Gallo

Gallo is the cockerel, and it was fastened to men rather than birds: the one who strutted, the one who crowed, the one awake and loud before anyone else. Italian naming was rich in that habit, and Gallo belongs to a whole class of surnames built from a neighbour's shorthand for a neighbour, alongside Rossi for the redhead and Mancini for the left-handed man.

An older root sits underneath it: the Latin Gallus, a Gaul or a Celt. Both senses were long settled before any Gallo carried the word as an inherited name.

Outside the aristocracy, most Italian families took no fixed hereditary surname until around 1450, and what finally froze them was paperwork. From 1564 the Council of Trent made the registration of baptisms and marriages compulsory in every parish, and a nickname copied into a parish book by a priest stopped being a nickname. Italy came out of that process holding over 350,000 surnames, more than any other country in the world.

The variants track the grammar, not separate families. Medieval households were identified by an ancestor's name in the plural, so Filippo of the Ormanni was written Filippo Ormanni; Galli is that same plural, the cockerels, a house rather than a man. Lo Gallo preserves the definite article Italian still puts in front of a surname, the usage that makes Mario Rossi il Rossi.

Spanish built its surnames on a different frame. Medieval Castile ran on patronymics that shifted every generation, so Álvaro son of Rodrigo was Álvaro Rodríguez while his son Juan was Juan Álvarez, and it was those frozen patronymics that became the commonest names in the Spanish-speaking world. Underneath them sat a smaller descriptive class, Delgado for the thin man and Moreno for the dark one, working exactly as the Italian nicknames did.

Gallo belongs in that second class on both sides of the water, which is why the word could stick to a man in Cantabria as readily as to one in Calabria without anyone having to carry it there.

In 2014 a little over a third of the world's Gallos, 36.1 percent, were still living in Italy, where the name runs at roughly one person in 680. The density sits at both ends of the country and not in the middle: Piedmont leads at one in 207, Calabria is almost level at one in 224, then Campania, Liguria and Molise. A word coined in a street ended up thickest in the north-west and the deep south at once.

The remaining count is a map of Italian emigration. Argentina holds 11.8 percent of bearers and the United States 11.7, so the southern Atlantic crossing carried about as many Gallos as the northern one, with Colombia, the Philippines, Brazil, Mexico and Peru behind them, and Ecuador, France and Uruguay behind those. Inside Argentina the name is densest in Santiago del Estero, at one in 375, ahead of Córdoba, Buenos Aires and Santa Fe. Spain accounts for 2.2 percent and holds the name along its northern strip: Cantabria first, then the Basque Country, Castile and León, La Rioja, Asturias and Navarre.

The best-documented Gallos left Fossano. Giuseppe Gallo, who went by Joseph in America, arrived as an immigrant, spent a spell at menial labour, then started farming grapes and founded a winery of his own.

His sons Ernest (1909-2007) and Julio (1910-1993) turned that start into E. & J. Gallo Winery, today the largest exporter of California wines. They split the work in two and kept it split, Julio on production and Ernest on selling; Julio's own fortune was put at 300 million dollars, and Ernest still ranked 297th on the Forbes 400 in 2006. After their parents died, the two brothers and their wives, Amelia and Aileen, raised their thirteen-year-old youngest brother themselves. Ernest died at his home in Modesto, California, on 6 March 2007, twelve days short of his ninety-eighth birthday. His marriage to Amelia Franzia Gallo had lasted sixty-two years.

That youngest brother, Joseph Edward Gallo (1919-2007), did not follow them into wine. He ranched, and built Joseph Gallo Farms into one of the largest family-owned dairy operations in the world, a cheese business rather than a cellar. Three brothers out of one immigrant's vines, working the same California ground in two different trades.