E. Rossoni considers that the surname would derive from a nickname originated in the Sardinian word fara, which in Logudorese designates the usher or messenger of the ecclesiastical tribunal. Even today, in Cagliari and its surroundings, the men in charge by the parish of ordering the processions are called faras. The term appears in historical Sardinian documents such as the signatories of the Peace of Eleonora (1388) and the Condaghe di San Nicola di Trullas (11th-13th centuries). Among its illustrious bearers is Giovanni Francesco Fara (1543-1591), born in Sassari, bishop of Bosa and author of fundamental historical works on Sardinia.

V. Blunda, on the other hand, places it in Sicily and proposes a Germanic root: it derives from the personal name Fara, linked to the Lombard term fara, which designated the fundamental social and military unit of that people, that is, the group of related lineages that moved and settled together in a territory. The fara was at once a family clan, a combat unit and a nucleus of colonisation, and its imprint on Italian anthroponymy and toponymy reflects the way in which the Lombards organised their settlement in the peninsula after the invasion of the year 568.

The surname is typically Sardinian.