Italian Coat of Arms: The Noble Heraldry of Italian Families

The first thing that makes Italian heraldry unusual is who had it.

Northern and central Italy urbanised early, and its cities were governed by merchants, bankers and guilds rather than by a landed aristocracy. So arms in Florence, Siena, Genoa and Bologna belong overwhelmingly to city families, guilds, confraternities and civic offices. The Arte della Lana and the Arte del Cambio — the wool and money-changers' guilds — had arms as unmistakable as any duke's.

The Medici were bankers. The Strozzi and Pazzi were bankers. Their shields are carved across Florence not because they were noble but because they paid for the buildings.

This is the most distinctively Italian feature of the whole tradition, and it is genuinely readable.

From the twelfth century Italy was split between the Guelphs, who supported the Papacy, and the Ghibellines, who supported the Holy Roman Emperor. The division ran through every city and frequently through single families, and it was written into arms.

The capo d'Angiò — the Angevin chief — is a band across the top of the shield, Azure, three fleurs-de-lis Or and a label Gules, granted to Guelph families by the Angevin kings of Naples. Where you see it, you are looking at a declared papal allegiance.

Its counterpart, the capo dell'Impero, carries the imperial black eagle on gold and marks a Ghibelline family.

The division shows in architecture too: Guelph battlements are square, Ghibelline ones swallow-tailed. Walk through northern Italy and the merlons on a castle tell you which side its builders were on.

• The horse-head shield. The scudo a testa di cavallo — rounded at the top with a notch, narrowing to a point — is the distinctive Italian form and is diagnostic on sight.
• The lozenge for churchmen and women, and in ecclesiastical heraldry a very developed system of hats and tassels, since Italy is where papal heraldry was codified.
• Crowns of rank rather than helmets. Italian achievements very often replace the helm with a coronet whose form indicates title — prince, duke, marquis, count, baron — and many show no helmet at all.
• Dense charges. Italian shields carry more, and smaller, charges than English ones, and rely less on the ordinaries.

Canting is everywhere, and Italian makes it easy to spot.

• Colonna bears a column. Della Rovere bears an oak tree (rovere). Orsini bears a bear (orso). Malaspina bears a thorn branch (spina).
• The eagle — imperial allegiance, and later a mark of any family ennobled by the Empire.
• The cross — the Genoese red cross on white, which the city lent to England and which became St George's cross.
• The lion of St Mark, winged and holding a book — Venice, and everywhere Venice ruled, from Dalmatia to Cyprus.
• The biscione — the Visconti serpent swallowing a child, the arms of Milan and later of the Sforza, and still on the badge of the city's football clubs and on Alfa Romeo cars.

Worth being exact, because a great deal of nonsense is sold on the strength of it.

Unified Italy regulated heraldry through the Consulta Araldica, established in 1869, which maintained the Libro d'Oro della Nobiltà Italiana and adjudicated claims to arms and titles.

The Republic abolished it. Transitional Provision XIV of the 1948 Constitution states that titles of nobility are not recognised. Since then Italy has had no state heraldic authority for private arms, and no Italian title has any legal standing whatever. Predicates attached to a surname before 1948 may survive as part of the name; the title does not.

What remains is private: the Corpo della Nobiltà Italiana and similar bodies keep registers, and the historical armorials remain what they always were — a record of what was borne, not a licence.

Italy has more distinct surnames than any other country — estimates run to around 350,000, against roughly 45,000 in England. The reason is fragmentation: surnames formed locally, over centuries, with no central pressure toward standard forms.

The main sources:

• Patronymic — Di Giovanni, D'Angelo, De Luca, Di Stefano, Paolini, Martinelli.
• Place — Romano, Lombardi, Napolitano, Calabrese, Greco, Toscano, Siciliano. These record a move: you are called "the Roman" in the town you moved to.
• Occupation — Ferrari and Ferraro (smith), Barbieri (barber), Sartori (tailor), Molinari (miller), Marinaro (sailor), Contadino (farmer).
• Nickname — Rossi (red-haired), Bianchi (fair), Bruno, Gallo, Lombardo, Mancini (left-handed), Grasso, Longo.

Rossi is the most common surname in Italy, Russo its southern equivalent, and Ferrari and Esposito follow closely.

The foundling surnames

A category of Italian name that exists almost nowhere else, and one it is worth recognising rather than romanticising.

Children left at a foundling hospital were given surnames by the institution, and the names are identifiable: Esposito (exposed, left out), Degli Esposti, Innocenti — from the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence — Trovato (found), Proietti (cast out), Casadio (house of God), Diotallevi ("may God raise you"), Della Casagrande.

Esposito is among the most common surnames in all of Italy, and overwhelmingly so in Naples. If your family carries one of these, the name marks an institution rather than a lineage — and no coat of arms attaches to it, however many sites will sell you one.

• The Libro d'Oro della Nobiltà Italiana and the published armorials of individual regions and cities — the regional ones are far more useful than the national.
• Crollalanza's Dizionario storico-blasonico, the standard Italian surname-and-arms dictionary.
• Rietstap, which has substantial Italian coverage.
• The Archivi di Stato, province by province, holding the stato civile — civil registration, which begins in the Napoleonic period in the north and around 1809–1820 in the south, and resumes nationally in 1866.
• Parish registers, which after the Council of Trent in 1563 are required and often run continuously from the late sixteenth century — among the deepest record series in Europe.
• Antenati, the Italian state archives' free digitised civil records portal.

Because Italian surnames formed locally, the useful question is not "what are the Ferrari arms" but "which Ferrari, and from where". Armorials list many unrelated families under the common names, and that is the accurate answer rather than a limitation.

The Heritage Volume sets out what the historical record holds for a surname — its origin, its meaning, where its bearers were concentrated, and the arms associated with it. How Your Report Is Made explains which parts come from public records and which our system builds.

Display the arms in a framed coat of arms, or carry the crest on a signet ring.