Most fruit names describe the fruit. The cantaloupe is named after a house.
Cantalupo was a country estate outside Rome that belonged to the popes, who used it as a summer retreat. The traditional story is that melon seeds brought back from Armenia were planted in its gardens, and the variety grown there became known by the estate's name. Accounts disagree about when this happened, and the Armenian detail is usually reported with a "supposedly" attached, but the link between the fruit and the place is well established.
The estate's own name is the stranger part. Cantalupo breaks down into the Italian canta, "sings," and lupo, "wolf." The usual explanation is that it marked a spot where wolves gathered and howled. Etymologists treat that explanation cautiously, since it may be a story invented to fit the name, but the literal reading holds: the melon on your breakfast plate is named, at two removes, after a singing wolf.
The word traveled to English through French, where the fruit became cantaloup, and it is first recorded in English in 1739. English kept the French spelling and added a final "e," which is why the word looks French even though its roots are Italian and Latin.
There is a twist for American readers. The fruit sold as cantaloupe in the United States, with its netted, corky skin, is a different variety from the smooth, ribbed melon that Europeans call cantaloupe. The American one is a netted muskmelon, and in Australia and New Zealand it goes by rockmelon. The name migrated from one melon to another, and from one continent to another, without ever losing the wolf.
Both halves of the name have large families in English. Canta comes from the Latin cantare, "to sing," which also produced chant, cantata, cantor, and enchant. Lupo comes from the Latin lupus, the root of lupine and of lupus, the disease apparently named because it seemed to "devour" the skin like a wolf.