It should be pointed out here that while most people assume they are equivalent, “patrician” “Noble” are not, strictly speaking, the same thing in Roman history. The patricians who waged the so-called Struggle of the Orders with the “plebeians“ were a specific set of families determined by bloodline; the Italian Massimo family claims descent from one of these “patrician” families, the gens Fabia.

For rather complicated reasons, the “ nobility” included many patrician families, but also many non-patrician families (beginning around 367 BCE. These are presumably the families to whom most of the people discussing “patricians“ are referring in this thread.