Fontanella

History & Origin

Fontanella is a diminutive of fontana — the Italian word for a spring, fountain, or natural water source. In medieval Italy, as in medieval Europe generally, access to fresh water defined where communities could live. A village or farmstead that had its own small spring — its own fontanella — had a precious natural resource, and families who lived near or around such a feature might become known by it.

The name is primarily associated with northern Italy, particularly Lombardy and the surrounding regions, where the Alpine foothills create the spring-fed landscapes that generated this class of topographic surnames. There is a comune (municipality) called Fontanella in the province of Bergamo in Lombardy, and it is likely that families from this and similar settlements took the place name as their own.

The related surname Fontana — the undiminished form, meaning simply "the spring" — is far more common throughout Italy. Fontanella, by contrast, is a regional name with a more specific northern character.

The word itself has an interesting modern resonance: in anatomy, the soft spot on a baby's skull is called a fontanella in Italian (and fontanelle in English) — because its pulsating movement reminded medieval anatomists of a bubbling spring.

In the Diaspora

For those bearing this name, it carries the memory of a particular landscape: the Alpine foothills of northern Italy, where small springs bubbled from limestone and gave life to the villages that perched on the slopes above the Po plain. It is a name that remembers water.

Spelling Variants

The Fontanella surname appears in various forms across Italy and its diaspora:

• Fontana
• Fontanini
• Fontanaro
• Fontanetto