Going back to present times:the italian white pages have 3750 Zito listed and the yellow pages around 200.A search for zito on facebook returns at least thousands of zito but also many "zitoun" (this sems to be a very common arabic surname).
There is also another italian telephone directory available online on Infobel. If you are searching a Zito in Italy please search on these services looking for the place where the person you are looking for came from.For example, this is what I get looking for Zito in Fragagnano.
According
to the Zingarelli (Italian dictionary) the name comes from citto a word from Tuscany which means boy. The word is now in use only in the South of Italy. In dialect the name means "bridegroom" but also "young bachelor".As an adjective it
means "engaged with".In the book from Camilleri :A month in Montalbano this author from Sicily that uses dialectal words in his works employs
the word in this meaning.Ziti(bride's macaroni) are
also a kind of tubular pasta called like this because it was used during the
marriage ceremony(or perhaps because of its phallic shape).
If you search for "zito" images on the Web, you will get also wheat ears and fields
: after some research I discovered the reason: zito means "rye" (segala in italian) in
Czech and "wheat" (grano) in slovenian.
Amazon has introduced a new feature that let's you search a name in more than 33 million pages from over 120,000 printed books.I have done a search of "zito" that gives 568 results. As you expect most of them are people's names.
Famous Zito in America: Barry Zito baseball player, Chuck Zito actor, Joseph Zito director, Tommy Zito pianist,Torrie Zito pianist and musical arranger-conductor, Nick
Zito horse trainer. But you discover also some interesting things:like the fact
that "zito" in greek means "long live!"(Viva!). And also that there is a
serbo-croatian sweetcake named "zito". There was also a famous Zito's bakery
in Greenwich Village (N.Y).
Also Google let's you search zito inside printed books.Perhaps the most cited author with surname Zito
is Angela Zito Associate Professor of Anthropology and Religious Studies at NYU
because of its work Of Body and Brush: Grand Sacrifice as Text/performance in 18th C. China.