Rossi

Rosso meant the red one, a nickname hung on a man for his hair; it would have died with him but for a medieval Italian habit: households were named for an ancestor put into the plural. Filippo of the Ormanno house was Filippo degli Ormanni; the possessive later dropped away and the plural stuck, so one man carried a name that described a whole kin group. Rosso's people became i Rossi, and the plural never came off.

The freezing came late. Outside the aristocracy, where surnames already came from patronymics, manors and fiefs, most Italians took hereditary surnames only around 1450, and parishes were not compelled to register baptisms and marriages until after the Council of Trent in 1564. Italy ended with over 350,000 surnames, more than any other country. Tuscan usage still treats such a name as a thing: name a man by surname alone and the article comes with it, so Gianni Rossi is il Rossi.

The documented Rossi of Emilia surface in 1323 in the archives of Parma and San Secondo, and rise the next year on one appointment: Ugolino Rossi, son of Guglielmo, was made Bishop of Parma in 1324 at twenty-three. He held the see until his death in 1377, and with it the revenues of Berceto, Bardone, Corniglio, Bosco, Roccaprebalza, Roccaferrara, Corniana and Castrignano, every one of which became a Rossi holding in the century that followed.

His three brothers took the secular half. Rolando, Marsilio and Pietro were granted the title of Counts of Berceto on 5 March 1331 by John I of Bohemia, who had occupied Parma, Reggio and Modena for the Guelph cause. The historian Marco Gentile notes that for all their later acquisitions the Rossi remained the sole holders of that comital title. The Ghibelline Scaligeri broke their grip on Berceto in 1336, and control was contested again through the 1350s.

Acquisition was the family's real method. In 1343 they bought the castle near Terenzo from the di Palmia. In 1346, the year Luchino Visconti bought Parma for 60,000 gold florins from Obizzo III d'Este, Felino Castle passed to Ugolino Rossi, son of Giacomo, jointly with Giacomo dai Ruggeri. And two generations of Rossi-Ruggeri marriage turned that joint holding, vassals and jurisdiction included, into Rossi property outright.

Litigation worked as well as purchase. In 1355 Giacomo Rossi and Agnese, widow of Rolando Rossi, sued Bishop Ugolino, their own kinsman, over an unrepaid loan, and carried off Corniglio, Roccaprebalza, Roccaferrara and Corniana from the episcopal mense. In 1365 the chapter of Parma Cathedral sold Giacomo the canons' rights over the castle and lands of San Secondo, the place that would name the Rossi counts thereafter; in 1376 the bishop handed Castrignano to his grand-nephew Rolando.

In 1375 Rolando Rossi bought property and vassals on the right bank of the Po in the Cremona diocese at Rezinoldo (the future site of Roccabianca) with Tolarolo, Polsine Manfredi, Fossa, Stagno and Motta Baluffi. The next year the Pallavicino bought land from a Da Borgo in the same district, and the collision ran on in lawsuits and armed action for more than a century. The Pallavicino won it in the fifteenth century, largely on Ludovico Sforza's backing.

Those holdings admitted the Rossi to the squadre, Western Emilia's word for the great families that dealt with Parma as blocs. The Sanvitale, Correggio and Pallavicino sat on the city's councils. By 1380 the Rossi party wanted representation reassessed to match its weight; the other houses insisted on parity; in 1388 the Rossi supporters refused to take up their seats at all.

Bishop Ugolino died in 1377 and Rolando and Bertrando Rossi took the family unopposed. Relations with Milan improved after Gian Galeazzo had his uncle Bernabò Visconti assassinated in 1385, and the Rossi kept everything: Felino under Bertrando, San Secondo under Rolando, the episcopal properties undivided. Rolando became podestà of Pavia in 1386; Bertrando advised Gian Galeazzo and carried diplomatic missions, including embassies to the French court.

