The collective name of Hucpoldings was recently introduced into historiography in order to designate the descendants of Hucpold, count palatine in Italy under Louis II's rule from approximately 850 to 860.

Formerly, local Bolognese scholars referred to this kinship group as the counts of Bologna, coining an expression that linked them inseparably to the city's medieval institutions. The fundamental assumption was that every city of any importance that had survived the early medieval centuries must have been under the jurisdiction of a count in Carolingian and Post-Carolingian periods. Nevertheless, this designation concluded by nullifying, within civic institutional circles, the entire kinship issue, which therefore lost its historic significance. Moving the field of investigation from the civic point of view, we can engage with an analysis that focuses on the kinship group as a whole and on the particular features recognizable for at least nine generations, that is the individuals who lived from the middle of the ninth century to the beginning of the twelfth century for whom it would appear appropriate to attribute the collective name of Hucpoldings.

In response to the anthropological opening supported by Georges Duby and Jacques Le Goff in their research into medieval family structures, Cinzio Violante assertively stated the peculiarity of the Italian groups which, in his opinion, always had a prevalent point of family cohesion in the hereditary transmission of property: ‘this is explained by the enormous importance that the royal element, and especially land ownership, had in Italy and with the fact that the memory of the lineages and, therefore, familial self-awareness derived from documents that concerned the transmission of the patrimony’.