Board Thread:The Last Sovereign Discussion/@comment-31763506-20171130021854/@comment-31763506-20171130221304

It's my understanding that a lot of European surnames based around placenames originiated to identify a progenitor who originally came from somewhare other than where they were now living. So in this case, Ronnie James' distant patronymic ancestor would have moved to Abruzzo from Padova, and his friends would call him "Johnny the Paduan" or Giovanni Padovano, and the surname would be inherited.

As to the vowel transposition, that sort of thing is depressingly common with American family names originating with the Catholic immigrant wave of the late 19th century. It means that the immigrating family was only partially literate and the Yankee immigration/census officials changed the Italian spelling to gibberish on the official documents.

I kind of did appreciate that Firenze was originally Florentia, but it strikes me as odd that we Englsih (and apparently French) speakers feel entitled to correct the people who actually live there on the spelling of their home.