Although Capuano is probably a surname, seeing as it is male-form (a woman from Capua is a Capuana) without any additional information it is anyone's guess as to how long her family had been called that (was her father from Capua? Or was it her grandfather?). Surnames in Italy were only definitively fixed when a national name registry system was established after unification. Technically registries had been created in the earlier Napoleonic era, but the regular redrawing of borders and political turbulence in the first decades of the 19th century had kept the door open to mutations according to the purely functional criteria with which surnames had been adopted up until then. Although even the most petty local landlords might have long found it useful to retain a recognizable surname through generations, the vast majority of ordinary rural people would have used patronymics right through to the middle of the 19th century (so a man named Giovanni di Pasquale might have a son whose name would be Antonio di Giovanni, and so on). In fact, this would create well-documented issues after the post-Napoleonic restoration, when the reconstituted governments of the Italian states attempted to build on the work begun by the Napoleonic registries only to have functionaries sent into the countryside return complaining that their work was nigh-impossible. Pastoral and sparsely populated communities were particularly resolute in the retention of patronymics (and the resolution, in the high offices of state, was to let them use whatever surname format they desired) although some progress towards fixing surnames was made amongst the more prosperous in those communities who had begun transmuting intergenerational material wealth, leading to humorous situations like a family headed by one Giacomo di Giacomo being registered in the province of Teramo.

In cities and towns the situation was slightly different. Certainly, where it was efficiently implemented the Napoleonic census went a long way to fixing surnames; the descendants of a man who ran a poultry shop might definitively thereafter be known as Gallo even if they picked up another trade. However, in this early period names could nonetheless change easily: a young teamster from Naples who settled to marry in Rome might be known to his neighbors, fellow parishioners, and the city registry as Giacomo di Napoli even if in his native Naples he still went by the surname Esposito, the name he would have been given when he was found as an infant at the Basilica della Santissima Annunziata (orphans were some of the earliest outside the aristocracy to systemically use set surnames). There is also the issue of people using singular and plural forms of the same name in different situations; i.e. Giacomo Ferri could be the head of the Ferrari family.

Of course, things were much different amongst the aristocracy. From the early middle ages, regional and dynastic identifiers had been used to denote individuals of important lineage. Over generations, this might lead to very descriptive surnames, as various branches of the same dynasty attempted to simultaneously exploit their family legacy while also distinguishing themselves. For example, the founder of the influential Medici bank was a foreign exchange trader named Vieri di Chiarissimo da Cambio de Medici, whose name can be translated as "Vieri [son] of Chiarissimo of the Moneychangers [branch] of the Medici [family]." In fact, the Da Cambio branch of the Medici family is a particularly interesting example: if the Da Cambio bank hadn't hired some members of down-on-their-luck branches of the family who felt it necessary to play up their being Medici, maybe the dynasty that would eventually rule florence (and their bank) would have dropped the "Medici" and been known as "Da Cambio."

Well-to-do Italians would continue combining their family names with descriptive patronymics in official documents up until the national registry made them stop: Alessandro Manzoni, socialite, celebrated novelist, and eventually Member of Parliament, gives his name to restoration authorities as Alessando Manzoni, di Pietro (Manzoni) e Giulia Beccaria. This was, of course, for reasons of prestige; in Manzoni's case his mother hailed from a very important aristocratic dynasty, and his maternal grandfather had been a celebrated philosopher (while his father certainly also hailed from a well-off aristocratic family, it was his mother's family which afforded him his socialite status).