Names of Italy IT

ISTAT — Contanomi newborn per-name series (1999–2024, JSONP backend) records Sofia as the commonest given name in Italy; the names that most distinguish Italy from the rest of the world are Francesco, Giulia and Andrea.

Written in Italian, German, French, Slovenian.

Population
62M
Official registers
1
Name forms recorded
147K
BBuilt from 1 official register (2024), 146,557 name forms in our corpus, 21 cited works.

At least one official register, plus a written account of the naming system.

fewerlarger share
Where the names most characteristic of Italy are borne outside it — the same spelling, counted in our record corpus. Shares are of all bearers of those names anywhere, Italy included.

How names work in Italy

6 naming traditions are in use in Italy, listed in the order of the country's languages. They are separate systems, not variants of one, and each has its own page.

The most common names in Italy

Counts children born in the year · authority tier 2
ISTAT — Contanomi newborn per-name series (1999–2024, JSONP backend), 2024 — 23,999 given names counted over children born that year, girls only, as the register publishes them.
#NameBearers recordedOur rank
1Sofia4.6K9
2Aurora4.3K—
3Ginevra4.2K—
4Vittoria3.9K—
5Giulia3.4K24
6Beatrice3.3K65
7Ludovica3.1K—
8Matilde3K—
9Alice2.9K53
10Emma2.5K—
11Camilla2.1K—
12Anna2K5
13Bianca1.9K—
14Greta1.8K—
15Azzurra1.7K—
16Nicole1.6K—
17Isabel1.6K—
18Chiara1.6K46
19Giorgia1.5K31
20Arianna1.5K94

Where the two lists disagree

23 of ISTAT — Contanomi newborn per-name series (1999–2024, JSONP backend)'s top 25 given names sit five or more places away in our record corpus. Neither ranking is wrong; they count different people.

ISTAT — Contanomi newborn per-name series (1999–2024, JSONP backend) 2024Across all recordsleonardo: 1 → 41 · ranks lower across all records1. leonardo41edoardo: 2 → 92 · ranks lower across all records2. edoardo92tommaso: 3 → 64 · ranks lower across all records3. tommaso64mattia: 4 → 35 · ranks lower across all records4. mattia35alessandro: 5 → 16 · ranks lower across all records5. alessandro16francesco: 6 → 86. francesco8lorenzo: 7 → 28 · ranks lower across all records7. lorenzo28gabriele: 8 → 43 · ranks lower across all records8. gabriele43riccardo: 9 → 52 · ranks lower across all records9. riccardo52andrea: 10 → 1110. andrea11diego: 11 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country11. diegonot rankedenea: 12 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country12. eneanot rankedmatteo: 13 → 23 · ranks lower across all records13. matteo23giuseppe: 14 → 2 · ranks higher across all records14. giuseppe2antonio: 15 → 6 · ranks higher across all records15. antonio6nicolo: 16 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country16. nicolonot rankedfederico: 17 → 66 · ranks lower across all records17. federico66samuele: 18 → 77 · ranks lower across all records18. samuele77pietro: 19 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country19. pietronot rankedfilippo: 20 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country20. filipponot rankedgiovanni: 21 → 74 · ranks lower across all records21. giovanni74giulio: 22 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country22. giulionot rankednoah: 23 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country23. noahnot rankedelia: 24 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country24. elianot rankeddavide: 25 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country25. davidenot ranked
Hover a line for what is available to explain that row.
ISTAT — Contanomi newborn per-name series (1999–2024, JSONP backend), 2024 on the left; every record we hold for Italy on the right. A dashed line means the name is not in our top ranks for this country at all.

The register counts one population in one year — everyone it enumerates, once. Our corpus counts records: historical registers going back decades, the diaspora, business and place records, and several generations of births. A name that was common two generations ago outranks a name common today; a name whose spelling scatters across sources (diacritics dropped, transliterated differently) loses ground, because only its dominant spelling is ranked.

Characteristic of Italy

Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when Italy holds a larger share of its bearers than the world does, weighted by how much of the country's whole name distribution it accounts for.

FrancescoRomaGiuliaAndreaAlessandroAlessiaMattiaRiccardoTommasoFedericaMassimoLorenzoVincenzoLuigiMartinaLeonardoChiaraEdoardoGabrieleLucaGianlucaDanieleSamueleSalvatoreGiadaIlariaStefanoGiorgiaFrancescaGaiaSofiaMaurizioNicolaGiovanniFilippoMarcoFedericoAntonioDomenicoAlessioPietroAntonellaMILanoGiuseppeDavidSimone
Sized by how much of the difference between Italy's name distribution and the world's this name accounts for. Hover for its share here against its share worldwide.●

Scripts & spelling

Mariagiven name●
Giuseppegiven name●
Johngiven name●
Davidgiven name●
Annagiven name●
The best-attested names in Italy, in the spelling our records use there. Where a Latin spelling is also attested it is shown beneath — a spelling from the corpus, not a machine romanisation.

Countries whose names look alike

Measured as the overlap between each country's top 300 given-name forms, weighted by how common each is — the fuzzy-set approach of Lauc (2024), on a truncated inventory.

Registers & sources

Official registers

  • ISTAT — Contanomi newborn per-name series (1999–2024, JSONP backend)2024headline (given)

    ISTAT (Istituto Nazionale di Statistica). Counts: newborns. given. 25,878 forms. 2022–2024. Licence: CC BY 3.0.

    What we know about this register

    Per-name newborn counts 1999–2024 from the live Contanomi JSONP backend (the interactive baby-names calculator). count = SUM over years per (name, sex); latest year retained, rank computed within sex by total. Seeded from the 227,755-token marisa list (uppercased + accent-folded, freq-desc). Resumable (raw/IT/contanomi_cache/). Supersedes the rank-only PDF extraction (it-istat-nomi) with actual per-year counts.

    Last verified 2026-06-04.

Cited works

Behind this page's own account — its one-line answer, its explanation of why the rankings differ, and the notes on its registers. Each naming tradition cites its own sources on its page. Not yet checked against onomastic literature.

About this data

Official figures are reproduced from the register named beside them, at the year named beside them, and are never combined across registers. The "across all records" ranking counts records in our own corpus — historical registers, the diaspora, business and place records — and is not a population count. Bearer estimates are omitted where a name accounts for more than a quarter of a country's records, because the estimate is not defensible there. Names listed by reference works and licensed name dictionaries are cited as attesting a name; their figures are not published.

Data snapshot: 2026-09-12.

Questions

What is the most common given name in Italy?
Leonardo, according to ISTAT — Contanomi newborn per-name series (1999–2024, JSONP backend) (2024), with 6,580 bearers recorded among boys.
Why do sources disagree about the commonest name in Italy?
Because they count different people. ISTAT — Contanomi newborn per-name series (1999–2024, JSONP backend) (2024) counts one population once, and its commonest given name is Leonardo. Our corpus counts every record we hold — historical registers, the diaspora, decades of births — and its commonest is Maria. Both are on this page, each with its denominator.
Is there one naming system in Italy?
No — 6 are described on this page (Italian, Maltese, Romansh, Sardinian and Corsican, German, Luxembourgish), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Italy”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/IT (data snapshot 2026-09-12). Official figures from ISTAT — Contanomi newborn per-name series (1999–2024, JSONP backend).