An Italian bishop has called on parents to stop giving their children "ridiculous" names and revert to traditional Christian names instead.

Monsignor Bassano Staffieri, retired bishop of La Spezia in Liguria, said that of the 500 girls born in the city this year, "not one was registered or baptised with the name Maria". He added."A name is not just a sound, it has a profound meaning."

Mothers and fathers "should return to using a name like Maria, which is inspired by the Virgin Mary", instead of opting for "exotic or strange names of which their children will later be ashamed", the bishop said. There were signs that parents were reverting to traditional names for boys, "but this is still not the case with baby girls, alas".

He said the reason was not so much that Italian families were abandoning the Catholic faith but rather that they did not give enough thought to baptismal names. "The problem is they do not think about what they are doing".

The AS Roma football star Francesco Totti and his wife Ilary have been criticised for calling their baby daughter Chanel, although their son, now three, is called Christian. Last month the Court of Cassation Italy's highest appeal Court banned a couple from naming their son Friday - Venerdi - because the name "could expose the boy to ridicule".

The court said the name was derived from the manservant in Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe, and was therefore associated with "subservience and inferiority". The judges ordered the boy to be renamed Gregorio, after the saint's day on which he was born.

The boy's parents, named only as Mara O and Roberto G under Italian privacy laws, said they should be free to name they boy as they wished. They said they would continue privately to call the boy Friday, which was a "nice" name, and threatened to call their next child Mercoledi.

However Gian Ettore Gassani of the Italian Association of Matrimonial Lawyers agreed with the ruling, saying courts had the power to change any name "likely to limit social interaction and create insecurity".

La Stampa said celebrities who gave their children "ridiculous" names bore some of the blame. It noted that Peaches Geldof, daughter of Bob Geldof and Paul Yates and sister of Fifi Trixibell and Pixie, had said she had come to "detest" her name.

Last year the model Jordan (Katie Price) and her husband, the former pop star Peter Andre, named their baby daughter Princess Tiaamii, taken from the names of Andre's mother Thea and Price's mother Amy. Other unusual names for celebrity children include Apple (Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow), Bluebell Madonna (Geri Halliwell), Brooklyn, Romeo and Cruz (David and Victoria Beckham), Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily (Paula Yates and Michael Hutchence), Lark Song (Mia Farrow and André Previn) and Saffron Sahara, Amber Rose and Tallulah Pine (Simon and Yasmin Le Bon).

Full list of names