Italian surname

A name in Italian consists of a given name (nome) and a surname (cognome). Surnames are normally written after given names. In official documents, the surname may be written before given names. In speech, the use of given name before family name is standard in an educated style, but, due to bureaucratic influence, the opposite was common (but now it's deprecated).

Italian names, with their fixed nome + cognome structure, have little to do with the ancient Roman naming conventions, which used a tripartite system of given name + gentile name + hereditary or personal name or names. E.g., the Italian nome is not analogous to the ancient Roman nomen, since the former is the given name (distinct between siblings), while the latter the gentile name (inherited, thus shared by all belonging to a gens). Female name giving tradition and name changing rules after adoption for both sexes also differ between Roman antiquity and modern Italian use. Moreover, the low number and steady decline of importance and variety of Roman praenomina is in stark contrast with the current number of Italian given names.

Many Italian male given names :

And in -a (for example Andrea, Battista, Elia, Enea, , Luca, Mattia or ). Some names, usually of foreign origin (or foreign variant of existing Italian names), end with a consonant, such as Christian/Cristian (cfr Cristiano), Igor, Ivan (cfr Ivano or Giovanni), , Oscar and Walter/Valter (cfr Gualtiero).

Female names :

A few names end with an accented vowel, for instance Niccolò and .

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