Pizzone, 1865

Pizzone, photo courtesy of Alfonso Notardonato

Maria Cristina Di Benedetto, my great-grandmother and the mother of Emiddio, was born April 4, 1865, in Pizzone, a tenth-century village surrounded by the Mainarde and Meta mountains in Molise, the small, mountainous region of Italy about one-hundred miles southeast of Rome.

Her birth was registered in the Stato Civile office in Pizzone, which recorded that she was presented by her father, Pasquale, and that her paternal grandmother, Francesca Di Vito, was the witness. The Sindaco, the mayor at the time, then signed the document. More than ten years before, from 1854 to 1856, Cristina’s father had been Sindaco. During his first year as mayor, his son Antonio was born. On the Atto di Nascita, the civil Act of Birth, Pasquale is listed as un proprietario, a land owner. However, by the time Cristina was born, some misfortune had reduced his circumstances. He was now un contadino, a farmer who rented land, a peasant. The unification of Italy, which began in 1861, resulted in difficult economic times in southern Italy. This might have been the cause of Pasquale’s reversal. Many southern Italians lost their land during this time.

And there were other troubles. The child Antonio would not survive. Pasquale and his wife Felicita Di Iorio (Italian women did not take the surname of their husbands) lost their first three children. Infant mortality was high in this part of Italy during the second half of the nineteenth century. It was common for women of this time to bear children every other year or so for twenty years. To lose three children was not unusual. The unfortunate infant would often be laid out in his or her christening gown. The tiny coffin would be carried on a draped board or tabletop during the procession to the cemetery, the pallbearers at each corner. Sometimes, the coffin was carried just by the mother, balanced on her head.

The campanile of San Nicola

Perhaps, because of this frequency of death, it was customary that infants were baptized quickly. Cristina was baptized the day after her birth in the Church of San Nicola. Built in the year 1318, San Nicola had been La Madre Chiesa for the Pizzonesi for more than five centuries. The pages of the baptismal record of San Nicola for 1865 still had the seal of Terra di Lavoro, the old province name from before unification when Pizzone was a part of the Regno delle Due Sicilie, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Terra di Lavoro, Land of Work, is an apt description of this rugged country in which Cristina would grow up. But for now, being held before Archbishop Santucci of San Nicola in the arms of her father, her mother at his side, and her mother’s younger sister Angelamaria with her husband Giovanni Di Vito there as Cristina’s padrini, her godparents, that was all still ahead of her.