- Giuseppe Garibaldi – Some might question if Garibaldi should be designated as Piedmontese, but he certainly spent much of his life absorbed in that culture. Born in what is now the French town of Nice in the early nineteenth century, Garibaldi became the pre-eminent military figure within the Italian Wars of Reunification or Risorgimento of the mid-nineteenth century. He was also something of a latter-day cross between Marco Polo and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, visiting each continent and fighting in revolutions in both Europe and South America between the 1830s and the 1870s.[8]
- Cédric Di Dio Balsamo – A classic example of an individual from the French Piedmont with an Italianate Piedmontese surname. Di Dio Balsamo, an accomplished ice-hockey player, comes from Briançon in south-eastern France, very near the border with Italy.[9]
- Carla Bruni – A well-known singer and actress from Turin who was also the First Lady of France during the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy. Her immersion in French cultural life points to the Piedmont as a perennial border region straddling Italy and France.[10]
Explore more about Piedmontese surnames
- Italy, Births and Baptisms, 1806-1900 record collection at MyHeritage
- Italy, Marriages, 1809-1900 record collection at MyHeritage
- Italy Deaths and Burials, 1809-1900 record collection at MyHeritage
- Italians Immigrating to the United States record collection at MyHeritage
- Researching Your Italian Ancestors at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/vernacularisation-and-linguistic-democratisation
- ↑ https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100326507
- ↑ Frederick C. Schneid, The Second War of Italian Unification, 1859–1861 (London, 2014).
- ↑ https://www.italyheritage.com/genealogy/surnames/regions/piemonte/
- ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alessandro_Barbero
- ↑ https://www.italyheritage.com/genealogy/surnames/regions/piemonte/
- ↑ https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vittorio-Conte-Alfieri
- ↑ https://www.historytoday.com/archive/giuseppi-garibaldi-1807-1882
- ↑ https://www.hockeydb.com/ihdb/stats/pdisplay.php?pid=193040
- ↑ https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/bruni-carla