Greco

Greco is the Italian word for a Greek, and as a byname it did the ordinary job of separating one man from the next. What makes it unusual is the ground it fell on. The far south had been Magna Graecia, and Byzantium held the heel of the peninsula afterwards. A household marked as the Greek in Calabria or the Salento was not being pointed at as an arrival off a ship. It was being placed in a layer of southern Italy older than the Italian being spoken around it.

Those communities never entirely went. Greek-speaking minorities survive in the Salento and in the Aspromonte, the mountain block that fills the toe of Calabria, and the Calabrian form of the language is catalogued in its own right as Greco di Calabria. The word did other work in the same countryside besides naming people: greco is a wind, the north-easterly also called the grecale, and it is a family of vines. In a region where the Greek strain was in the speech, the weather and the wine, it is no surprise it ended up in the surnames as well.

This is not a minor name. More than 13,000 families in Italy carry it, and the surname sits tenth or eleventh in the national order depending on which count is used. A 2014 measure put its rate across Italy as a whole at one bearer in 715.

Every region that beats that average lies south. Calabria carries it at one in 155, Apulia at one in 198, Sicily at one in 282 and Molise at one in 377. In Apulia it is not merely common but the single most frequent surname in the region, and it is concentrated almost entirely in the Salento, the peninsula of the heel where Greek is still spoken; it heads the count in Basilicata too. In the country around Bari the same name is carried in its other vowel, as Grieco.

That map is no accident. It follows, region by region, the parts of Italy that kept the closest ties to the Greek peninsula in both the classical and the Byzantine centuries. The frequency table and the language map of the Mezzogiorno are drawing the same line.

The root is the Latin graecus, one born in Greece, but the Italian naming record adds a second reading that changes who the name is really about. In some cases the byname marked a family's rite rather than its birthplace: it was applied to people of the Orthodox faith, whoever their grandparents had been.

The proof the naming record cites is the Arbereshe south. The Italo-Albanian settlements, Piana degli Albanesi in Sicily among them, were for centuries called greci by their neighbours, though the people in them were not Greeks and did not come from Greece. That is the word doing religious work rather than geographical work, and it means the name is not a straight guarantee of Greek descent. Some households were called Greco for where they came from; others for the altar they knelt at.

The variants of this name are not spelling drift. Each one belongs to a place, and the list works as a map of who said the word which way. Greca is Sicilian and La Greca belongs to the Agrigento country, while Lagreca is carried around Bari and Salerno. Griego is Campanian, Lucanian and Apulian. Del Greco is a name of Lazio and Abruzzo, Grecco of Lazio alone. Greci belongs to Parma, Rome and Frosinone; Grechi to Lombardy and central Italy; Grecchi to Milan, Lodi and Pavia; Greghi to Ferrara, Rovigo, Trento and Genoa; Grego to the Veneto, Friuli, Trieste, Rome and L'Aquila.

The southern forms did something the northern ones did not: they swallowed the article. Lo Greco is Palermitan, Agrigentine, Foggian and Barese. Compress it and you get Logreco, which is Barese, and Lo Grieco, which is Apulian, and finally Logrieco, which the surname atlas ties to one town, Bitonto in the metropolitan district of Bari. Four surnames in a row, each a further step of the same two words being run together in the same corner of Apulia.

The word travelled north as a place as well as a person: Milan has a quarter called Greco. What the spread shows is that one obvious observation, made in twenty dialects, produces twenty surnames, and that a family called Grecchi in Lombardy and one called Logrieco in Apulia are carrying the same remark about an ancestor.

The best-documented Grieco line begins in Apulia, in exactly the country the frequency tables mark. Ruggero Grieco was born at Foggia on 19 August 1893 and finished his schooling at the institute of agronomy, a training in land that stayed with him for the rest of his life. At eighteen he fell in with socialist circles and met Amadeo Bordiga; he joined the Socialist Party in 1912, and when Italy entered the First World War in 1915 he served as a second lieutenant.

In 1921 he took part in the founding of the Italian Communist Party, siding with Bordiga at the Livorno schism, and sat on its central and executive committees from that year. He was a parliamentary deputy from 1924 to 1926 and entered the party's politburo in 1927. By then he was already out of the country. From 1926 to 1944 he lived in exile in Switzerland, working in the party's Foreign Centre under the name Garlandi, becoming a candidate member of the Communist International's executive committee in 1928 and a full member in 1935. During the Second World War he worked in Moscow on radio, in charge of the broadcasts aimed at Italy.

