The Pendolas of Rapallo

When we look at a map of Italy, we see an arch on the sea at north-west, with a Port city at the center- Genoa. The whole of the arch, a narrow stretch of land between sea and the mountains at its back, is Liguria. The part of region eastwards from Genoa to the port of La Spezia is known as  Eastern Riviera (Riviera di Levante). Roughly at its center, some 20 miles east of Genoa, a mountain is protruding to the sea, Portofino cape. At its bottom, Rapallo, six miles further to the east  Chiavari. The Gulf from the tip of Portofino to Sestri Levante, the smaller Cape on the sea ten miles east of Rapallo, is called Tigullio.
From Chiavari, as we look at the interior, we see a long arched valley going parallel to the shore towards Genoa- the Fontanabuona Valley. Some fifteen miles long, Fontanabuona Valley is never too far away from the sea, though the sea itself is not visible from it, the mild climate and the clouds come easily through the hills that divide the valley from the coast.
Mankind has lived these places from long ago. Though Sestri Levante dates back to a Roman town, in recent times in Chiavari some late Neolitic tombs have been unearthed. As for Rapallo, some late-Roman traces were found, and lost.
But it was at the end of the Roman empire that the eastern Riviera became, though its rough terrain offered small transit routes, a crossroads of people. The Longbards, a barbaric people of German descent,  retained the region in the VII century  AD, while  in Bobbio, a small town tucked in the mountains and  not far away, the Irish monk Colombanus  established its monastery at the same time.
In the VIII Century a group of Longbards came to Graveglia Valley, a smaller valley close to Fontanabuona, taking with them their language and their names.
Villages were named after these German people, though in the centuries they molded into an Italian form. According to a book published in Genoa in 1981 (Pedracco Siccardi, Caprini – Toponomastica storica della Liguria, Sagep, Genova, 1981) small villages derive from the root of a common name (i.e. an object) while bigger ones have in their root  the name of a person.
The village Pendola, just a few houses huddled together at the center of Fontanabuona Valley, on a narrow strip of land on the right bank of the river, has certainly a German root. The authors of the above mentioned book quote a river in the western part of Liguria, Bendola, which, they say, derive from the old German word binda (strip of land).
On the other end, in Germany the surname Pendl is common, and a research there confirm the same pattern- Pendl derives from the old german word bendel,  which means ribbon. From bendel we have   Pendler/Bendler, which means either “a man who ornates his dress with a ribbon” or “ a maker or handler of ribbon”. It is therefore possible that such a name passed into Italian- either such Pendler  established the Pendola village, or the village was named after the narrow strip of land it was built.
I personally prefer this solution, though the first is still possible. Whatever the solutions, it’s certain that Pendola derives from a strip, either of land or tissue (ribbon).
Around year 1000 AD the use of family names, surnames, came into use in Italy. Some were called after their profession, others from their fathers’ names, others still from the place their lived.
This is the case of the Pendolas.  By the way, close to the village is also a small creek, named in the same way (Rio Pendola).
The first written testimony of a man identified as Pendola is precisely there, as in 1167 on a contract signed by a rich man (Marchesini) from Lorsica, a couple of miles from this location, a Pendola witness is named.
In the weekly Il Mare, published in Rapallo in the first half of the XX century, the local historian Arturo Ferretto wrote, in the May 22, 1909 issue, that beginning in the XIII century “The Pendolas, among others, left the Fontanabuona Valley and descended into Rapallo”. The same A. Ferretto, on March 13, 1920 wrote that “the Pendolas were given us from the Nosiglia place, in Fontanabuona Valley” (Nosiglia is a small place not far away from Pendola, on the road to Rapallo, in the municipality of  Coreglia. It’s also the birth place of the man who first advocated Columbus Day in the US ).
We have here a clear pattern- a person, a group of people maybe, were named after the place they inhabited, or  were born, and that became a family name.
 At the beginning of the XIII Century, we do not know why,  a movement of people began from the valley towards the sea. They left the northern slope of the hill, took the road, in use from Roman times, accross the pass on the ridge that divide the Fontanabuona from the Riviera properly and settled on the southern slope. There, in San Maurizio di Monti, though a church  was recorded earlier, the hill probably was scarcely inhabited.  It was not only the Pendolas, of course. Arturo Ferretto, in his articles, identified family names, all originating in the Fontanabuona, and untill those years not present in Rapallo, the Zerega, the Macchiavellos, the Noziglias, among others.  It was a movement that took centuries. We do not know the causes, but overpopulation may be an explanation. Fontanabuona is fertile at its bottom, but floods were common at the times, and the hills are not so prone to feed the people that lived on.
