The authors agree that the surname derives from the place name Catania, a city of Sicily. F. Miranda specifies that the name of the city goes back to the Greek Katàne and the Latin Càtina or Catana, with a meaning that could be "bowl" or "under Etna", and adds that in Arabic it corresponded to Baladaf-fil, an expression that means "country of the elephant", according to the linguist Pellegrini. G. P. Holmes, for his part, also gathers an alternative Arabic etymology with the sense of "coarse grain".

E. De Felice notes that the surname spread throughout southern Italy and is especially frequent in Sicily, above all in its eastern area. He adds that derived forms such as Catanése, Catanèo and Catanoso come from the same place name, with suffixes of Greek origin (-èo) or characteristic of the south (-oso, -uso). Miranda completes the picture of distribution within Sicily, where the surname appears in the Catania, Messina, Palermo, Syracuse, Agrigento and Enna areas, and also extends over a large part of the Italian regions.