Interesting fairly recent thread about the name Pelino in Italy:
http://italiangenealogy.tardio.com/Forums/viewtopic/p=93469.html
Some highlights:
There is a Saint Pelino, who was a Bishop in Brindisi in the 7th century.
the name Pelino is concentrated in the Abruzzo region and comes from a martyr: Saint Pelino. Origins of this name are uncertain, might reconnect to Peligni(Paeligni), an ancient Italic population in the Abruzzo region.
The Pelino surname is not listed in the Italian surname dictionary as being Italian and is either Local in origin or imported from abroad and italianized. However, There is no record for Pelino in other parts of the world making it quite probable that surname is local in origin and as often occurs was once a nickname,becoming a first name and later became a last name or surname. Since the name is Pelino, a diminutive spelling meaning refined or fine then it may be possible that its opposite maybe Pelone which in the Italian word dictionary means a coarse kind of cloth making Pelino a refined or improved cloth. But this is conjecture and anecdotal.
Pelino is used both as a first name and as a last name. In both cases, the name is used only by people who come from Abruzzo in Italy. A famous use of the name as a last name is for “Confetti Mario Pelino”, a candy company in Sulmona. As a first name, it is most closely related to Saint Pelino of Confinio. All of these places are in the Vallata Peligna (the Valley of the Peligni), which is the ancient home of the Peligni tribe, whose capital was Corfinium (now Confinio), located in the valley.
Actually, though in modern Italian “pelino” means a small hair, and comes from the Latin “pilum”, the root of the word Pelino as it appears in Abruzzo go back before Roman times, from Jupiter palenus, worshipped on the mountain later called Majella. the name remained almost unchanged in the little town of “Palena”. With a phonetic transformation the word Palenus shifted to pelinus. And that also became the name of the population of the area, the Peligni, and a first name very popular also thanks to the cult of a San Pelino.
Now if only I could find concrete evidence of the link to Pelino! (Hello, Tony?)