The Pendolas, however, never reached  Rapallo, at least they took a very long time to get there. They settled, but a few, in San Maurizio di Monti, high on the mountains over the Riviera, just over the pass. And there they stayed.
We have a record of a Pendola in Rapallo, a certain Bartolomeo Pendola, who in 1453  was part of a group of people that  funded the construction of  the bell tower.
In San Maurizio, however, they were rather a third of the population. According to a 1500 census, there were at the time  some 90 families in the village,  in 1593 26 of them were Pendola. We can be sure of this because we have a document, dated 1593. It is the will of a certain Andrea Pendola.  He was a  rich man, being childless and feeling close to death, in a day in October of 1593 he sat by a Notary detailing his last wills.  He left  all his belongings to a trust, formed with the purpose of giving a sum of money (dowry) to all the daughters of the Pendolas of San Maurizio that were to be married.
For this purpose, he identified all the Pendolas in San Maurizio at the time. Here is the list-
1-2-3: brothers Martino, Giovanni e Giaveno Pendola, sons of Francesco,
4: Bartolomeo Pendola, son of gerolamo,
5: brothers Giovanni e Andrea Pendola,  sons of Pantalino,
6: Domenico Pendola, son of Maurizio,
7: Giovanni Pendola, son of Agostino,
8: Francesco Pendola, son of Bartolomeo,
9: Giovanni Pendola, son of Maurizio,
10: Andrea Pendola, son of Maurizio,
11: Pasquale Pendola, son of Maurizio,
12: Agostino Pendola, son of Maurizio,
13: Gerolamo Pendola, son of Maurizio,
14:  brothers Vincenzo and  Teramo Pendola, sons of Pietro,
15: Bastiano Pendola, son of Agostino,
16: Stefano Pendola, son of Agostino,
17: brothers Cipriano, and Nicolò Pendola, sons of Bastiano,
18: Battista Pendola, son of Raffaello,
 19: brothers Giacomo and Battista Pendola sons of Bartolomeo,
20: Stefano Pendola son of Bartolomeo,
21: Bartolomeo Pendola son of Maurizio,
22: Domenico Pendola son of Maurizio,
23: Battista Pendola son of Batolomeo,
24: Bernardo Pendola son of Gregorio,
25: Domenico Pendola son of Girolamo.
A 26th family, Bartolomeo Pendola son of Gerolamo, was excluded because of an old family quarrel.
The Pendolas were absent from most of the facts that took place in Rapallo in the centuries leading up to the end of the Genoese Republic (1797).  That means that either they stayed put to the mountains or that those who came to live to Rapallo never got the prominence in wealth that could lead to a high standing in local politics.  However, my hunch is that by the most they never came to Rapallo. For,  when we read the list of people who was kidnapped by the Turkish pirates that roamed the Mediterranean those years, and taken hostages to the shore of northern Africa, never did I met a Pendola.
Yet, in the XVIII century, we began to meet some Pendola in Genoa, as well in other ports of Liguria.
At the end of the XVIII century, Agostino della Cella  wrote three books on Genoese families. He also quote the Pendolas, and he wrote: honest Genoese citizens not old, they came, as I think, from Rapallo, where in San Maurizio di Monti those with that surname  are in  great number. All but a few peasants.
A.Della Cella reported also the famous people for each family, for the Pendolas he reported a Giuseppe Pendola that in 1746 took part in the uprising against the Austrian presence in Genoa and the following year was called to represent his profession (he was a maker of knifes) in his quarter. But he was ill, and resigned.
That some Pendola went to Genoa is of no relevance at all- Genoa being the capital, was also the magnet for people from all over the republic.  Those who ended up in Sicily, surely they did through Genoa. While with those small boats that at the times were used for small traffic along the coast, somebody could have settled in Lerici, where  at the end of the XVIII a Pendola is recorded to have been born, and whose descendants now live in Spotorno, on the western Riviera. But, with the end of the Napoleonic period, in 1815, emigration began. It took a big swing in the 1840s and 1850s, when the Pendolas left their hill for the valleys of California and the coast of Chile. Where they found a new homeland.

Agostino Pendola