Hi Steve!

Hi Steve!!

These Italy maps are a digitized version of maps originally produced by L'Istituto Geografico Militare. They are incredibly detailed, drawn to scale, and show land elevations and even the types of crops planted, as well as local place names.

Here is a little information on the Southern Italy of 100-150 years ago.

In the late 19th century, most of the people in Southern Italy were poor, and many were landless. Landless people either sharecropped or worked on other people's land in exchange for food for that day and some to take home to ...

I've seen Gio: in very old records where it stood for Giovanni, or Gian in a compound surname.

If you can read in Italian, the Italian Wikipedia does have some information on Paganica and Fagano Alto. The entry on Paganica includes a lot of the history. Paganica is part of the comune of L'Aquila. Fagano Alto is a tiny comune located a few comunes away from L'Aquila. Both Paganica and Fagano ...

Sometimes the La Stampa archive search function just doesn't work. Maybe there are too many people online all at once. Try it again later. I have used it many times and when it isn't working so well, I let it go to another time. When it works and I get a good hit, it more than makes up for the times ...

Il Centro and other Italian newspapers.

At the following link is the online archive of newspapers affiliated with the big Roman daily La Repubblica: http://ricerca.repubblica.it/ricerca . Click "ricerca avanzata" to open the full search screen. Next to the long search box is a drop-down list of all ...

Great thread!
I remember the first time I saw "da una donna che non consente di essere nominata" in an Italian birth record. I almost fell over laughing! I did not realize then that this was the stock language used by the town officials to identify a child whose mother did not want to be officially ...

My guess is that not many soldiers kept their Libretto Personale after their recall terms ended, and practically none brought it with them when emigrating, simply because of the size of the thing. So now, 100 years later, not many are around and interest in them is low.

You may wish to check out the CinecittaLuce channel on YouTube. They have a mix of things there.
Also many neorealist filmmakers filmed ordinary people in the late 1940s and 50s, and many of these ordinary people were simple contadini. Riso amare is an example.

A lot of comuni changed their names after unification because the national government had complained that there were too many similar place names. Because a lot of comuni had changed their names, there were several "gazetteer" type books published from the late 1860s and 1870s that cross-referenced ...

Yes, first-cousin marriages AND marriages between people with the same surname and not unheard of in the Italian towns I've been looking at. I was told that in my father's town the priest would try to dissuade such marriages, but did not forbid them entirely.

If you go the Wikipedia link PippoM provided, on the left margin "In altre lingue" you can select English and read the English version which is a little shorter. The Italian govt created this order of knights to honor the World War I vets who were still living in 1968 and had served 6 months during ...

Thank you for responding, erudita74! I am aware of the Cole book; I have been waiting for an updated version! The 2 documents I mentioned above corroborate genealogical facts found elsewhere, and so are being used mostly to add "color" and "depth" to the family history, some insights into life in ...