Italian Baby Names, With Meanings and Data

What Italy itself is calling its babies

Italy has an official source, and it is not a commercial name site. Istat, the national statistics institute, publishes a name counter built from civil-registry birth records, covering every child registered in Italy since 1999. In the most recent ranking Istat has published in that series, covering babies born in 2022, Leonardo was the most common boys' name, followed by Francesco and Tommaso, and Sofia was the most common girls' name, followed by Aurora and Giulia. Istat released those figures on 16 January 2024.

The British counts below are separate and come from the Office for National Statistics datasets for England and Wales, covering births registered in 2025 and published on 9 July 2026.

Girls

Boys

What the two datasets show together

Italy's favourites and Britain's Italian favourites are different names

Leonardo tops Italy but went to 389 boys in England and Wales in 2025. Luca, which is the Italian name British parents actually choose, went to 3,266 and ranked fourth overall — and it was also the second most popular boys' name in Scotland in 2025 and in Wales. Enzo, at 617, outnumbers Leonardo, Lorenzo and Matteo in Britain. What British parents are choosing is an Italian sound: two or three open syllables ending in a vowel, easy to say, hard to misspell.

Several are Germanic, not Latin

Leonardo, Rocco and Enzo all trace back to Germanic rather than Latin roots, which is a reminder that "Italian name" describes a language of use, not an origin. Italy was settled and ruled by Germanic-speaking groups for centuries and the names came with them. If Roman ancestry is what you are after, Marco, Emilio, Valentina, Serena and Aurora are the safer picks.

Movement, measured properly

Set the ONS 2024 and 2025 files side by side and the changes are modest. Chiara went from 49 to 68, Dante from 61 to 84, Marco rose from 67 to 84, and Sofia fell from 1,626 to 1,490 while remaining seventeenth. Nothing here is moving fast enough to look dated in a decade.

Sofia and Sophia are one sound and two entries

The ONS ranks spellings. Sofia went to 1,490 girls in 2025 and Sophia to 1,547; together the sound would have ranked fourth in England and Wales rather than thirteenth and seventeenth. The same applies to Matteo and Matthew, and to Emilia and Amelia. If you are choosing an Italian spelling because it feels less common, check the combined figure before you rely on that.

The saints' names have thinned out in Britain

Italy's own list is still full of them: Francesco, Tommaso, Giuseppe, Antonio. In England and Wales in 2025 Angelo went to 69 boys, Raffaele to 20 and Alessandro to 36, all essentially flat against 2024. British parents are taking the Italian sound without the Italian calendar of saints, which is a real difference between the two lists rather than a lag.

Choosing an Italian name

Check the double consonant. Alessia, Alessandro, Bianca and Rocco all rely on a spelling English speakers routinely reduce, and a child called Alessia will spend her life correcting Alesia and Alicia. If that would irritate you, Luca, Nico, Dante and Rosa are the names on this list with the fewest failure modes.

Watch the final vowel with cross-language use. In Italian, names ending in -a are usually feminine and -o masculine, but Luca, Andrea and Nicola are all standard men's names in Italy and read as women's names in Britain. Andrea in particular is a common Italian man's name and a common British woman's name, which is worth knowing before a family gathering rather than after.

Finally, if the point is a link to Italy, use Istat rather than a name site to check what is actually current there. The Istat counter shows the whole series from 1999 onwards for any name you type, so you can see whether a name is a living Italian choice or one your Italian relatives will associate with their grandparents' generation.