The authors agree that the surname derives from the place name of the capital of France. F. Miranda specifies that the Latin name of the city was Lutetia Parisorum, inhabited by the Parisii, a people from ancient Normandy who settled in the region after the Roman conquest of Gaul. Miranda also documents the use of the form Parisi in medieval literary Italian, citing canto XI of Dante’s Purgatorio. He notes as well that, in some cases, the base could be the name of the Trojan hero Paride, spread through classical epic as Paris.

V. Blunda offers a Sicilian dialectal perspective: the word parìsi designated the French city and was applied as a nickname to a traveller who had been there or to a merchant with commercial ties to France, later becoming a surname from that byname. G. P. Holmes agrees on the toponymic origin and adds that the surname could also have indicated a more generic connection of the bearer with France.

Miranda observes that the surname is spread across the whole of Italy, with a notable presence in Sicily, Campania, Apulia, Lombardy and Lazio, and smaller clusters in Piedmont, Calabria, Trentino-Alto Adige and Emilia-Romagna. He also points out that Parisi is a place name in the Bari area, from which the lineage of the Parisi family of Apulia would derive.