Are Lewis and Peter Capaldi related? And also, what's with all the Italian surnames in Scotland?

[BlackAmericanoNoSugar]

Two completely trivial questions. I just saw the video for Lewis Capaldi's song and Peter Capaldi is in it, so I wondered if they were family and that's why.

Also there are a lot of famous Scots with Italian surnames but completely Scottish backgrounds (as far as I can tell). Was there a huge influx a few generations back or just a few Italian families that were very artsy and so Italian surnames are disproportionally represented among famous Scots. I can think of a load off the top of my head, Nardini, Conti (x2), Iannucci, Nutini, and I'm not even that good with names or knowing about famous people.

Re-Sharleen Spiteri it would appear she has Italian AND Maltese ancestry - and Irish and German too. According to Wikipedia anyway.

The Alba d'oro is the famed Stockbridge chippy isn't it?

One of the school mums met her husband when they both worked in Luca's. They're so brand loyal now they dress their kids in purple.

Proclaimers song about immigration which has a bit about the Italian Scots. It’s a beautiful song anyway, worth a listen.

@svalberg, I suspected it was autocorrect.

To be fair NannyRed I had a quick Google about Scottish Italians and there wasn't much info there. I could have done a deeper Google, but I would never have found the level of knowledge and personal history that I have from one short thread on MN.

@JazzersMaw

HI I actually lived in Edmonton and went to Ambrose Fleming in PE for secondary. My friends went out with a few of the St Ignatius boys in the 70s, it had moved to Turkey Street by then.

As well as the chip shops there were several Italian bakeries in Edinburgh too. Lovely chewy Italian rolls were an affordable luxury when I was a student in the eighties, they don't seem to exist anymore, my particular favourites were the ones where the dough had been rolled up like a Swiss roll and you could "unpeel" them.

Morris L’ Alba D’oro is on Henderson Row, at the bottom of Hanover Street. L’ Aquila Bianca was on Raeburn Place, in the heart of Stockbridge. We used to go to both but L’ Aquila Bianca was the best.

Anyone in Glasgow I can highly recommend Jaconelli's ice-cream on Maryhill road.

Is really pisses me off when people ask a question that they are perfectly capable of but way too lazy to find the answer to.

Damn those people who'd rather initiate a chat rather than read a wikipedia article! The bloody cheek.

To Clarify:

I was at Uni with a Spiteri, and she was emphatic in her Cardiff accent: 'Spiteri: It's Greek.'

...But, to confuse the Issue, the Maltese are mostly descended from Sicilian Greeks.

Costello’s another name people often mistake for Italian. It’s actually Irish AFAIK.

To get political, all this talk of names and ancestry just shows how stupid all this Brexit bollocks is. Lots of families and individuals are a mix of lots of heritages. Marc Francois and Boris Johnson being just two examples. and [anger]

And there I go, I can no longer remember how to do emojis on Mumsnet bc I’ve been on Twitter and ravelry for too long.

After this thread I’ve been thinking about family stories - and how they can be biased and inaccurate. I remember my mum talking of her uncle who died in ww2 and how his ship was torpedoed by the Germans. What she also said was that it was a boat carrying Italian POWs. That when the ship started to sink, the ‘Italians took all the lifeboats’. This must be what my mum was told by her family though - she was 10 or 11 in 1940. Of course this isn’t accurate - hundreds of Italians died on the Arandora Star and most of them had been arrested as enemy aliens whilst living in the U.K. Relatively few were POWs - it also begs the question why were the British govt transporting so many men across the Atlantic without an escort? Rhetorical question btw.

There was a really good documentary about an Italian/Irish chippy family a few years ago. The mother was such a hard-working woman.

Hear hear JazzersMaw

It's only by conveniently 'forgetting' these inconvenient stories that littlebritishness can be constructed.

It's also interesting in that differing ethnicities in Britain only seem to be mentioned in a negative context. If the media want to claim someone (and their achievements) as 'British' end of story then their heritage is rarely mentioned.

Tamzin Outhwait's episode on 'Who do you think you are?' is all about her Italian family frowning up in Glasgow and then settling in a seaside village in north east England. Her grandfather ran an ice cream shop and ended up in a POW camp on the Isle of Man. Defo worth a watch.