Pastore

Origins and Meaning

Pastore is one of Italy's great occupational surnames, deriving from the Latin and Italian word for shepherd — pastor, one who tends a flock. In ancient Italy, as in ancient Palestine, shepherding was one of the fundamental livelihoods: the transhumance routes by which shepherds moved their flocks between summer mountain pastures and winter coastal lowlands shaped the landscape, the law, and the economy of the peninsula for millennia. The ancient tratturi — the wide grass highways of Abruzzo and the south along which the flocks moved — are still visible in the landscape today.

The word pastore carries a double meaning in Italian. As an occupation, it means shepherd. In religious usage, it means pastor or priest — the spiritual shepherd of a congregation. The two meanings overlap in the Christian imagery of Christ as the Good Shepherd (il Buon Pastore), and this overlap enriched the word's cultural resonance. A family named Pastore might have been actual shepherds, or they might have been associated with the Church, or they might have acquired the name as a metaphor for a person of quiet, guiding authority.

The surname is found throughout Italy but is particularly common in the south — Campania, Calabria, Abruzzo, and the Apennine regions where transhumant shepherding remained a living tradition well into the twentieth century. Italian-American Pastore families trace predominantly to these southern regions, arriving in the great emigration of 1880–1930.

In American public life, the name Pastore is associated with John O. Pastore (1907–2000), the Rhode Island-born son of Italian immigrants who became the first Italian-American to serve as a state governor (Rhode Island, 1945) and the first to be elected to the United States Senate. His career was a landmark in Italian-American political achievement.

The Italian-American Story

A Pastore family in America carries a surname from the oldest layer of Italian rural life — the shepherd's work that preceded cities, preceded writing, preceded the names we give to things. The pastore moved through the mountains with his flock on the ancient routes, and his descendants carried the word across an ocean to begin again in cities where no sheep grazed. It is a name of extraordinary continuity.