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«soltanto i tessitori» — only the weavers. The return was made to a question about the County of Pisino, and the men enumerated in it are tessitori. Everything this archive had built as a convergence — the peasant weaver at the head of the Mione household, Leonardo De Franceschi the one trained weaver at Gologorica — now sits on top of a source that says the word.

«con un suo fiolo» — with a son of his. The line this archive has been quoting for months names two Defranceschi in Istria in 1679, not one, travelling together with a third man, Zuane d'Erman. Three from Mione.

Ferigo is explicit that the return covers only the imperial county, because that is all the question asked about. Venetian Istria — where, he says, the great majority of these villages' men documentably went — is simply not in the answer. Whatever the 1679 list shows of Carnian weavers in Istria is a floor, not a ceiling.

One Michele del Canal di Gorto — «più che probabilmente di Ovaro» — buys a «partem botege textorie», a share in a weaver's shop, at Montona in Istria. The deed is in the protocols of the notaries Daniele and Nicolò de Vidonis of Cella, in the Biblioteca Civica of Udine. It is the earliest of the line.

Jacobo Carlavariis of Luincis dictates his will at Pedena in Istria. Pedena is the cathedral town of the diocese this family's own two parishes belonged to. A Carnian weaver from the next village to Mione was dying there a hundred and forty years before the 1679 list.

Further back and further south, a «Petrus de Cargna, magister textor qm. magistri Christophori» is living at Sissano near Pola. Ferigo notes honestly that it is not known whether he came from the lower Gorto or was an isolated case.

«la strada dei furlani» — the Friulians' road, running from the parishes of Ovaro and Luincis into Istria. Ferigo's summary of the documents: relatively rare in the sixteenth century, thick in the seventeenth, thickest in the eighteenth. The family's own crossing, somewhere around 1700, sits in the thickest part of it.

Cargnelli — the Carnian mountain men — «da secoli costretti a spostarsi, almeno stagionalmente, in cerca di migliori condizioni di vita», forced for centuries to move, at least seasonally, north into the German lands, south to Istria and the upper Adriatic, west into the Veneto. Some were cramars, pedlars with their crassigne packs, crossing Istria in every direction. Others «erano semplicemente tesseri, tessitori a domicilio» — were simply weavers, weaving at home. Quirino Ermacora's line on them: «emigrano d'inverno e travagliano giorno e notte per procacciarsi con la fatica e coll'industria sussidi per la loro vecchiaia» — they go out in winter and work night and day to earn, by toil and industry, a provision for their old age.

Tommasini, writing in the seventeenth century of Sanvincenti: «tra essi si trovano molte famiglie di cargnelli, ch'attendono alla mercantia et alcune poche persone civili che vestono all'Italiana» — among them are many families of cargnelli, who attend to trade, and a few civil persons who dress in the Italian way. Brhan draws the conclusion: the Cargnelli were seen as a group apart from both the Croats of the countryside and the Italians of the castle, bilingual because their business made them so. That is the position a family arriving from Mione would have occupied.

«Nel Settecento molti Cargnelli investivano i soldi guadagnati con l'industria comprando beni immobili dalle popolazioni locali» — in the eighteenth century many of them put the money they had earned by their trade into property bought from the local people, most often vineyards, the most profitable crop inland. «Nelle fonti vengono indicati con l'indicazione D.no, domino, ovvero proprietario terriero, chiaro segno di una stratificazione sociale già in atto non riscontrabile nei secoli precedenti» — in the sources they are then marked D.no, domino, landowner: a clear sign of a social stratification now under way that the earlier centuries do not show.

«Gran parte dei Carnici di Sanvincenti, nella seconda metà del XVIII secolo, risulta tra i proprietari terrieri come ad esempio D.no Vittorio De Franceschi, D.no Valentin Lupieri, D.no Antonio Fabris.» A Dominus Vittorio De Franceschi at Sanvincenti in the later eighteenth century, listed among the Carnian landholders — beside a Lupieri, which is the name of the notary who held the seat at Luint, the next village to Mione, from 1699 to 1724. The purchases are in the protocols of the Sanvincenti notary Alvise Davia, 1787–1789, in the state archive at Pazin.

