Rizzo

Rizzo begins as a description of a body, not of a family. Riccio, 'curly', said in the dialects of Sicily and the Mezzogiorno, gave Rizzo, which the record sets alongside the central-Italian Ricci and the variant Risso. It belongs to the same class of name as Rossi, the redhead, and Mancini, the left-handed: a neighbour's shorthand for the one man in the parish whose hair anybody could pick out of a crowd.

That is the awkward thing about a nickname surname. It was accurate for exactly one generation. The curly-haired man's son might have hair as straight as rope and still answer to Rizzo, because by then the word had stopped describing him and started identifying his father's household. Every bearer of the name descends from a moment when a village's private observation hardened into a permanent label.

Ancient Rome had hereditary names, the nomen of the clan and the cognomen of its branch, but the Middle Ages lost the habit. Outside the aristocracy, where names came from patronymics or from a manor or fief, most Italians began to assume hereditary surnames only around 1450. That is the window in which Rizzo turned from a remark into an inheritance, and it is why the name's traceable spine is Renaissance rather than medieval.

The lock came later. After the Council of Trent, registration of baptisms and marriages became mandatory in parishes from 1564, and a name written into a priest's book is a name that can no longer drift. Italy ended with the largest collection of surnames of any country in the world, over 350,000 of them.

The same period explains the Rizzi who stand beside the Rizzo. Italians identified a household by an ancestor's name in the plural, so that Filippo of the Ormanno family was Filippo degli Ormanni and ended simply as Ormanni: the possessive fell away and the plural stayed. Rizzo kept the singular, Rizzi took the plural, and Riccio kept the word the whole thing started from.

Francesco Rizzo da Santacroce, 1505 to 1545, is the earliest bearer the record holds by name and date, and he sits precisely in the gap: after Italians began taking hereditary names, before the parish registers made them compulsory. He was a painter, active mainly in Bergamo and Venice.

A count taken in 2014 put 55.1% of the world's Rizzo bearers in Italy, at a national rate of one in 786. Inside Italy the name is nothing like evenly spread. Sicily carries it at one in 234, Apulia at one in 261 and Calabria at one in 374: the three regions of the deep south where the dialect that made the word was spoken.

Then the anomaly. Veneto, at one in 699, is the fourth region above the national rate and the only northern one. The Italian surname map usually keeps its regions apart, with -ago and -engo endings in Lombardy and Piedmont, -iello in Campania, -ace in Calabria, -aro and -isi in Sicily. A colour nickname such as Rosso crosses that grid, recorded in Sicily, Piedmont and Veneto at once, and Rizzo shows the same refusal to stay put: a southern name with a Venetian foothold.

The 1564 rule made the parish priest the keeper of Italian identity, and priests named Rizzo turn up on both sides of that book. Giuseppe Rizzo, 1863 to 1912, was a priest who was also a politician and a journalist. Angelo Rizzo, 1926 to 2008, rose to be Roman Catholic Bishop of Ragusa.

The furthest-reaching of them changed her given name and kept the other half. Rita Rizzo, an American Franciscan nun, was known to the world as Mother Angelica and founded the Eternal Word Television Network. Religious life replaced her given name; the surname stayed on the record. That is exactly the division of labour the Italian system was built to produce, the nome personal and changeable, the cognome fixed and inherited.

The United States holds 18.2% of Rizzo bearers, but share and rate tell different stories: one in 14,059 Americans against one in 5,960 Argentines and one in 3,422 Ecuadorians. Brazil holds 7.9%, Argentina 5.1%, Ecuador 3.3%. In Ecuador the name did not spread evenly either. It concentrates in Los Ríos province at one in 694, then Guayas at one in 1,410, the Galápagos at one in 2,098 and El Oro at one in 3,237.

What happened to the name in South America is visible in how it is written. Spanish-speaking countries give a person two surnames, the father's and then the mother's, so an Italian cognome that marries into a local family survives in a fixed slot rather than being absorbed. Gonzalo Nicolás Rizzo Sánchez, a Uruguayan football defender born in 1995, carries it in the paternal position. Juan Pablo Vojvoda Rizzo, an Argentine football manager born in 1975, carries it in the maternal one. Neither was shortened or translated to fit.

The generation that put it there is dated too. Juan Salvador Rizzo, an Argentine football player, was born in 1906 and the record loses him after that, his date of death unknown. Helena Rizzo, born in 1978, is a Brazilian chef and restaurateuse.

Not every Rizzo abroad came off a nineteenth-century emigrant ship. Joseph Rizzo was an eighteenth-century philosopher and theologian from Malta, which puts the surname settled on the island well before the age of mass migration. Malta kept it: Turu Rizzo, 1894 to 1967, was a Maltese Olympic water polo player and a world record swimmer.

Corfu holds the strangest figure in the entire count. It accounts for 0.01% of Rizzo bearers, statistically almost nothing, and yet its local rate is one in ten. One Greek island holds the name more densely than Sicily does.

The sea carried it into service as well as into settlement. Francisco Rizzo, 1831 to 1910, served as acting Spanish Governor-General of the Philippines, the surname surfacing in the administration of an empire on the far side of the world. Luigi Rizzo, an Italian naval officer, came out of the First World War as one of its heroes.

France holds 2.4% of Rizzo bearers and Belgium 1.1%. Alfredo Rizzo, 1902 to 1991, was a French-born Italian actor, screenwriter and director, a single lifetime holding both countries.

The name sits thickly in twentieth-century Italian image-making. Gianni Rizzo, 1925 to 1992, was a film actor; Willy Rizzo, 1928 to 2013, was a photographer and designer. The record links none of the three to each other, and that is the point of a name like this one. A surname common enough to appear three times over in a single industry is the surname the frequency tables still find thickest in Sicily, Apulia and Calabria.