Rizzo is an Italian surname-name likely derived from a nickname meaning curly-haired.
Rizzo is a southern Italian and Sicilian surname rooted in the adjective "riccio" — curly — itself descended from the Latin "ericius," meaning hedgehog or something spiny and coiled. It began as a nickname for someone with notably curly hair, the kind of vivid physical descriptor that medieval Italians converted into hereditary family names with unsentimental practicality. The name clusters historically in Sicily and Calabria, carried westward by the great Italian diaspora of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into the neighborhoods of New York, Chicago, and Buenos Aires.
In American pop culture the name acquired its most famous avatar in 1971 when Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey introduced Betty Rizzo in their musical "Grease" — sharp-tongued, leather-jacketed, and ultimately more dimensional than she first appeared. Sandy Olsson's foil and the Pink Ladies' leader, Rizzo became an archetype: the tough girl with a bruised interior, too proud to admit vulnerability. The character's surname choice was almost certainly drawn from the Italian-American milieu of 1950s Chicago that the musical depicted, and it became so iconic that the name now resonates strongly with that specific cultural moment.
As a given name rather than surname, Rizzo has slowly migrated in the twenty-first century, carried partly by the Grease association and partly by the broader trend of Italian surnames crossing over as first names. It carries an undeniable cool factor, a suggestion of urban grit and loyalty — qualities the character embodied so memorably that they now trail the syllables wherever they go.