In any event, trying to pinpoint every last detail of cioppino's origin is a bit of a fool's errand since the fishermen and sailors of the Mediterranean have travelled up and down that coast for millennia, spreading cooking traditions all the while-that is, after all, why this type of soup has so many variants throughout the region. It's worth noting that both of the ciuppin recipes in that book only call for fin fish and not the shellfish that's required in a cioppino, although I've found other Italian recipes for ciuppin online that incorporate a wider variety of seafood. In one, which the book describes as 'particolare' to convey its relative strangeness, the fish in the ciuppin is left whole in the other, presented as the more traditional one, the fish is puréed to make a creamy broth, much like a French bouillabaisse. In my copy of the Italian cookbook La Cucina Ligure by Alessando Molinari Pradelli, there are two versions of ciuppin. The word 'cioppino' most likely comes from 'ciuppin,' a Ligurian variant of these Mediterranean stews, which was brought to San Francisco by Genoese immigrants more than a century ago.