A small statistical anomaly that tells a great colonial story
If you type the surname Sorio into the main international onomastics databases — mappacognomi.com, forebears.io, the MyHeritage records — you will run into a figure that at first sight looks like a cataloguing error: the Philippines turns out to be the country with the largest number of Sorios in the world, ahead of Italy. Further down the list, but still well represented, you will find Brazil, Spain, the United States, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Argentina, Uruguay.
To anyone who knows the history of this surname — a Venetian surname, rooted for at least five centuries in the provinces of Vicenza and Verona, attested in notarial deeds of the fifteenth century and in the registers of the Greater Council of Vicenza in 1510 — this is bewildering. How did thousands of Sorios end up in the Philippine archipelago? Was there a Venetian migration to the Pacific that nobody has ever spoken of? The answer is no. And the explanation, once uncovered, is one of the most curious folds in the colonial history of the nineteenth century.
The Venetian Sorios: a country surname that became a city surname
Before getting to the heart of the paradox, it is worth fixing a few firm points on the authentic origin of the surname in Italy, clearly visible in its historical and present-day distribution:
The Venetian Sorios have a fairly clear onomastic genealogy. The surname derives from the place name Sorio, which in turn is the Venetian dialect form of the Latin Sanctus Georgius — Saint George. The phonetic evolution is the one typical of the Veronese and Vicentine Marches: Georgius becomes Giorgio, then in Old Venetian it shifts to Zorzo (consider the Venetian patrician Zorzi family, who signed themselves in Latin as Georgii), and finally, through devoicing and simplification, Sorio. A document of 1178 attests a place called Allodium Sancti Georgii (ora Sorio) in what is today the municipality of San Giovanni Lupatoto, in the province of Verona. The transition between the two forms is recorded in black and white.
From this toponymic nucleus — replicated in several points of the Veneto: a hamlet of Gambellara in the Vicentine, a locality of San Giovanni Lupatoto in the Veronese, a hamlet of Lonigo, and even a hill called Monte Sorio on the border between Vicenza and Verona — the surname was formed by that classical mechanism of Italian onomastics in which the person who came from a particular place ended up being identified with it. The first documented Sorios are people of some local standing: a Cristoforo Sorio appears in a contract of 1468 for the cultivation of Garganega grapes on twenty fields at Calderina; in 1510 the Sorio family holds three seats in the Greater Council of Vicenza; the Dizionario storico blasonico of Crollalanza, at the end of the nineteenth century, records the Sorios as “an ancient and noble Venetian family from Vicenza, propagated over the centuries into several regions of Italy”, complete with coat of arms — two silver hares rampant, their bodies joined into a single head, on a green field. A somewhat odd but memorable piece of heraldry.
From the sixteenth century onwards the Sorios spread slowly within the Veneto and then, on the long timescale of family histories, beyond its borders: in the nineteenth century the branch that produced the Dante scholar Bartolomeo Sorio (1805–1867), a pupil of Antonio Cesari and an Oratorian of the Congregation of Saint Philip Neri, moves to Verona; at Brescia, at the end of that century, we find Leandro Sorio (1899–1975), the anarchist and anti-fascist drawn into the investigations of the Lucetti attempt on Mussolini’s life in 1926. Between 1880 and 1950, finally, a portion of the Venetian Sorios takes part in the great transoceanic migration that carries whole villages of the Triveneto to Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. From there comes the Brazilian footballer Wilson Sorio. From there, presumably, come the non-Hispanophone South American Sorios.
All of this, put together, gives a credible picture of a Venetian family of medieval origins, never very numerous, which has followed its normal course: a few hundred households in Italy today (Cognomix estimates around 393), a handful of branches in the Americas brought by the late nineteenth-century emigration. Small, coherent, narratable numbers.
So who are the Sorios of the Philippines?
Manila, 21 November 1849: the Clavería decree
To answer, we need to shift place and perspective and arrive in Manila in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Philippines have by then been a Spanish colony for almost three hundred years, governed by the gobernadores generales appointed from the Crown in Madrid. The population has been Christianised for centuries, speaks dozens of local languages — Tagalog, Ilocano, Cebuano, Hiligaynon — and uses the system of personal names in an extremely fluid way: each individual chooses what to call themselves, often at the time of baptism, frequently changing in the course of life.
For the Spanish colonial administration this is a nightmare. A decent census cannot be made, tax collection is chaotic, notarial deeds multiply through endless disambiguations, brothers turn out to have different surnames and families change name from one generation to the next. Moreover, after the mass Christianisation, an enormous share of the population has chosen religious-sounding surnames — de los Santos, de la Cruz, del Rosario, Bautista, de Jesús — to the point that whole provinces are populated almost entirely by homonyms.
On 21 November 1849 the governor general Narciso Clavería y Zaldúa, a Spanish soldier of reformist sympathies, issued a decree that would literally change the name of millions of people. The logic was straightforward: every Filipino citizen who could not document an inherited surname going back at least four generations would have to choose a new one from an official catalogue, the Catálogo Alfabético de Apellidos. The catalogue, compiled at his direction, contains 61,000 surnames, mostly Spanish, with a smaller share of indigenous or other origin, distributed by province according to an almost arbitrary criterion: one province got all the surnames beginning with A, another those beginning with B, and so on. The aim was to avoid having too many people in the same place ending up with the same name.
