The di Carlos of Rionero Sannitico

During our genealogy tour we spent a lot of time in Fornelli because it is so darn cute, but two other villages in the vicinity, Forlì del Sannio and Rionero Sannitico, are more central to my di Carlo family's more recent history. 

Like a lot of small towns in Molise, they had suffixes added to their names after 1861, to distinguish them from towns with the same name elsewhere in newly unified Italy. "Sannio" and "Sannitico" both refer to the Samnites, an ancient warrior civilization that dominated the area hundreds of years before the Christian Era. Although the Samnites were subjugated and absorbed into the Roman Empire by around the time that BC became AD, their name lives on in the area where they once ruled. But that history is even further back than our daughter's most ambitious researches. 

Born in Fornelli from a long line of di Carlos, Giorgio di Carlo moved to Rionero Sannitico for reasons unknown. There his son Vincenzo, my great-grandfather, was born. A coffee-bar encounter led our daughter to Ferdinando Carmosino, a former mayor of Rionero Sannitico who now devotes much of his time to researching and writing about his town's history. 

On a gray, drizzly day we drove over to Rionero and met Ferdinando and Don Tarquino, the local priest, who took us into the back room of St. Bartholomew's in the center of town.

Inside was a nondescript metal cabinet full of old record books...a genealogist's delight. The priest pulled out the birth registry covering 1861 and we began looking through the pages. There, among the listings for April of that year, in the spiky writing of the pre-ballpoint era, was my great-grandfather in his first encounter with church and state.

Vincenzo is the listing on the upper left.

In the pretty little church Don Tarquinio and Ferdinando showed us the baptismal font that dates from the early 1600s. This is probably where Vincenzo was baptized. 

We were all being very COVID-conscious.

Ferdinando told us that one of our relatives, Domenico di Carlo, served as Rionero's mayor for 28 years. Although the di Carlos were mostly poor laborers, this di Carlo seems to have been something of a go-getter. His family ended up owning the house across the piazza from the church and built themselves an impressive (though currently somewhat run-down) mausoleum in the town cemetery.

He looks like a prosperous fellow, no?

Domenico di Carlo, RIP.

We're hoping that through Domenico we might have some living relatives, albeit distant ones, in Rionero Sannitico, but our in-house genealogist has been busy tracking down other parts of the family.

On a ridge above the town are what's left of a castle that once housed the ruling Carafa family. Ferdinando told us that there used to be a tunnel running from the castle directly into the church, presumably so that the aristocrats wouldn't have to mingle with the hoi-polloi. 

That's a bit of what's left of the castle at left.

They clearly enjoyed a pretty spectacular view.

Another site we visited was a monument to those who emigrated from Rionero and to the longtime local parish priest who, according to one of the priest's descendants, "kept alive the link between two distinct realities," that of those who stayed and of those who left for elsewhere. 

The inscription on the pedestal is a 1963 quote from John F. Kennedy: "A nation reveals itself by the men it produces but also by the men it honors, the men it remembers." The monument seems to be at least as much about modern-day emigrants, those who have moved to Northern Italy or elsewhere in Europe as well as across the Atlantic in search of the kinds of jobs and opportunities that the shrinking towns of rural Italy can't offer. My daughter found that the town lost half its population to emigration between 1950 and 1980. 

The monument is not in the town's little center but in a meadow on a hill a bit out of the way. A little Googling revealed that there was, and perhaps still is, considerable ill feeling in Rionero about its placement and its purpose. Some emigrants who maintain ties to the town insist that the courage and suffering of those who left for new lands deserve to be celebrated, but some locals don't agree. In an online debate about the question a few years ago, one Rionersi wrote that he had no objections to a monument to Don Antonio, "a man of great importance and valor, whom everyone thinks of when they think of Rionero." He was less enthused about honoring those who left. "I cite the words," he wrote, "of the most intelligent woman I have ever known up until now, my mother: 'Monuments should be for those who had the courage to stay and suffer hunger for love of their own land.'" 

An understandable feeling, I think. But after visiting Rionero and these other little towns, I can't help being grateful that my branch of the di Carlos didn't choose to stick around.