Brhan compares the eighteenth-century archives with Roberto Starec's survey of 1945 and finds the descendants still in place: «i discendenti di Gio. Batta Giorgis di Mione vivevano ancora a San Pietro in Selve, quelli di Pietro Antonio Rodella di Ovaro a Torre e quelli di Gio. Batta Candriella di Claudinico a Visignano». A second family out of Mione — the Giorgis, who also appear in the Mione papers in the Udine archive — still at San Pietro in Selve in 1945, which is twenty kilometres from Gologorica.

Carnians became zuppani, village headmen: Gio. Batta Rabas at Visignano in 1768, from a family three generations in the place; Giacomo Cadore in 1750 and 1769; Francesco Dell'Osto as early as 1678. And the mistri got the good commissions — Gio. Maria Rabassi «de Cargna, perito nell'arte di muraro» built the marble altar of St Quirinus in the parish church at Visignano in 1736.

At Luincis above Ovaro: the mother church of the whole Val di Gorto, to which Mione, Muina, Agrons, Cella, Ovasta, Luint and the rest were subject, and the churchyard the valley's dead go to. The provincial panel at its door: «una delle undici antiche pievi della Carnia, risale probabilmente al secolo VIII» — one of the eleven ancient pievi of Carnia, probably eighth-century. It burned, and in 1431 was rebuilt by «maestro Stefano quondam Simone di Mena»; the present building is eighteenth-century and keeps fragments of what came before. Three naves, four arcades a side on three piers, a square apse facing east. In the apse survive Romanesque fresco fragments of the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, the figures set inside a thin painted architecture of twisted columns and finely decorated arches. The organ is of 1778, by Giovanni Battista de Corte of Ovasta — in Friulian, Zuan Batiste de Cort de Davaste. There is a small museum inside. If any one place on earth is the origin of this line, on the evidence assembled here, it is the parish that buries in this ground.

The village church itself, and the provincial sign at its door dates it to the fifteenth century. The apse carries what the sign calls the finest fresco cycle by the painter Pietro Fuluto, painted about 1510 — the Annunciation, God the Father and the Evangelists in the vault; on the walls the Nativity, the Presentation, the Flight into Egypt, the Slaughter of the Innocents and the Resurrection; Apostles in the lower band of the apse. The influence of Gianfrancesco da Tolmezzo is noted as remarkable. On the counter-façade stands a wooden ancona of 1538 by Simone di Paolo of Udine: three tiers, with St Maurice, St Anthony and St Bovo below, St Vincent, the Madonna and Child and St Florian in the middle, and Christ Resurrected above between painted panels of the Madonna and the Angel of the Annunciation.

«Ovaro: itinerari e ricerche», the 1995 survey read here in September, records the same man as «Pietro Fuluto (Mione, ante 1514; Liariis 1515 e Luincis 1519)» — frescoing Mione before 1514, Liariis in 1515, Luincis in 1519. The cycle in the family's own village church is the earliest of the three. A Zuane De Franceschi walking out of Mione for Istria in 1679 had grown up under those walls.

«IN MEMORIA DEI CADUTI IN GUERRA», placed by «i compagni di Muina». Sixteen names of the First World War: Lieutenant Micoli Umberto, Corporal-Major Svander Giuseppe, Corporal Spinotti Giovanni, and then the privates — DE FRANCESCHI VITTORIO and DE FRANCESCHI ISIDORO, Stefani Aristide, Riccardo and Giacomo, Fabris Antonio, Micoli Riccardo, Beorchia Osvaldo, Menegon Leonardo, Lorenzini Giacomo and Michele, Corporal Stefani Antonio, Adami Giovanni.

