Francesca

Francesca began as a Latin name, Franciscus, meaning the Frenchman. It moved south into Italy and took a feminine shape. The literal sense is "the French one," and a second meaning trails behind it, "the free one," because the Frankish tribes that gave France its name were reckoned free people.

Dante fixed the name in memory. In the fifth canto of his Inferno he sets Francesca da Rimini among the lovers, and readers have quarreled over her fate for seven hundred years. Rome later gave the name a saint, Francesca Romana, honored on the ninth of March.

In Poland the same name dresses differently. On a form at the urząd it appears as Franciszka. Friends shorten it to Frania or Franka. The masculine version, standing beside it, is Franciszek, and all of them trace back to that old Latin word for a Frenchman.