From Italian/Latin 'novella' meaning 'new' or 'young'; also a literary term for a short novel.
Novella comes from the Latin "novellus," a diminutive of "novus," meaning new — making it a name that literally means "little new thing" or, more evocatively, "something newly born into the world." In medieval Italy, it entered use as a given name with this sense of freshness and beginning. It is also, of course, the word for a particular literary form: longer than a short story, shorter than a novel, prized for its compression and intensity — a form associated with Boccaccio's Decameron and with the tradition of tightly crafted narrative art.
The name appears in medieval Italian records with some frequency; there is a Novella d'Andrea, a 14th-century Bolognese woman celebrated by Giovanni Boccaccio who reportedly lectured at the University of Bologna in place of her father, veiled so that her beauty would not distract her students — a story, likely embellished, that attached the name to female scholarly achievement. The name traveled through Italian communities and occasionally appeared in Catholic-influenced naming traditions elsewhere in Europe. As a given name today, Novella occupies a wonderful space: rare enough to feel like a genuine discovery, grounded enough in Latin roots to feel legitimate rather than invented.
It has the warmth of Italian vowels, the literary resonance of a form devoted to concentrated meaning, and the literal meaning of newness itself — making it a quietly perfect name for a first child. It sits alongside Vella and Nella as part of a family of melodic Italian-derived names attracting renewed interest.
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