«GUERRA 1940–1945», in two columns. Among the soldiers, two Spinotti dead and four DISPERSI — missing — the first of them DE FRANCESCHI ISIDORO, with Macuglia Donato, Menegon Aniceto and Micoli Sisto. And then the second column, headed «CIVILI CADUTI 1 E 2.XI.1944»: Stradiotto Angelina, DE FRANCESCHI EGIDIO, Fabris geom. Giovanni, Fabris Tullio, Felice Guido, Gallo Ettore, Micoli Elio.

A second stone, «NOVEMBRE 1944 — MAGGIO 1945», carrying fourteen names with De Franceschi Egidio at the head of them, the same seven civilians of the first two days of November and seven more who died in the seven months that followed: Not Antonio, Not Lino, Not Secondo, Palma Eligio, Piemonte Paolino, Timeus Guerrino, Marin Antonio.

Brhan's argument is that this migration was continuous, long, individual and spontaneous — driven by economics, not organised by the state as the Morlach resettlements were. Because nobody organised it, nobody filed it. «The primary sources are therefore parish registers and local notarial acts, not government files.» That is exactly why this archive has spent its time in baptism books and notarial boxes rather than in state papers, and it is why the question has been so hard.

A Venetian enquiry of 1769 recorded fifty-four Carnians in Istria — and the Carnian parish registers at the other end mark their absentees «in partibus Carsi et Istriae», in the parts of the Carso and Istria. The two ends of the road, each keeping half the record.

They were craftsmen and traders — the «cramars» with their pedlar's crassigne — and they filled a total vacuum of artisan labour in a Slav-farming interior. They preferred the interior to the coast. They reinvested craft and trade profits in land bought from the local population; they kept property and kin in Carnia across generations; and they assimilated fast, often by the second generation, to whichever community was dominant locally. Weavers came especially from the Quartiere di Socchieve, and the majority of the Istrian Carnians from the Quartiere di Gorto and the Val Pesarina. Gorto is the pieve this page began at.

Brhan prints Pietro Kandler's mid-nineteenth-century list of the families of Carnian origin at Sanvincenti: «Lupieri, Fiorencis, Defranceschi, Fabris, Vernier, Gonano, Vorano, Zuliani, Crosilla, Sandri, Corva, Spinotti e altre». And among the farmsteads around the castle, most of them Carnian-owned, «Stanza Lupieri, Stanza Spinotto, Stanza De Franceschi». Antonio De Colle counted a hundred and eighteen surnames of Carnian-Friulian origin in the commune of Visignano alone, and Defranceschi is on that list too.

«D.no Vittorio De Franceschi» among the landed proprietors. And a marriage: Zuanne Volpe of Bergamasque origin married «Maria Zanco vedova di Gasparo De Franceschi, carnico pure lui» — widow of Gasparo De Franceschi, himself a Carnian — and came into his capital; her will leaves it, should their children die, to her first husband's kinswomen «Pasqua e Antonia De Franceschi». Four people, and an explicit statement that Gasparo was Carnian. Brhan takes this from an unpublished private study, so the archive records it as a lead needing the Pisino registers behind it — but a Carnian De Franceschi at Sanvincenti in the eighteenth century is a fact of the right shape.

«I discendenti di Gio. Batta Giorgis di Mione vivevano ancora a San Pietro in Selve, quelli di Pietro Antonio Rodella di Ovaro a Torre e quelli di Gio. Batta Candriella di Claudinico a Visignano.» The descendants of Gio. Batta Giorgis of Mione were still at San Pietro in Selve; those of Pietro Antonio Rodella of Ovaro at Torre. Named men from Mione and Ovaro, traced to named Istrian villages, still there in 1945. Not this surname — but Giorgis is on the Gorto stones this page transcribes, married to a Maddalena De Franceschi.

