Siciliano

History & Origin

Sicily is not simply a place — it is a palimpsest of civilizations, each layer visible in the landscape, the architecture, the food, and the people. The Greeks planted their greatest cities here: Syracuse was for centuries the largest city in the western world. The Romans made it their granary. The Arabs transformed it into a garden of citrus and sugar cane. The Normans built their extraordinary cathedral at Monreale where Byzantine mosaics glow in African light. The Spanish left their baroque churches in every village.

The Siciliano surname emerged from the same pattern as other regional names: a Sicilian who moved elsewhere — to the Italian mainland, or to the New World — would be identified by where they came from. In a community of immigrants, your region was often your most immediate identity.

Sicily sent enormous numbers of emigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Economic hardship, agricultural failure, and the oppressive conditions under the post-Unification Italian state drove hundreds of thousands to leave. New York, particularly lower Manhattan and later Brooklyn, became home to some of the largest Sicilian communities outside the island itself.

In Italian-American culture, Sicilian identity has always been particularly strong — the dialect, the food (arancini, cannoli, pasta con le sarde), and the fierce family loyalty that defined Sicilian culture were transplanted to the New World and kept alive across generations.

In the Diaspora

To be called Siciliano is to carry an island's worth of history in your name — the Greeks and Arabs and Normans, the lemon groves and the ancient temples, the great emigration that sent your ancestors across the ocean. Sicily is not a place many of its diaspora have forgotten.

Spelling Variants

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

• Siciliani
• Siculo
• De Sicilia
• La Sicilia