Well, just got my copy of “Valerio Dorico: Music Printer in Sixteenth-Century Rome” (S.G. Cusick, UMI Research Press, 1981), so sleepless nights are a thing of the past.
Sadly out of print; perhaps they’ll reprint it, if there’s renewed interest?
How cool is that… I hope you’ll share a handful of pics.
I read that in the music reading room at the British Library on 23 September 2013 – I still have the notes I made from that visit. So it goes to show that although at that point the name Dorico was only intended to be the codename for the first version of the software and not the final go-to-market name, we hit upon the possibility of using Valerio’s name in connection with the software less than a year after we started at Steinberg.
Glad you didn’t call it Pasoti or Blado.
Valerio is a cool name too.
Or Locatelli.
It was also a bit of a risk because too many people think that the stress of all Italian words with three or more syllables falls on the penultimate one. How many times have we heard Stefano?!
Brave decision to educate people into pronouncing Dorico properly 
Blado is already used as the name of an Italic font, first created in hot metal by Monotype in 1923. It’s based on type used in the period.
Indeed, just like the name of the so-called inventor of the piano, Cristofori and not Cristofori. On the other hand, too many people still say Pachelbel instead of Pachelbel.
Nice post, Ben! I’d also be interested to see some snippets from the book.
Perhaps an item (including Dorico coffee cups, shirts, hats, etc. - hint, hint) to be included in the future Dorico/Steinberg Merchandise Shop! Hey Steinberg, we have Cubase, where is Dorico? 
Absolutely. I would totally wear a Dorico shirt.
You could even do boxer shorts with Dorico printed on the front or waistband and Finale and Sibelius centered on the back. 
The former is (approximately) the second of the three pronunciations given in the Duden though.
The others make more sense etymologically (Elbel am Bach) but as with many surnames and place names in English, meanings have sometimes been obscured over the centuries.
If Pachelbel is written Pachelbl (this form does exist), an English speaker’s pronunciation is likely to be reasonably close to the German. I stress the first syllable, some would stress the second; both are in the Duden.
Back to Ben’s book…
The things you guys teach me in unexpected threads…
Need we mention “Purcell”?
Pronunciation? Purcell is straightforward and pronounced to rhyme with rehearsal. It’s more obvious when one looks at variants like Pursall, Purtle, and Parcel. On the English Wikipedia page for Henry Purcell, there are two versions given from John Wells’ Longman Pronunciation Dictionary of 2000 but that’s a survey rather than a prescriptive guide. There was already a crisis of confidence by then and Americans had started to pronounce many first syllables as though they were prefixes. Looking at a pronouncing dictionary from 1960 (the editor states ‘the pronunciation in this book is that which I believe to be very usually heard in everyday speech in the families of Southern English people who have been educated at the public [i.e. private] schools’), there is no such uncertainty.