Francesca is the Italian feminine of Francesco (Francis) — from the Latin Franciscus ("Frenchman, free one"). A top-500 US baby name since 2000. Francesca da Rimini (c. 1255-1285) — Italian noblewoman whose tragic love story with her brother-in-law Paolo Malatesta is told in Canto V of Dante's Inferno (c. 1308-1320); their souls are eternally bound together in the second circle of Hell among the lustful; the passage is among the most-quoted in all of world literature and inspired Tchaikovsky's symphonic poem Francesca da Rimini (1876), Rachmaninoff's opera (1906), Riccardo Zandonai's opera (1914), and Auguste Rodin's sculpture The Kiss (1882). Francesca Marciano — Italian-American novelist.
Francesca does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.
In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Francesca reduce to 7, The Seeker. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.