Peeking into the rock

I'm on the trail of cioppino. This is a fruits-de-mer kind of soup, of all kinds of fish and shellfish, depending on what you've got. It's native to San Francisco, where there was at one time a fishing fleet dominated by Italian-Americans. But the nice fellow's cousin's husband's mother (who is from near Padova) says there is no Italian dish and no word in Italian that correspond even partially. So I googled it in Italian and found a page which says that it's from the Pacific coast and also partly from Portugal. This is reasonable: there's a sizeable group here that comes from there. But when I google in Portuguese I find recipes that are clearly translated from English and a claim that the dish is Italian.

I'm not so worried about where the dish comes from, actually: biologists would call it "cosmopolitan," because where do you not find a mixed fish and sea trash soup? -- and really, since the tomato is cosmopolitan, too, you've got to find the tomato-based kind too. What I'm wondering about is the name. There's an onion sold at the farmer's market called "cippolino" which I think I'm supposed to think is an Italian onion (what I do think is that it's not good enough to pay $3.00 a pound for, not when the plain reds and yellows and whites are so good they'll knock your socks off).

I found a recipe for cialde, which my affinal relative makes magnificent ones of, but the recipe did not sound at all like her description.