Fazzi households in Italy.

Since the roots of the name Fazzi must be found in Italy, it is clear that my interest is in the Italian origin of the name.
One way to look for a clue about the origin of a family name is to make a frequency distribution graph to determine where the name is most common.

According to the Italian telephone directory of 1996 there are not more than 1100 households under the name Fazzi in Italy. With the addresses of these Fazzi’s I have tried to find a possible origin of the Fazzi name with by assuming that highest number (or density) of the Fazzi’s are still living near the place where the name originated.
To begin I counted the Fazzi’s per region and found that Tuscany has the highest count with 398 Fazzi’s (37% of total number) followed by Lombardia in the north (142, 13% of total) and Puglia (133, 12% of total) in the southeast.
In Lombardia we find most Fazzi’s in or around the big cities like Milano (49 Fazzi’s), Cremona (26) and Pavia (12). In Puglia most of the Fazzi’s are living in or near the city of Lecce where we even find a hospital named Ospedale Vito Fazzi.

Figure 1: Number of Fazzi's per region.

To get a more realistic view I expressed the values as count per 100,000 inhabitants and the difference between Tuscany and the other regions becomes even bigger. Tuscany shows a density of 11 Fazzi’s per 100,000 inhabitants, so it seems clear that we have to search in Tuscany to find apossible origin of the name.

Figure 2: Number of Fazzi's per 100,000 inhabitants.

To focus down, I counted the Fazzi’s in the 10 Tuscan provinces.
In the province of Lucca we’ll find 14% of the Tuscan Fazzi’s (16 per 100,000) living in the capital city Lucca and in and around the mountain villages of Borgo a Mozzano. In the province of Massa, we’ll find 24% of the Tuscan Fazzi’s (48 per 100,000) and the majority (79%) is living in the capital city Massa.

Figure 3: Number of Fazzi's per Tuscan Province.

The province of Grosseto shows to highest density of Fazzi households (144) that is 35% of all Tuscan Fazzi’s with a density of 66 per 100,000 inhabitants. Most of these Fazzi’s are living in one particular commune with the name Castel del Piano which has a population of 4400 inhabitants and can be found in the eastern part of the province.
Here, in the shadow of the highest mountain of Tuscany the Monte Amiata, we find 91 households under the name of Fazzi.
In conclusion we can say that 63% of all Fazzi’s in the province of Grosseto and 22% of all Tuscan Fazzi’s are living in the commune of Castel del Piano and this suggest that the origin of the name Fazzi may be found in this community.

Thus, I believe that the name Fazzi is a Tuscan name. The fact that the name ends with an -i suggest the same, according to others.

(These data are all according to telephone directory of Italy 1996.)
The author wants to thank Guido Buldrini for supplying the data and starting up this study.

Copyright © 1999 G.E.Fazzi. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without prior written permission from the author.