The Catálogo was printed in Manila in 1849. Copies were distributed to provincial governors, who in turn distributed them to parish priests, cabezas de barangay and local officials. For weeks on end, in every village of the archipelago, the same scene played out: whole families presented themselves before an official, leafed through the catalogue, chose a surname and signed. Those who did not choose had one assigned to them ex officio. From that moment on the surname became hereditary, unchangeable, recorded in the parish and civil registers.
Among the 61,000 entries of the catalogue was — and this is the point — also Sorio.
A Venetian surname in the hands of a Spanish compiler
The interesting question at this point is why. How did the surname of a small Venetian family end up in a catalogue of Spanish surnames compiled in Manila in 1849? The likeliest answer is that those who compiled the Catálogo — namely Clavería’s collaborators, drawing on parish registers, military rolls, and Iberian and American onomastic collections — neither knew nor cared about the difference between a Venetian Sorio and any other Spanish-sounding word. Sorio in Spanish means nothing, but it resembles Soria, a Castilian city and a widespread Iberian surname, and it is sufficiently consonant with other Hispanic surnames (Osorio, Sotelo, Soriano) to have been included probably without much further thought. It is also worth recalling that there exists in Spain, albeit in a very rare form, a surname Sorio of Catalan or Aragonese origin, completely independent from the Venetian one. It was probably that which ended up in the catalogue. Or it was a transcription error of Soria. Or simply a name added to fill out a less populated letter. We will never know for certain.
What is certain is the result. Between 1849 and 1850, in some village of the Philippines — probably one, or only a few, given the per-province distribution criterion — a handful of Filipino families without a surname presented themselves before the king’s official, leafed through the catalogue, and chose Sorio. Or saw it assigned to them. From that day on, and for every generation that followed, their descendants were called Sorio. They married among themselves, had children, emigrated — many to the United States after 1898, when the Philippines passed under American control — and multiplied the surname. A hundred and seventy-five years on, they are thousands. More numerous than the Venetian Sorios of origin, who in the meantime had grown much more slowly.
The other stops of the misunderstanding: Bolivia, Costa Rica and the Hispanic factor
The same mechanism, on a smaller scale, also explains the other suspect presences of the surname in the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America. In Bolivia, Costa Rica, Mexico, and to a lesser extent in Argentina and Uruguay, the presence of Sorio surnames is almost always attributable to one of three causes: homonymy with Spanish native surnames of similar form (Soria is by far more frequent, and in handwritten registers one could easily be transcribed as the other); transmission through the Philippines during migrations internal to the Spanish empire before 1898; and — only marginally — the true Venetian diaspora of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which is instead overwhelmingly concentrated in Brazil (especially Rio Grande do Sul and Paraná) and in parts of northern Argentina. In other words: the Brazilian Sorios are almost all Venetian. The Bolivian and Costa Rican Sorios almost never are.
There is a fairly reliable historical test to tell the two stocks apart. The Sorios of Venetian origin tend to have Italian baptismal names, or names adapted from Italian (Giuseppe, Marco, Antonio, Luigi, Carlo), even after several generations in South America. The Sorios of Hispanic origin (Philippine or Latin American) invariably have Spanish first names (José, Juan, Carlos, Miguel, María), and often a second maternal surname in the Hispanic style. The dates of emigration diverge: the Venetians leave en masse between 1880 and 1930; the Hispanic Filipinos move within the Spanish empire before 1898 and then towards the United States afterwards. The places of disembarkation and settlement are different. Parish priests and civil registrars record different things.
What it means, in the end, to be a Sorio
All of this is not just statistical curiosity. It is a small reminder of how deceptive it is to read the raw numbers of a surname distribution map without asking what those numbers really represent. The map of a surname is not a map of biological kinship: it is the stratification of administrative decisions, colonial decrees, transcription errors, onomastic fashions and independent processes of homonymy. The surname Sorio, in its Philippine version, shares with the Venetian one only five letters and a similar pronunciation. Genetically, culturally, linguistically, they are two different things: two populations that found themselves bearing the same name because of a decree signed in Manila on 21 November 1849 by a Spanish governor who had probably never heard of Gambellara, Vicenza, let alone Saint George.
For the Venetian Sorios — those roughly 393 Italian households who still live predominantly between the provinces of Vicenza, Verona and Padua, and their cousins scattered between Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay — the history of the surname remains that of a small country village named after a medieval church, of Garganega grown on the hills of Gambellara, of a town councillor of 1510, of a traveller in Egypt in 1707, of a Dante-scholar philologist of the nineteenth century and of an anti-fascist partisan of the twentieth. A provincial story — long, modest, deeply Italian.
The ten thousand Sorios of the Philippines have their own story. It begins with a colonial functionary in Manila on 21 November 1849, with a page of a catalogue opened at random. It is an equally true story, but it is a different story.
The information in this article is based on cross-referenced research drawing on Venetian archival sources (State Archives of Vicenza and Verona, Diocesan Historical Archive of Verona, Bertoliana Civic Library, Bulletin of the “La Vigna” International Library), on entries in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Treccani) for the figures of Giuseppe and Bartolomeo Sorio, on G.B. di Crollalanza’s Dizionario storico blasonico (1888), on surname distribution data from Cognomix and mappacognomi.com, and on the historical literature concerning the Catálogo Alfabético de Apellidos of Narciso Clavería y Zaldúa (Manila, 1849).