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In case you are interested in learning more about infant abandonment in Italy, there are a number of books out there which may be of interest to you. I started reading such books when I discovered that my paternal grandfather was an abandoned infant:
Sacrificed for Honor: Italian Infant Abandonment and the Politics of Reproductive Control by Professor David I Kertzer. (deals with 19th century Italy)
Although Jewish, and the son of a rabbi, Professor Kertzer has done a lot of research on Italian related subjects and was one of the first researchers allowed into the Vatican archives when they were first opened it to researchers. He has written a lot of books which I have found interesting.
There is, of course, the book called The Kindness of Strangers by John Boswell, but this only deals with the abandonment of children in Western Europe from olden times up to the Renaissance.
In its most general sense, the term genealogy refers to the study of family history, while encompassing such related fields as ethnology, onomatology and --in rather few cases-- heraldry. It is important to bear in mind that genealogy forms part of the framework of general history. The best genealog...