Romano

Romano belongs to the largest class of Italian surnames: the ones that record where a man came from. The naming sources set Romani and Romano, 'Roman' and 'from Rome', in a long column beside Fiorentino, Napoletano, Genovese, Pisano and Palermitano. Each began as the shortest useful answer to the question of which man was meant. Romagnolo, for a man from Romagna, looks close enough to be mistaken for a variant; it is a separate name for a separate place.

The second reading is the older road. A pilgrim is a peregrinus, literally one who has come from afar, and medieval Europe kept different words for men returned from different shrines. A traveller back from the holy places of Palestine was a palmer, from the palm leaf he carried home as proof, and palmers were regarded as well-natured holy men for the devotion the journey demanded. A man back from Rome got a word of his own, and in Italy it settled on him for good.

Christian pilgrimage began with the sites of the birth, life, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. Aside from Origen in the third century, the surviving descriptions of journeys to the Holy Land date from the fourth, when the practice was encouraged by church fathers including Saint Jerome and established by Saint Helena, mother of Constantine the Great. Rome took its place among those destinations as the city of the martyrdom of Peter and Paul, the phrase Benedict XVI used of it, and pilgrimages were made there and to the other sites associated with the apostles, saints and Christian martyrs.

That devotion built an industry. In the Middle Ages Christian pilgrimage became a serious economic sector, first through the facilities that grew up at the popular destinations and later through organised group trips arranged across the Mediterranean. Anyone who walked to Rome walked into that apparatus, and came home changed enough that his neighbours renamed him for it.

Nobody is called the Roman in Rome. A surname of origin is created by movement, and it is given by the people the traveller arrives among rather than chosen by him. Through the European Middle Ages migration ran chiefly from smaller communities into the cities, and new arrivals needed a defining name to be known by. Romano is that transaction fossilised, repeated in a thousand parishes until it stopped being a description and became a family name.

Italy ran the same machinery on foreigners as on its own. Alongside the Milanese and the Calabrese sit Greco for a Greek, Danese for a Dane, Inglese for an Englishman, Tedesco for a German, and Spagnolo, Catalano, Maltese and Svizzero. Every one is a small piece of migration history, a record of an ancestor who arrived somewhere and was noticed.

One warning belongs here. The sources also record a medieval Italian family called da Romano, the house of the Ezzelini da Romano. No line of descent is traced from that house to bearers of the modern surname, and the two should not be taken for one thing, however tempting the spelling makes it.

Ancient Rome gave every free man an inherited name, the nomen of the clan and the cognomen of the branch, but that tradition was lost by the Middle Ages and surnames had to be built again from nothing. Outside the aristocracy, where names were often patronymic or taken from a manor or a fief, most Italians began to assume hereditary surnames around 1450. Before that, Romano was a label attached to one living man and it died with him; after it, the label began passing to children who had never seen the city.

The second date is 1564, when registration of baptisms and marriages became mandatory in parishes following the Council of Trent. That is the moment a family stops being remembered and starts being written down, priest by priest, village by village, and it is the foundation Italian genealogy still rests on. The scale of what those registers preserved is remarkable: Italy holds the largest collection of surnames of any country in the world, more than 350,000 of them.

The difference between Romano and Romani is grammar, not distance. A great many Italian surnames end in -i because of the medieval habit of naming a family after its ancestor in the plural. Filippo of the Ormanno household was Filippo degli Ormanni, and when the middle 'of the' fell away the plural stayed behind, leaving Filippo Ormanni. Romani is a house of Romanos in exactly that sense. Tuscan usage went further and put an article in front of a bare surname, so that a Rossi was il Rossi and a Romano was il Romano, which is precisely where the byname started.

Some bearers wore the name as their entire professional identity. Antoniazzo Romano, whose dates are given as the 1430s to the 1510s, is known to art history as an Italian Early Renaissance painter under a name that is nothing but a given name and a city. Giulio Romano, born about 1490 and dead in 1546, is recorded the same way, a sixteenth-century Italian artist whose surname is simply the word for a Roman.

Girolamo Romani, who lived from about 1485 to about 1566, is recorded equally as Romanino. That is the -ino diminutive the Italian system hangs on names like Bellini and Puccini, applied here to the family name itself. Juana Romani, 1867 to 1923, was an Italian-born French painter; Gustavo Romano is an Argentine artist; and Lou Romano, born 1972, is an American animator and voice actor who worked in the art department at Pixar Animation Studios.

Felice Romani, 1788 to 1865, was an Italian poet, a scholar of literature and mythology, and an opera librettist. Lalla Romano, 1906 to 2001, was an Italian novelist, poet and journalist.

Francesco Romani, 1785 to 1852, was an Italian medical doctor, and Elio Romani, 1920 to 1999, an Italian chess master. Antonella Romano, born 1962, is a French historian of science and Rose Romano, born 1959, an American poet. Fabrizio Romano, born 1993, is an Italian journalist and Carla Romano, born 1969, a Scottish journalist.

The name settled in South America in quantity, and the sporting record shows it plainly. Ángel Romano, 1893 to 1972, was a Uruguayan footballer and Félix Romano, 1894 to 1970, an Argentine one. María Romano, born 1931, was an Argentine fencer and Florencia Romano, born 1970, an Argentine football referee. Darlan Romani, born 1991, is a Brazilian track and field athlete specialising in the shot put.

North America and the Pacific took the name as readily. Johnny Romano, 1934 to 2019, and Jordan Romano, born 1993, are baseball players, as was James Romano, 1927 to 1990, an American right-handed pitcher in Major League Baseball. Megan Romano, born 1991, is an American swimmer, and Luke Romano, born 1986, a New Zealand rugby union footballer.

On stage and on record it did as well. Carlo Romano, 1908 to 1975, was an Italian film actor, screenwriter and voice actor, and Ray Romano, born 1957, is an American actor and comedian. Aldo Romano, born 1941, is an Italian-French jazz drummer and Daniel Romano, born 1985, a Canadian musician. A byname that once meant only that a man was not from here is now carried in Italy, France, Scotland, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Canada, the United States and New Zealand, and it still says exactly what it always said.