Napoli

Origins and Meaning

Napoli is one of Italy's great city surnames — a name that records an ancestor's origin in Naples, the vast, ancient, overwhelming capital of the Italian south. The city's name comes from the Greek Neápolis, meaning "new city," reflecting its founding as a Greek colony (alongside the earlier Palaiópolis, the old city) on the Bay of Naples in the eighth or seventh century BCE. Through Greco-Roman antiquity, the medieval Kingdom of Naples, Aragonese and Spanish rule, the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and the Risorgimento, Naples accumulated history, art, music, food, and people in extraordinary concentration. By the nineteenth century it was one of the largest cities in Europe.

The surname Napoli arose as a regional identifier — a person who moved from Naples to another Italian city or town would be known as il napolitano, the Neapolitan, or simply napoli. The variants Napolitano and Napoletano preserve the full adjectival form; the compact Napoli is the city name itself used as a surname. The prefixed form Di Napoli — "from Naples" — follows the standard southern Italian pattern.

In the great Italian emigration of 1880–1930, Neapolitans and people from the broader Campanian region surrounding Naples constituted one of the largest streams of Italian immigration to America. The iconic image of Italian immigration — arrivals at Ellis Island, tenement life in New York's Little Italy, the music of Enrico Caruso — is substantially a Neapolitan and Campanian story. The Napoli surname arrived with these hundreds of thousands, settling in New York, New Jersey, Chicago, and Boston.

In American public life, the most prominent Napoli surname belongs to Janet Napolitano, born 1957 in New York City to a family with Sicilian and Neapolitan roots, who served as Governor of Arizona and as the third United States Secretary of Homeland Security under President Obama.

The Italian-American Story

A Napoli family in America carries a name that is Naples itself — the city of Vesuvius and the Bay, of pizza and mandolins, of the Spaccanapoli and the Castel Nuovo, of Caruso and Sophia Loren, of the most dramatic urban landscape in Europe. It is a name that announces southern Italian identity without qualification, connecting you to one of the world's great cities and to the millions who left it carrying nothing but their names and their courage.