Family name origins & meanings
- Southern Italian : from a pet form of Meli.
- Southern Italian : from the Neapolitan dialect word melillo ‘crab apple’, hence a nickname, possibly for someone with a sour disposition, a topographic name, or a metonymic occupational name for a grower or seller of apples.
- Southern Italian : possibly a regularized form of Melilli, a habitational name from a place so named in Siracusa, Sicily.