There is one place where the name Sorio designates neither a hamlet, nor a hill, nor a villa, but a city street. In Padua, in the western district of Brentella, there is a Via Sorio: an ordinary urban street, with its apartment blocks, its bus stops, its postcode.
And yet this street sign too, looked at closely, tells a chapter in the history of the name — and tells it in the oblique, layered way in which cities remember.
Why a street in Padua is called Sorio
The most likely answer has nothing to do with a Paduan family. It has to do with a battle fought seventy kilometres away.
On 8 April 1848, in the hamlet of Sorio near Gambellara, the Austrian forces of Prince Friedrich of Liechtenstein defeated the Italian volunteers of General Marcantonio Sanfermo. Defending the hill of Sorio that day were above all the Paduan crusaders: the volunteers of the Legion raised in Padua in March 1848, largely university students. Some fifty of them held the position, heroically and in vain. It was a rout, and they paid the highest price.
For Padua, in short, the word “Sorio” is not the name of a hamlet in the Vicenza countryside: it is the name of the place where its students received their baptism of fire.
The neighbouring names confirm it
The street names of the district appear to bear this reading out. Alongside Via Sorio runs Via Montebello — and Sorio and Montebello are the twin names of the battle of 8 April 1848, which chronicles often mention together. Not far off lies a Via dei Mille, unmistakably Risorgimento in flavour.
There is more. The municipal street registers record that until 1921 the area also contained a Vicolo I Sorio and a Vicolo II Sorio, renamed in that very year Via dei Mille and Via Montebello. Which means the whole area carried the name of the battle, multiplied, and that the post-war reorganisation of street names redistributed it among the symbolic places of the Risorgimento, leaving a single Via Sorio standing.
What the documents do not say
It must be said plainly, because it is the method of this project: no municipal resolution explicitly attesting the dedication has emerged from the sources consulted. We do not have the document that says “let this street be named after the battle of Sorio.”
What we do have is the convergence of the names — Sorio, Montebello, the Mille, all in the same district — and the direct link between Padua and that battlefield. It is a hypothesis, not a certainty; but it is by far the most solid one.
The Jewish cemetery on Via Sorio
There is also, on this street, a presence worth recording, even though it has no direct link with the surname. Via Sorio is the site of the Jewish cemetery of Padua, established in 1862: the last of the city’s seven Jewish cemeteries still in use, with its traditional gravestones standing beside the more imposing monuments of the age of Emancipation.
It is one of those coincidences cities produce without meaning to. A street named for the memory of young men who died for an idea of the nation also holds the memory of a community that, in those very years, was becoming fully part of that nation.
A circularity
One symmetry, finally, is worth noting. Padua is the third Italian province for the concentration of the surname Sorio, after Vicenza and Verona.
The Sorios of Padua today therefore live in a city that wrote their surname on a street sign for reasons that have nothing to do with their family: to commemorate a battle fought in a Vicenza hamlet that bears that name because of a saint.
Place name, battle, street, surname: four lives of the same word, brushing past each other without ever touching. It is the mechanism this project has been following from the start, and here you can watch it at work in a few hundred metres of asphalt.
Further reading: The Battle of Sorio, 1848 and the places that carry the name Sorio.