Esposito

Set into the wall of the basilica of the Annunziata in Naples there is a revolving wooden cylinder turned on a compass mechanism, and it is still there to be seen. Built in the fourteenth century along with the church, its purpose was mechanical mercy. A woman who could not keep her child laid the infant in the cylinder from the street and turned it, and the child passed through the wall into the hospital's care without her ever being seen. This was the ruota degli esposti, the wheel of the exposed.

The act was called esposizione and the child an esposto, both from the Latin expositus, past participle of exponere, to place outside. Neapolitan dialect turned esposto into esposito, and that is the surname: not a father's name, not a trade, not a village, but a description of how a person entered the record. Naples held that the children of the wheel had been placed in the keeping of the Madonna of the Annunciation and called them figli d' 'a Nunziata, a city insisting its foundlings belonged to somebody.

The first Esposito in the record is a specific child. The registers of the Ospedale dell'Annunziata record an admission on 1 January 1623 entered as Fabritio de anni due, Fabritio, aged two. He was no newborn left in the night; he was a toddler, kept for two years by somebody who could not keep him longer, and the surname the institution gave him is now carried by millions.

What the wheel guaranteed was anonymity, and what anonymity cost was parentage. A child arriving through it had none the hospital could write down, so the register supplied a category instead of a father, and the same surname went to unrelated children in the same building until it looked like a vast kindred and was the opposite of one. The people using the wheel worked against that: notes were sometimes tucked in beside the child giving the family's origin, so that if circumstances changed it might one day be claimed back.

During the decennio francese, the French decade in which Naples was ruled from outside, King Joachim Murat judged the surname harmful. His objection was practical: Esposito announced its bearer's origin to every clerk, employer and neighbour who read it, a humiliating mark and a stain that sometimes cost the foundlings advantages they would otherwise have had in civil life.

By decree number 985 of 3 June 1811 he ordered it stopped. Abandoned children were to be given an invented surname fitted to the person: from a physical characteristic, or the saint of the day, or the season of the exposure, or the place of birth. Nineteenth-century Italian law took up the principle and forbade any surname that advertised a child's origin. The reform came far too late. By 1811 the name had been leaving the Annunziata for nearly two centuries and every Esposito already discharged was passing it on by ordinary inheritance; what Murat abolished was the manufacture of new ones.

The Naples wheel was closed on 22 June 1875 after roughly five centuries in service, and closing it did not end the need it answered. Infants went on being left on the sagrato and the steps of the basilica for years afterwards, to the same institution without the machinery, and its foundling hospital kept taking in orphaned children until 1980.

The arithmetic of those centuries sits in the phone book. Esposito is the fourth most common surname in Italy, held by more than 35,000 families, over 22,000 of them in Campania and more than 18,000 in the metropolitan city of Naples alone, where it is the most frequent surname there is. No family produced that; one building did. Around it sit forms that are dialect and grammar rather than error: Esposto, Sposito, the plurals Esposti and Espositi, D'Esposito and Degli Esposti, and Expósito in Spanish.

Michele Esposito was born at Castellamare di Stabia, near Sorrento, on 29 September 1855 and entered the conservatory of Naples as a boy: piano under Beniamino Cesi, eight years of composition under Paolo Serrao, who also taught Francesco Cilea. He went to Paris in 1878, and in 1879 married Natalia Klebnikoff of St Petersburg; among their four children was the scholar Mario Esposito. In 1882 he took the chief pianoforte professorship at the Royal Irish Academy of Music and held it for more than forty years.

What he did with the post was build the institutions Dublin lacked. He inaugurated the Royal Dublin Society's chamber recitals, founded the Dublin Orchestral Society in 1898 and conducted it until it disbanded in 1914, and with Sir Stanley Cochrane set up the publisher C. E. Edition. The prizes came from three countries: Feis Ceoil awards for his cantata Deirdre, his Irish Symphony and his String Quartet in D major, a London prize for the Cello Sonata in 1899, one from La Société Nouvelle in Paris in 1907, another from the Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna. He conducted the London Symphony Orchestra at Woodbrook in 1913 and 1914, playing his own piano concerto under Hamilton Harty, and returned to Italy the year before he died at Florence on 19 November 1929.

Gaetano Esposito, born at Salerno on 17 November 1858, studied first with Gaetano D'Agostino, then entered the Royal Institute of Fine Arts of Naples on a stipend from the government of Salerno, under Filippo Palizzi, Domenico Morelli and Stanislao Lista. Like Morelli he pushed away from an academic temperament, and the lifelong support of Antonio Mancini shows in what he painted: the working people of Naples at their own business, and portraits.

The commissions of his last decade put his work into rooms Neapolitans still walk through: the Caffè Gambrinus, the ceiling of the Garibaldi communal theatre at Santa Maria Capua Vetere in 1895, and in 1897 and 1898 the ceiling of the refurbished Palazzo della Borsa in Naples, with allegories of work and of history. Latterly he turned to marine views in the manner of the School of Posillipo, and a large seascape took the gold medal at the 1904 Universal Exposition in Saint Louis.

The southern migration carried the name across the Atlantic in bulk, and one family's dates are on the record. The grandfather of Amadeo Esposito came from Italy in 1885; his father Giuseppe followed in 1900 at eighteen and became a saloon owner in Ocean Hill, Brooklyn, where he and Felicia raised their son and two daughters in the rooms above the bar.

Amadeo, called Meade since elementary school, left high school at fourteen and was remembered by colleagues as a man who read everything from comic books to Plato. At eighteen he got a couple of dozen of the local men together and founded the Progressive Democratic Club on Fulton Street. He put others into office before himself, launching the Brownsville haberdasher Abe Stark, president of the New York City Council from 1954 to 1961, and helping elect Alfred Lama, co-author of the Mitchell-Lama housing programme. He lost the Canarsie district leadership by 200 votes in 1958 and won it in 1960 with the endorsements of Eleanor Roosevelt and Herbert H. Lehman, then chaired the Kings County Democratic Committee from 1969 to 1984.

Giani Esposito, born at Etterbeek in Belgium on 23 August 1930 to a French mother and an Italian father, appeared in fifty films between 1951 and 1973 and recorded albums of spiritual, poetic songs; his Les Clowns of 1957 was covered by Raymond Devos, Hervé Vilard and Bernard Lavilliers. Alfredo Mario Espósito Castro was born in Naples on 20 May 1927 while his father served there as Argentine consul: ordained a Claretian priest in 1954, he was named bishop by Paul VI in April 1976 and installed that July as the first bishop of Zárate-Campana in Argentina.

In Naples and its bay the name is as ordinary and as visible as ever. Giovanni Esposito, born in the city in 1970, Salvatore Esposito, born there in 1986, and Ciro Esposito, born in 1981, all act. Castellamare di Stabia, the town Michele Esposito left for the conservatory, has since produced three footballers of the name: Salvatore, born in 2000, Sebastiano in 2002 and Pio in 2005. The wheel that put the name into the record is still there, set in the wall of the Annunziata.