Marino

The Italian surname literature offers three roads to Marino and refuses to pick one. The name may descend from the Latin cognomen Marinus; it may have been lifted off the given name Marino; or it may come from the ordinary noun marina, the coastline. The readings do not really compete, since the cognomen and the given name carry the same sense, of the sea, and the coastal word says it in the vernacular.

Behind the given name stands a saint whose story made it popular enough to harden into a surname. Marinus was a stonemason out of Dalmatia who, escaping persecution around AD 300, took to Monte Titano and built a hermitage there. The settlement that grew around him kept his name and was never absorbed: San Marino is the oldest surviving republic in the world, an independent state inside Italy. A boy christened Marino was handed a mason and a founder.

Marino is counted at roughly 23,726 presences in Italy, typical of the centre and the south and present in every part of the country. That single form is only the trunk: Italian onomastic sources list twenty-four related spellings, from the clipped Marin to the elaborate Marinuzzi.

The south prefers to say the name with a preposition in front of it, the old possessive meaning of the family of. De Marinis is recorded as Barese and Neapolitan, Demarinis as Barese alone, De Marino as Barese, Neapolitan and Salernitan, Di Marino as Campanian, Abruzzese and Lazio. Marinaccio, with its pejorative -accio ending, is Campanian and Foggian; Marinella appears in Campania, Marinuzzi in Puglia.

Northern Italy built the same name out of endings rather than prepositions. Marinolli is Trentino, Marinoni Lombard, Marinotto simply typical of the north; in Friuli, Marinatto belongs to Udine. Across the Veneto the forms multiply: Marinato is Venetian and Trevisan, Marinello Paduan, and the bare Marin is Venetan proper, recorded at Vicenza, Padua, Treviso and Venice. The same disambiguation records a Venetian patrician family called Marini or Marin, and says nothing further about it.

Between the poles sit the forms that refused to stay put. Marinelli is Marchigiano, Lazio and Apulian at once, with appearances throughout Italy; Marinacci is Perugian, Lazio and Foggian; Marinotti is Apulian and Roman, the far south paired with the capital. Marini, the variant carrying almost every documented bearer of this family, is typical of the centre-north and of Sardinia.

Three Italian places carry the name rather than the other way round. Conca dei Marini is a comune in the province of Salerno. Lido Marini, Li Marini in the Salentino dialect, is a seaside locality of the comune of Ugento in the province of Lecce. Marini is a frazione of Cassola in the province of Vicenza, in the Venetan country where the clipped Marin form is thickest.

One of the three is a seaside place, which makes the marina reading hard to dismiss even where the Latin cognomen would serve. The name also runs the other way round, as a given name: the Museo Marino Marini holds the works of a Marino Marini, gathered under what is effectively the same word twice.

Something unusual happens to this surname in the modern record: it very often appears inside a longer one. The Italian disambiguation for Marini gives compound surnames their own heading, and five of the people listed there carry the name joined to another. Antonietta Marini-Rainieri was a nineteenth-century Italian soprano. Evelyn Franceschi Marini, born Evelyn de la Touche and known professionally as Evelyn, lived from 1855 to 1920 and worked as an art historian, journalist and writer, an Italian of British origins.

The other three are twentieth-century figures with careers on record, and each acquired the extra name a different way: one from his mother, one from a stepfather, one from a husband. Between them they show how Italian compound surnames form, by accident, by household, one family at a time.

Giorgio Wenter Marini was born at Rovereto on 8 February 1890 to Giuseppe Wenter and Maria Marini, and carried both parents' names for the rest of his life. He studied under Luigi Comel at the Scuola Reale Elisabettina in Rovereto from 1901 to 1909, then took his engineer-architect degree at the Regia Scuola Tecnica in Munich in 1914. In 1912 he was among the founders of the Circolo artistico trentino, alongside Luigi Bonazza, Luigi Ratini and Ettore Sottsass senior.

When the First World War broke out he fled into Italy and finished his training in Rome with Giacomo Boni and the archaeologists Paolo Orsi and Federico Halbherr, joining Marcello Piacentini's studio in 1916 for the restoration of central Bologna. In 1919 the archbishop of Trento, Celestino Endrici, made him adviser to the relief works for war-damaged churches; the next year the province took him on to maintain its buildings.

His 1922 design to enlarge the provincial educational institute of Sant'Ilario at Stropparolo, near Rovereto, was argued over and finally stopped on the grounds that it followed German aesthetic canons too closely, a charge laid against a man who had just spent four years training in Munich. The province let him go in 1927 in a staff reduction and he turned to teaching, at Cortina d'Ampezzo, then Cantù, then Padua. From 1935 he lived in Venice, lecturing at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura from 1938 and directing the Istituto Statale d'Arte from 1953. He died there on 24 November 1973.

Giovanni Battista Marini Bettolo Marconi was born in Rome on 27 June 1915 to Rinaldo Marini and Evelina Bettolo, both from Liguria. His father died in 1918. In 1923 his mother remarried Umberto Marconi, an official of the British government in the Chinese customs service, and the household moved to Harbin in Manchuria; the third name in his surname arrived with that marriage. He was back in Rome by 1929 and enrolled in chemistry at the University of Rome in 1933.

He graduated in 1937 and worked in organic and pharmacological chemistry under Bargellini. In 1947 he became professor of chemistry at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, and in 1948 moved to the University of the Republic in Montevideo, where he carried out a large body of research on natural substances of biological interest. In 1949 he entered the Istituto Superiore di Sanità in Rome, in the therapeutic chemistry laboratories run by Daniel Bovet, and began the studies of Strychnos alkaloids for which Bovet was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize in medicine.

In 1964 he took over the direction of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità and became the first president of the Commission for the European Pharmacopoeia, leaving the ISS in 1971 for the chair of chemistry at the Sapienza. He belonged to the Accademia nazionale dei Lincei from 1969 and to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences from 1968, presiding over it from 1988. He wrote more than 400 publications and died in Rome on 22 July 1996.

Nicoletta Marini-Maio, born in 1961, took her hyphen from her husband Vittorio Maio, a professor at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. She read Italian literature at Perugia to 1986, took a master's in Italian studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 2001 and a doctorate there in 2006, and taught at the Università per stranieri in Perugia from 1989 to 1994. She handled cultural affairs at the Italian consulate in Philadelphia, joined Dickinson College in 2005 and took her chair there in 2010, founding the college's online G/S/I Journal and translating Marco Baliani's Body of State into English in 2012.

The Marino spelling itself keeps a quieter record. Only two of its Italian bearers are on record, both footballers: Luigi Marino, born at Padua in 1895 and dead there in 1980, and the former footballer Vincenzo Marino, born at Castelfiorentino in 1949. It is a thin list for a name carried by more than twenty thousand people in Italy alone, and a fair reminder that most who have carried it left no written record of themselves.