He came home in 1944 and took over the party's propaganda section and headed the agrarian committee of its central committee, editing the magazine La riforma agraria, and returned to public office as a member of the Constituent Assembly in 1946 and a senator in 1948. The agronomy student finished as the party's man on the land. He died of a heart attack at Massa Lombarda on 23 July 1955, at a political meeting called to launch the National Farmworkers' Alliance.

Ruggero's son Sergio Grieco, born at Codevigo in the Veneto on 13 January 1917, was carried to France as a baby and schooled in Paris. His way into cinema was a school art competition: the prize included assisting the man who ran the school's projector. He began working in Paris as an assistant to the avant-garde film maker Germaine Dulac, and a family journey to the Soviet Union turned into a job as third assistant to Nikolai Ekk, for whom he worked on Road to Life, the first Soviet sound film, released in 1931. He married a Russian woman and had children there.

His Italian career started at the bottom, as a script supervisor in 1939 and an assistant director the year after, and in 1949 he assisted Rene Clement on The Walls of Malapaga. He directed his own first film, Il sentiero dell'odio, in 1950, close to forty in all before 1977, moving through swashbucklers, sword and sandal pictures and the Eurospy cycle. For the Secret Agent 077 films with Ken Clark he signed himself Terence Hathaway. His last film as director was The Mad Dog Killer in 1977; he co-wrote The Inglorious Bastards the following year, and died in Rome on 30 March 1982.

The third generation went into the same trade from the other end. David Grieco, Ruggero's grandson and Sergio's nephew, was born on 19 September 1951 and was acting in three of the most talked-about Italian films of 1968: Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, Pasolini's Teorema and Bertolucci's Partner. Pasolini, whom he counted with Bertolucci as his mentor, wanted him as an assistant director. He gave up acting at nineteen instead and became a film critic for l'Unita, took up directing documentaries and commercials in his thirties, and made his first feature, Evilenko, in 2004 with Malcolm McDowell, which brought him a David di Donatello nomination as best new director. In 2016 he returned to the man who had shaped him, directing La macchinazione with Massimo Ranieri as Pasolini.

Maria Patrizia Grieco, born on 1 February 1952, took a law degree at the University of Milan and joined Italtel in 1977. She was made its director of legal and general affairs in 1994, its director-general in 1999 and its managing director in 2002, then ran Siemens Informatica from 2003 to 2006 and Olivetti from 2008 to 2013, chairing that company from 2011 to 2014. In May 2014 she became chairman of Enel, the Italian electricity group, and held the chair until 2020. She won the Bellisario prize in 2000, an award for women who have distinguished themselves in management, science or economics, and has sat on the board of Save the Children since 2010.

The name turns up thickly in Italian football, and where it does the birthplaces keep pointing back to the same provinces. Vito Grieco, born at Molfetta in the province of Bari on 6 February 1971, began at Bari and built a long career in the lower divisions, over 100 matches in Serie B, more than 150 in Serie C1 and over 200 in Serie C2, taking four lower-division titles and a Serie B runners-up place with Modena in 2002 before moving into management. Gaetano Grieco, born in Naples on 7 November 1982, came up at Genoa and made his debut there on 12 September 1999 as an 82nd-minute substitute, won the Coppa Italia with Parma in 2001-02 and Serie C1 with Napoli in 2005-06, and scored six goals for the Italian under-18 team.

The plain Greco spelling keeps the same company. Fedele Greco, born at Cantalupo in 1930 and dead at Lucca in 2005, played and then managed; Giuseppe Greco, born at Palermo in 1983, and Peter Greco, born at Priverno in 1946, both played. None of these men is recorded as kin to any of the others, which is the ordinary condition of a surname carried by 13,000 families.

By the 2014 count 62.6 per cent of the world's Greco bearers were still living in Italy. The rest are the southern emigration in one line of figures. The United States holds 17.7 per cent of them, Argentina 6.1 per cent, Brazil 4.2 per cent, Canada 2.4 per cent and France 2 per cent: the standard route out of the Mezzogiorno, set down as a table.

Argentina repays a closer look, because the name did not spread evenly once it landed. It runs above the Argentine average in the city of Buenos Aires at one in 2,234, in Buenos Aires province at one in 3,163 and in Santa Fe at one in 4,827, and then, oddly, in Tierra del Fuego at one in 2,603, the territory at the bottom of the continent. A byname that began by noticing the Greek in a Calabrian village finished up denser in the far south of Argentina than in most of the country that invented it.