The surname shows multiple independent clusters of origin (ceppi), arisen in different regions without direct relation between them.

E. Rossoni notes that the surname is distributed across several areas of southern Italy: one in the Naples area, another in the Potenza area, a very substantial one in the Lecce area —with a presence in Aradeo, Collepasso, Galatone, Nardò, Alezio, Gallipoli and San Nicola— and another in Sicily, at Milena (Caltanissetta area) and Racalmuto (Agrigento area). According to Rossoni, it could derive from a nickname of Greek-Calabrian origin, linked to the ancient Greek term manteia ("oracle, divination, prediction"), perhaps applied to an ancestor regarded as a kind of soothsayer.

V. Blunda, by contrast, proposes for the Sicilian cluster a Germanic root, derived from the personal name Mand, linked to the root mand ("assembly, legal gathering"). Blunda warns that the popular reading associating the surname with the Italian manto ("long cloak") is a false etymology, since that noun derives from the Latin mantum, unrelated to the Germanic anthroponym. He adds, further, that the form Manta with the final vowel -a is proper to some dialect areas of northern Italy, in particular of Piedmont, where the locality of the same name exists in the province of Cuneo, from which it probably derives as a toponymic surname.