Land of my father's father's fathers

I'm just back from a tour of the rural portion of southern Italy where my Italian grandfather was born and whence stems my claim to Italian citizenship. Our daughter, who originally spearheaded the Italian citizenship initiative, has become a demon genealogist, harnessing her formidable research skills to the task of figuring out who all of her ancestors are, stretching across the world and deep into the past.

Until a few years ago the only thing I knew about my grandfather's origins was that he and his family came from Cantalupo nel Sannio, a little town in Italy's smallest and least developed region, Molise.  Because of my daughter's efforts, I now know that Cantalupo actually plays only a walk-on part in my Italian ancestors' history. 

Many Italian families have lived in the same place for generations but, for reasons my daughter has not yet uncovered, my Italian forebears seem to have been afflicted with wanderlust, or perhaps an inability to keep up with the rent. My grandfather was born in 1892 not in Cantalupo but in another small Molisano town, Forli nel Sannio. His father had migrated there from a different Molisano town, Rionero Sannitico, where he'd been born in 1841. And my great-grandfather's dad, Giorgio di Carlo, was born in 1792 in still another Molisano hill town, Fornelli.  (The family name was di Carlo until my assimilationist grandfather Americanized it.)

Fornelli, it turns out, is a hotbed of di Carlos. In our genealogical conversations with locals in neighboring towns, as soon as they heard the name di Carlo the response was always, "Your family must be from Fornelli." And indeed in Fornelli di Carlos were everywhere; it's the second-most common name in town. My daughter got a haircut at Mariangela di Carlo's beauty salon and we bought a loaf of bread and some cookies at the di Carlo Brothers bakery. 

I have to admit the bread wasn't that great.

The pretty church near the B&B where we were staying had been nicely restored. 

A plaque on the wall credited the generosity of two widows for the restoration, one being Giulia di Carlo.  

Down the way from our B&B, two local men had set up a little diorama and museum of the town in the cantina at the bottom of an old house. The display included a collection of old wedding photos. 

Note the model of the city walls and towers at right.

There were a lot of di Carlos in the lineup, including this pair of newlyweds. 

The bride's surname, Ucci, is the fourth-most common name in town.

Coincidentally, these two were the grandparents of Giuseppina, the friendly woman whose bar we breakfasted in every morning during our stay in Fornelli. 

We were discussing why her grandparents, and all the other couples in those old photographs, looked so grim. "In those days marriages were always arranged by the parents," Giuseppina told us. "It wasn't love. It was about land." One of the customers enjoying a morning beer chimed in that anyway the photos weren't taken at the wedding, but a week or two later, evidently to make sure that the marriage took. By then both parties knew what they were in for, until death did them part. 

Which it eventually did. And there are legions of di Carlos in the local cemetery, too. 

In some ultimate sense all these di Carlos are probably my relatives. But not close enough that my daughter has found any living Fornellesi that she can show we are directly related to...yet.

Currently Fornelli is home to only about 1,900 people. My great-grandfather wasn't the only one to pull up roots and leave town during the last century and a half. Like every place in the region, Fornelli contributed to Italians' great migration to the Americas. For some reason a large portion of Fornelli's population moved to one place, Warwick, Rhode Island. (When people in Fornelli heard we were DeCarlos from America, they inevitably asked if that's where we'd come from.)

Twin cities.

Numbers of former residents, or their descendants, return to Fornelli every year, and while we were there we met several who go back and forth regularly. I suspect that this is one reason Fornelli seems more prosperous than many other towns in the area.

It's also extremely charming, credibly advertising itself as "one of the most beautiful villages in Italy." Its centro storico is pedestrian only (thanks to its narrow alleys and steep stairs) and surrounded by very well-preserved medieval city walls and towers. From the battlements you look out over a beautiful landscape of fields and woods surrounded by the Apennine mountains.

Many of the houses are a thousand years old, but even the ones that are a bit dilapidated look cared for, and most residents decorate their front porches, balconies, and little piazzas with plants and flowers. 

The town is a bit of a fantasy--the Italian village of everyone's dreams--but it's a very sweet fantasy. I suspect the people there are equally friendly to strangers who aren't di Carlos. It made me a little sad that my genealogical connection to this lovely place is a pretty attenuated one.