Mannino

History & Origin

Mannino is a diminutive form of Manno, a medieval personal name common in Sicily and southern Italy derived ultimately from the Germanic root mano (meaning man or power). The Normans who conquered Sicily in the eleventh century brought Germanic personal names with them, and Manno was among those that passed into Sicilian usage and eventually gave rise to hereditary surnames.

The diminutive ending -ino in Italian expresses affection or smallness — so Mannino was originally "little Manno" or "dear Manno," a pet form of the personal name that became fixed as the family surname. This pattern of forming surnames from diminutives of personal names is extremely common in Sicily.

The surname is concentrated in western Sicily — the provinces of Palermo, Agrigento, and Trapani — which were also the main source regions for Sicilian emigration to America. The great majority of American Mannino families trace their roots to these provinces, with ancestors who emigrated between 1880 and 1920 and settled most densely in New York, New Jersey, and California.

In Sicily itself, the Mannino surname appears in medieval and early modern records as a well-established family name, and there are Mannino families recorded in ecclesiastical and notarial documents from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Palermo and its surrounding provinces.

In the Diaspora

A Mannino family in America is almost certainly from western Sicily — from the olive groves and sulphur mines and fishing villages of Palermo, Agrigento, or Trapani province. The name links you to Norman Sicily and to the great Sicilian-American communities of New York and the East Coast, where the Mannino families settled alongside thousands of other Palermitani and Agrigentini at the turn of the twentieth century.

Spelling Variants

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

• Manno
• Mannina
• Mannini
• Di Manno