Is your name Italian? Do you ever wonder what it means or where it came from? If so, you need look no further. Joseph Fucilla's Our Italian Surnames answers every conceivable question on the subject. In Our Italian Surnames, Dr. Fucilla, the late distinguished professor of Romance languages at Northwestern University, presents the most comprehensive analysis of Italian names ever published. It is also a book which is easy to use & presupposes no knowledge of Italian itself. Our Italian Surnames covers every facet of Italian names & naming practices. It is here we discover, for example, that Bussolari is Italian for compass, Orsini means bear, & Passalacqua stands for butterfly. (Fucilla, incidentally, means gun.) Besides given names & the evolution of Italian surnames, the book contains chapters devoted to pet names, botanical names, geographical names, bird names, insect names, occupational names & more. There is even a separate chapter on surnames deriving from names of spiders, worms, reptiles, amphibians, & mollusks. Written for a popular audience, each chapter of the book is a separate & informative unit in itself. Complete with a list of sources & an index of more than 7500 names, Our Italian Surnames is a monument to Professor Fucilla's lifelong interest in the language & names of Italia.