De Luca

Italian patronymics began as a possessive phrase rather than a name. A man was Francesco de Bernardo, Francis the son of Bernard, and the small word in the middle did all the work. Across most of the peninsula it did not survive the journey into a fixed surname: the de was dropped, a suffix fitted in its place, and de Bernardo became Bernardo and then Bernardi. De Luca is the same phrase with nothing dropped, a preposition and a given name still standing in the order somebody first said them aloud.

That is not decoration, because the two forms claim different things. A pluralised name points at a household sharing an ancestor. The prepositional form points at one man, the father, and identifies his son by him alone. De Luca says the son of Luca and nothing else; Di Luca is the same sentence with the vowel the local speech preferred. The naming sources put it flatly: De Luca, son of Luke, is one of the most common surnames in the whole of Italy.

The company it keeps is telling. The Italian surnames that held their preposition run south and Latinate: De Napoli and Di Napoli, De Genova and Di Genova, De Sanctis and De Laurentiis with the -is and -iis endings that mark Abruzzo.

The name behind the preposition is Luca, the Italian form of Luke, the evangelist. A father called Luca had been named at the font for that saint, and the son entered as De Luca carried the evangelist's name at one remove, in the possessive, as family property rather than as his own christening.

Luca is also grammatically odd, and Italians notice it. Male given names in Italian overwhelmingly end in -o and a smaller set in -e; only a short list ends in -a, the ending that otherwise marks a woman's name, and Andrea, Elia, Enea, Mattia, Nicola, Tobia and Luca are that list. It held its ground regardless, sitting among the commonest male names in Italy beside Marco, Giovanni, Giuseppe and Francesco, and sturdy enough to take another name in front of it and give Gianluca.

There is a second reading of the saint's name that Italian scholarship prefers, and it turns the surname inside out. Lucas is taken as Latin for an inhabitant of Lucania: a name of origin, like Calabrese or Napoletano, which happened to be worn by an evangelist and then travelled two thousand years as a personal name. On that reading a De Luca descends from a man named for a saint who was named for a place.

De Luca has a near neighbour that means something else altogether. De Lucca and Di Lucca, with the doubled consonant, belong to the class of names taken from a town, and sit in the sources beside Lucca, Lucchese and Lucchesi: a man from the city of Lucca, not the son of anybody. One letter separates a patronymic from a place name, and a family that lost or gained it in a clerk's hand crossed from one meaning to the other without intending to.

The given name also seeded a crop of surnames through the ordinary Italian machinery of suffixes, and the list shows what De Luca declined to do. Luchetti and Lucchetti, Luchini and Lucchini, Luconi, Lucotti, Lucatti, Lucattini, Luchelli, Lucarelli, Lucarini and Luccarini all take the root and dress it in a diminutive or a plural. Lucariello carries the -iello ending that belongs to Campania; Lucantoni fuses Luca to a second saint's name; Lucà moves the stress to the final syllable, and in Sicily the name also survives stripped back to a bare Luca with the preposition gone.

The count bears out how well the plain form did. De Luca is the fifty-ninth most frequent surname in Italy, carried by more than twelve thousand families, and its weight lies in the south and centre rather than spread evenly, heaviest in Campania and Lazio.

Giuseppe De Luca was born in Rome on Christmas Day, 25 December 1876, the son of a blacksmith, and sang in church choirs as a boy. When his voice broke a wealthy patron paid for lessons at the Rome Conservatory, where he studied under Venceslao Persichini and Antonio Cotogni; Persichini also trained the baritones Mattia Battistini and Titta Ruffo. He made his debut at Piacenza in 1897 as Valentin in Gounod's Faust, and its success brought invitations from more important houses.

He was a small man without a large voice, and built a career on the opposite qualities: a smooth, immaculately controlled legato that carried in the biggest theatres, a middle register of exceptional beauty, and comic timing that made him memorable in the ebullient roles. He sang at La Scala from 1902 to 1910 and made his London debut at Covent Garden in 1907.

Composers used him to launch their work. He created Gleby in Giordano's Siberia in 1903, the Marquess in Massenet's Grisélidis and Michonnet in Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur, and at La Scala in 1904 he was the first Sharpless in Puccini's Madama Butterfly.

De Luca moved to America and was a leading baritone at the Metropolitan Opera for twenty years, from 1915 to 1935, with a brief return in 1939-1940. His first appearance there was on 25 November 1915 as Figaro in The Barber of Seville, with Frieda Hempel as Rosina and Gaetano Bavagnoli conducting. In 1918 the house gave him a second Puccini premiere and he sang the title role in Gianni Schicchi. Arturo Toscanini is reputed to have called him absolutely the best baritone he ever heard.

The voice is not a matter of report only. He recorded for the Gramophone, Fonotipia and Victor companies from the early 1900s into the 1930s, sometimes partnered by Enrico Caruso, Beniamino Gigli and Rosa Ponselle. After retiring he taught at the Juilliard School. He died in New York on 26 August 1950 at 73, and his granddaughter was the soprano Nicoletta Panni.

Not every De Luca came out of the south. Mariano DeLuca and his wife Catherine, born Bonetti, left the Province of Belluno for the United States in the 1880s, and their son George Benjamin DeLuca was born on 20 September 1889. He became a lawyer and a banker, and served as Bronx County District Attorney from 1950 to 1954.

In 1954 he was elected Lieutenant Governor of New York on the Democratic ticket alongside Governor W. Averell Harriman, and held the office from 1955 to 1958. He was a delegate to the Democratic National Conventions of 1956 and 1960, and in 1959 was elected a vice president of the Commercial Bank of America. He lived in Riverdale in the Bronx and died on 2 May 1983.

Emigration took the name everywhere, and abroad it usually lost its space and became DeLuca. Fred DeLuca, 1947 to 2015, co-founded the Subway franchise of sandwich restaurants; Giorgio DeLuca was a founder of the gourmet grocery Dean & DeLuca, whose name is half his; Ryan DeLuca founded Bodybuilding.com; Michael De Luca, born 1965, is an American film producer and screenwriter.

Sport carried the name furthest into the ordinary record. Joseph Frank DeLuca, born at Weed in California in 1932, played at guard and linebacker for Olympic Junior College and then for the University of Montana, an All-Skyline Conference selection in 1953 and 1954; he played for the BC Lions in 1955 and came back as a coach, taking the head football job at Saint Mary's College of California in 1984 and 1985. Australia produced a run of Australian rules footballers of the name, from Alby De Luca, 1908 to 1978, to Adrian, Fabian and Josh Deluca. Nick De Luca, born 1984, played rugby union for Scotland, and Eduardo Deluca made his career as a football administrator in Argentina.

The rest of the roll is as broad as any Italian surname gets: Augusto De Luca, born 1955, an Italian photographer; Antonio De Luca, born 1956, an Italian Catholic bishop; the Italianist Iginio De Luca; Hector DeLuca, an American biochemist. A phrase invented so one village could tell two men apart is now a working name on four continents.