The name
A name with a long paper trail in Italy — from a Germanic personal name, through a Florentine house that Dante and Boccaccio both put in writing, to the compound form recorded in Romagna.
What follows is the documented history of the name — drawn from published reference works and primary texts, with sources listed at the bottom.
It is deliberately not a claim about our own descent. Nobody has yet traced this family's line back to the people below, and until someone works through the Italian civil and parish registers, that link stays an open question. Where the record is uncertain or disputed, this page says so.
Etymology
Alberighi is a patronymic — a surname built from a personal name. It descends from the medieval Italian given name Alberico, and is recorded as a variant of Alberici.
Alberico is itself the Italian form of a Germanic name that arrived in Italy with the Franks and Lombards: Alberich, from alb ("elf") and rīhhi ("ruler", "power"). The same root produced Aubrey and Avery in English.
Della Casa is a separate and much more transparent Italian surname: casa means "house", and della means "of the". As a surname it typically marked a family by its household or its holding.
Read literally, then, Della Casa Alberighi is "of the House of Alberighi" — the household of the descendants of Alberico. Compound surnames like this are common in Italian records, where a second name was often carried to distinguish one branch of a family from another.
Alberici · Alberghi · Alberghini · Albricci · Albrici
Florence
An old Florentine house, prominent enough to be named in the city's chronicles — and gone before the Renaissance began.
The Alberighi were among the ancient noble families of Florence. They lived in the San Piero quarter, near the church of Santo Martino, in a cluster of properties that carried their name, and they held estates and fortified holdings in the Chianti and the Val d'Arno. They ranked among the wealthiest and most influential families of the city before moving into commerce.
In 1250 the commune forced them to cut down their towers, along with the other magnate families — a standard humbling of the old warrior clans by the popular government of the day.
Their decline was steep. By the middle of the fourteenth century the family had disappeared from Florence entirely. The chronicler Giovanni Villani, writing of the old houses of the city, records flatly that "today there is none of them." A later and unrelated family bearing the same name surfaced in the sixteenth century, and it too died out.
The chronicler Ricordano Malispini traced the family to a Roman house and credited a Filippo Alberighi with a knighthood granted by Charlemagne. This story is repeated in a lot of surname write-ups online as though it were settled fact.
It should be treated with caution. Malispini's chronicle is a disputed source — its dating and authenticity have long been questioned by historians — and Charlemagne-era origin stories were a conventional flourish for medieval Italian families asserting antiquity. It is a claim about the family, not evidence of it.
In literature
The name survives in two of the foundational works of Italian literature — both written while the family was still living memory.
In the sixteenth canto of the Paradiso, Dante's ancestor Cacciaguida looks back on the Florence of his own century and names the great houses he watched fade. The Alberighi are in that list, under the spelling Alberichi:
Io vidi li Ughi e vidi i Catellini,
Filippi, Greci, Ormanni e Alberichi,
già nel calare, illustri cittadini;
"I saw the Ughi and I saw the Catellini, / Filippi, Greci, Ormanni and Alberichi, / already in decline, illustrious citizens;"
Dante, Paradiso XVI, 88–90The phrase Dante gives them — già nel calare, illustri cittadini, "already in decline, illustrious citizens" — is the whole history of the house in five words.
The most famous bearer of the name is a character. Boccaccio's Federigo degli Alberighi — introduced as the son of Messer Filippo Alberighi — is a young Florentine nobleman who spends his entire fortune trying to win Monna Giovanna, and fails.
Ruined, he retires to a smallholding with one thing of value left: a superb hunting falcon. When Giovanna finally comes to his door, it is to ask for the bird — her dying son has begged for it. Federigo, with nothing in the house worthy of her, has already killed and cooked the falcon to feed her. The boy dies; Giovanna, undone by the gesture, later marries him.
It is one of the best-known novellas in the Decameron, and it is the reason the name Alberighi is still set in front of literature students.
Romagna
The full form — Della Casa Alberighi — turns up in the civil registers of Emilia-Romagna.
The clearest documented bearer of the compound surname found so far is a man born in the Ravenna province in 1870:
This places the compound form in Romagna — the eastern side of Emilia-Romagna, around Ravenna — rather than in Tuscany. That is a meaningful distinction: the modern Alberighi surname is concentrated in Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany, and the Romagna cluster is its own story, not a continuation of the vanished Florentine house.
Ravenna is also, as it happens, where Dante spent his exile and where he is buried.
Next steps
Connecting this family to any of the above needs documents, not surname sites. The usual route back through an Italian line:
Civil registration (stato civile) — Italy required civil birth, marriage and death registration from 1866. These are the backbone of any Italian search, and for the Ravenna province they sit with the state archive.
Parish registers — before 1866, baptisms, marriages and burials were kept by the parish, and many run back to the sixteenth century.
The Portale Antenati — the Italian state archives' genealogy portal, which has digitised large runs of civil registration and is free to search.
The practical starting point is the most recent Italian-born ancestor in the family: a name, a birth year, and a comune. With those three things the records open up. Without them, they don't.
References
Several commercial sites sell "family crests" and origin certificates for this name. They are not cited here. Coats of arms in Italy attached to specific families and branches, not to everyone sharing a surname, and at least one of those sites states outright that its heraldic write-ups are machine-generated.