Bertrando's other legacy is a library. Missals and books of hours made for him in Pavia and Milan hold seventy-two miniatures, one showing Bertrando at prayer at the feet of the Virgin; they were likely carried on his diplomatic missions, and reached the Bibliothèque nationale de France in the Smith-Lesouef donation of 1913. He continued work begun by Ugolino: a Pontificale, and a Messale that doubles as a family obituary recording the birth of Pietro Maria.

Then the succession frayed. Bertrando's eldest son Giacomo was made Bishop of Verona in 1388; Rolando died in 1389 without a male heir, buried in the Franciscan church in Parma; and Bertrando died in 1397, leaving Giovanni, Pietro and a natural son, Leonardo, who rebelled against his half-brothers in 1406 to seize San Secondo.

Gian Galeazzo died of plague in 1402, leaving the duchy to his thirteen-year-old son Gian Maria, and the Rossi threw everything at two objects: expansion into Lunigiana, and the recovery of Pontremoli, theirs early in the fourteenth century. Florentine money backed their bid on Parma and was withdrawn the moment Ottobon Terzi won. Pietro Rossi then allied with Ottobon in 1404 to hold Parma jointly; Ottobon soon cut him out, and the war that followed wrecked the countryside.

The Rossi took Berceto from the Sanvitale in that fighting but ran into the Ghibelline Fieschi over the La Cisa pass. Chasing half of Pontremoli they swore allegiance to Charles VI of France, who ruled Genoa; Giacomo, driven from Verona by the Venetian invasion, took on the Diocese of Luni. None of it worked. Pontremoli was sold to the Fieschi, castles were surrendered to the Terzi, Grodola was lost in 1408, and Pietro was captured by Luca Fieschi and had to find 10,000 florins for his release.

Diplomacy did what war had not. In 1408 the family joined Niccolò III d'Este's league against Ottobon and laid before the Marquis of Ferrara a document in twenty-four chapters demanding their castles and rights back, compensation for the Terzi occupation, and recognition that they were subjects of no future lord of Parma at all. In 1409 the league killed Ottobon, Niccolò III took the city, and the Rossi emerged with eight towns and numerous castles centred on Felino.

Pier Maria II de' Rossi, fourth count of San Secondo, put the family's money into stone between 1448 and 1460, raising Torrechiara Castle on a terraced hill south of Parma commanding the Parma River. It borrows from the castles of the House of Sforza and was built to be two things at once: a working fortification, and a noble residence for Pier Maria's mistress, Bianca Pellegrini d'Arluno. Four rectangular towers joined by a double merloned wall enclose the Cortile d'onore.

The towers declare the arrangement openly. The keep is the Lion Tower, named for the lion of the Rossi arms; the Lily Tower carries Bianca Pellegrini's; and the Tower of the Golden Chamber held the couple's bedchamber. That Camera d'Oro is among the most famous decorated bedchambers in Italy: fresco lunettes attributed to Benedetto Bembo showing Bianca crossing the couple's own lands in search of her lover.

As of 2014, 63.2 per cent of the world's Rossi still lived in Italy, one Italian in every 176. The name runs thickest in Liguria (1:87), Umbria (1:92), Tuscany (1:96) and Emilia-Romagna (1:98), the last the counts' own country, the Parma Apennines Ugolino drew his revenues from. The singular Rosso runs a different map, densest in Piedmont (1:253), then Liguria, Friuli-Venezia Giulia and the Veneto.

The rest went overseas, and the emigration is legible in the figures: 13.2 per cent of bearers in Brazil, 6.7 per cent in the United States, 6.3 per cent in Argentina, 3.5 per cent in France, pooling where Italians settled: Santa Fe Province (1:672), Salto in Uruguay (1:555), São Paulo (1:1,173). The singular form carries its own roll: the sculptor Medardo Rosso (1858–1928), the trumpeter and composer Nini Rosso (1926–1994), and Renzo Rosso (born 1955), co-founder of the Diesel clothing company.