Italian Roots

Italian surnames encode a trade, a father, a place, a nickname — or an orphanage. How to read yours, and why its distribution across Italy can point you at the right province.

Italy rewrote its citizenship-by-descent rules in 2025 and the Constitutional Court upheld them in 2026. The eligible pool shrank dramatically. Here is the current picture in plain language.

Italy digitised millions of civil records and put them online free. The catch is that you cannot search most of them by name. Here is how the Antenati portal actually works.

Italian records are organised by town, not by surname — so finding the comune is the step that unlocks everything else. Here are the US records that reveal it, in the order worth searching them.