Family name origins & meanings
- Asturian-Leonese and Spanish : habitational name from any of the places (mainly in Asturies) called Villa, from villa ‘(outlying) farmstead’, ‘(dependent) settlement’, or from any of the numerous places named with this word as the first element.
- Italian : topographic name for someone who lived in a village as opposed to an isolated farmhouse, or in a town as opposed to the countryside, from Latin villa ‘country house’, ‘estate’, later used to denote of a group of houses forming a settlement and in some dialects to denote the most important area or center of a settlement, or a habitational name from any of various places named with this word.