Del Carretto

The House of Del Carretto is the name of an old and influential Italian noble family, whose members occupied many important political and ecclesiastical positions in Northwest Italy, mostly in Liguria and Piedmont.

[1] The Del Carretto family has descended from the House of Aleramici and was divided into many branches, feudal lords of the western Ligurian Riviera and of Lower Piedmont.

The territory was further divided by their descendants into a multiplicity of independent feudal domains, sometimes united in a league with a Ghibelline orientation.

The most widespread variant in the less recent historiography, however, is of the Carretto, in which the first small letter of the surname seems to denote a provenance from the village of Carretto, fraction of Cairo Montenotte, interpreting and translating the Latin de carreto as an indication of geographical origin (without any documentary confirmation).

The spread of this variant is a consequence of a political position consistently followed by the Republic of Genoa for centuries, aiming to disregard to Del Carretto the title of marquises of Savona (which is attested with great frequency in the carretteschi documents, but is completely absent in all treaties between the Republic and Del Carretto).