The great debate: is it Del Pezzo or are you wrong?

The family name of Italian mathematician and politician Pasquale Del Pezzo has long been subject of debate, mostly among mathematicians to be fair, on the merit of how it should be spelled. Does “del” have to be capitalised? is it “del Pezzo” or “Del Pezzo”?

I must admit that I have never given this issue much thought, in part because I have always read “del Pezzo” in a lot of books, in part because I fundamentally do not care¹, in part because the subject of the conversation is not here to settle the debate and in part because a rose by any other name woul projective surfaces of Kodaira dimension $-1$ have the exact same properties, regardless of how you call them.

Recently however, I was browsing Fanography, as one does, and I read the “great debate” section on the spelling of Pasquale Del Pezzo’s family name. It says,

Rendiconti del [C]ircolo [M]atematico di Palermo 1 (1887), p. 382 (sic.) records the admission to the circle of dottore Pasquale del Pezzo, marchese di Campodisola. It would be interesting to know why Corrado Segre writing in the same volume (p. 218, 220, 221), along with every subsequent Italian writer, spells the Marquis’ name incorrectly with a capital D.

When I read this passage, I was slightly puzzled: it is strange that in the same notice, the admin staff of the Circolo Matematico di Palermo spells somebody’s name correctly, but Corrado Segre mispells it in the same issue of the notice.

I paused to think: it is strange that Segre, along with every subsequent Italian writer, spells the name incorrectly, right?

Is it not strange that Corrado Segre, along with every subsequent Italian writer, mispells the family name of an aristocratic and a brilliant colleague, who would go on to become chair in the University of Naples, Rector of said university twice, Mayor of Naples and Senator of the Italian Kingdom?

Is it not strange that Italian writers of his time have consistently misspelled the name of an eminent colleague and politician throughout his and their careers??

Moved by some skepticism, I wondered if there would be a way to learn more about the Marquis.

Interestingly, the Wikipedia page about him spells the name without a capital D, in the English version, but does have a capital D in the Italian version. Now, I could put forth the argument that Italians should be more reliable when talking about Italians, but saying “the Italian wikipedia editors say so” is not a very satisfying argument when “yeah but this other Wikipedia editor says the opposite” is a measurate response.

At this point I thought to myself: “If I can find the birth certificate of Del Pezzo, that would settle the debate”. Unfortunately, Pasquale Del Pezzo was born in Berlin, and while I was able to find an accusation of his birth in the prefecture of Naples that does not capitalise his name, that is not a birth certificate, just a document that says

[we have been told that] on the second day of May 1859, at a quarter to three in the morning, was born in Berlin in the house Leipziger Platz 5 Pasquale Maria Attanasio Giuseppe Nicola Friederich Vincenzo Luigi, legitimate son of Sir Gaetano del Pezzo [without a capital d] Marquis of [Campodi]sola.

This would suggest that his father’s name (and thus his name) was “del Pezzo”, sure, and yet the only Wikipedia page that mentions Sir Gaetano uses a capital letter too. In fact, the Italian version of Wikipedia itself is inconsistent, as most pages capitalise the D, but not all of them do! Is this an issue with the Italian language? How should names with a preposition be spelled, anyways?

After a quick research on the Italian side of the internet, it would appear that the standard practice is to always capitalise a name, except if it was a nobiliar title, in which case it is not really a “name”, but rather an indication of the family to which one belongs, to the point that according to op. cit. the preposition “del” should not even be counted as part of the family name. This means that, when writing the family name first, one should write Sassure, Ferdinand de; or Cavour, Camillo Benso Conte di. If the name is not of noble origin, as for Fabrizio De André, one should instead write De André, Fabrizio².

Another interesting example is the famous comedian Totò (Antonio de Curtis according to himself and the orthographical tradition cited above, Antonio De Curtis according to the Italian registry office), was able to show in an Italian court of law in August 1946 that he deserved various nobiliar titles, since he had shown to be a member of the “de Curtis” noble family³, however the constitution of the Italian Republic shortly after established that “nobiliar titles are not recognised”, and that “titles existing before October 28th, 1922, remain valid as part of the name”, so that Totò’s name always kept a capital letter.

What about the del Pezzo surfaces’s inventor though? If it was really customary to not capitalise noblility titles - and the family del Pezzo certainly was a noble, powerful family counting members in positions of power in central and southern Italy since the 16th century -, then why did every contemporary writer capitalise his name?? Surely all of these people were not trying to insult their colleague by denying his name its nobility status? Keep in mind that among Italian nobility of this time names are important and worth fighting over, and that this was happening half a century before Italy became a Republic, so the “declassation” of nobility titles to parts of a name could not have been in anyone’s mind. What gives?

Even more puzzled, I noticed that the German National Libraries keep a register of “important” people, which for some reason includes the hero of our story. There he is registered as Del Pezzo, as he is in the Italian National Library Service’s page about him and in the Vatican Apostolic Library’s database.

At this point I had a brilliant idea: since Pasquale ¿el? Pezzo was a Senator, maybe the Italian Senate keeps some page about him in their archives! Surely the Italian Senate, of which he had been a member, would have his correct name, right? Armed with optimism, I searched the Italian Senate webpage, and I found him!

There is one problem though. His family name is in all caps. Which is how Italians often record family names, and is how they appear on identity cards anyways.

Luckily, the Senate of the now Italian Republic employs various people, and some of these have found it appropriate to catalog various manuscripts related to the Senators, scan them and make them accessible online.

Behold.

Capitalised family name. In the documents of the committee vetting his Senate nomination, in his service record as a public employee, and in the official record of the Italian Senate on the day of his nomination, his family name is always capitalised!

This, for me, is the strongest piece of evidence one can reasonably ask for, short of a photograph of his birth certificate. On one hand, we have Miles Reid correctly pointing out that the Circolo of Palermitan mathematicians does not capitalise the name; on the other hand, we have manuscript and dactylographed documents handled by the Italian Senate staff and members, who presumably did not employ people prone to misspelling Senators’ names, consistently writing “Del Pezzo” with a capital D; we have many Italian writers, who would presumably take care in not offending a very politically influent colleague, and we have at least three national libraries (Italian, German and Vatican), who I suppose to employ historians who are sensible to correct spelling of names as well, writing Del Pezzo consistently.

The correct spelling is, as far as I am concerned, Pasquale Del Pezzo.

I hope this satisfies Miles Reid’s curiosity on the writing choices of Del Pezzo’s contemporaries.

Bonus

If you wasted enough of your time reading this far, here is an additional bit of information. You see, in the archives of the Italian Senate, the handwritten signature of Pasquale Del Pezzo appears four times! That, in my opinion, should be a very strong piece of evidence regarding someone’s name - after all, who would know better the spelling of his name than the guy himself?

Well, here are the two signatures.

The first two, on postal orders, have a capital D.

The two others, on some administrative forms to receive the Senate’s rulebook and the Journal of record of the Italian Government, do not. What to make of this?

I have the feeling that in a context where the reference is to the family, the Italian language and tradition imposes the use of a family’s title, i.e., “Pasquale son of Gaetano del Pezzo” should be understood as “Pasquale, son of Gaetano who belongs to the family del Pezzo” literally “of the Pezzo”; this means that when writing his signature, he would underscore the belonging to his noble family by referring to himself as a member “of the Pezzo family”. On the other hand, when dealing with technical forms, the kind of administrative papers that you hand in to a Senatorial commission, the kind that the Postal office needs to get right to keep your money and give it back when asked, our protagonist took care in capitalising his family name.

Maybe because that was the correct way to refer to himself, rather than to his family.