«Nell'Ottocento, in pieno clima nazionalistico e patriotico, Carlo De Franceschi si espresse criticamente sui Cargnelli di Lindaro perché “imbastarditisi sposando donne slave, giunsero a … parlare fra loro a preferenza lo slavo”.» In the nineteenth century, in a fully nationalist climate, Carlo De Franceschi spoke critically of the Carnians of Lindar because, having bastardised themselves by marrying Slav women, they came to speak Slav among themselves by preference. Carlo is the great-great-grandson of Carnian immigrants. He is describing the ordinary fate of families like his own, in the ugliest available word, because by 1860 it had become a political matter. It is the sharpest thing this archive has found about what he was, and it is not flattering.

Miroslav Bertoša's entry for the surname: «predci gologoričkih rodova potječu iz Karnije, od tzv. gismanija, ministerijala akvilejskoga patrijarha» — the ancestors of the Gologorica line come from Carnia, of the so-called gismani, ministerials of the patriarch of Aquileia. The same word Carlo used. Then: «I De Franceschi possedevano il castello Agrons vicino al fiume Degano.» The De Franceschi possessed the castle of Agrons by the river Degano. — On which see the correction further down this page: the castle was rubble by 1400 and belonged to a different family, and what the Francisci held at Agrons was a ministerial fief. Charters of 1467 and 1471 record the investiture of a Leonardus Francisci by the governor of Friuli; a document of 1502 names «ser Leonardus Christoforus Francisci quondam Johannis gismanus de Carnia»; and the archives of the first half of the sixteenth century mention a de Franciscus «nel villaggio di Mione, sopra di Ovaro, nelle vicinanze del castello di Agrons» — in the village of Mione, above Ovaro, near the castle of Agrons.

«I De Franceschi di Moncalvo erano originari di Agrons e i loro consanguinei abitavano nelle villa di Mione. Non sono da confondere con i numerosi De Franceschi carnici presenti in Istria in altre località o con i De Franceschi di Umago che hanno un origine completamente diversa.» The De Franceschi of Moncalvo were originally from Agrons and their kinsmen lived in the village of Mione. They are not to be confused with the many Carnian De Franceschi present in Istria in other places, or with the De Franceschi of Umago, who have a completely different origin. That last clause is the one this archive has been circling for weeks, and a scholar of the migration says it without being asked.

Agrons is one of the four places the family photographed this autumn — Ovaro, Mione, Muina, Agrons — and its cemetery is in the files. The provincial interpretation panel at Santa Maria di Gorto, transcribed on this page above, describes the castle without knowing whose it was: «The Agrons Castle was close to the parish church of St. Mary; what remains visible nowadays is the bell tower only… During the Middle Ages, documents mention noblemen who were the feudal lords of the castle: Varnero and Vecello di Agrons in 1274, Pantaleone di Agrons in 1329. By 1400, the castle was already reduced to rubble and its stones were used to renovate the ancient church.» So the castle was already rubble when Leonardus Francisci was invested in 1467, and its stones are in the walls of the church this family's graves surround.

Agrons, by the Degano, where they held a castle already ruined by 1400 and were invested in 1467 and 1471 — Mione, above Ovaro, in the first half of the sixteenth century — and Moncalvo di Pisino, where the surname first appears in the baptismal register in 1661 and where Gian Battista, «il vecchio stipite del ramo dei De Franceschi», died in November 1686. Then the house of 1711. Three villages and two hundred and fifty years, and the first two are twenty minutes' walk apart.

Carlo, in the same letter, explains it: «Il nostro nome originario è veramente De Franceschi… Ma venuti negli stati austriaci sembrò alle autorità che volessero arrogarsi il titolo di nobiltà, non sapendo questi che il de in Italia aggiunto al nome esprime il casato, e non titolo nobiliare, onde essi nei decreti scrivevano Defranceschi, e così avvenne che taluni per timore della multa comminata a chi s'arrogava… titolo di nobiltà, s'indussero a firmarsi Defranceschi, altri adottarono il De Franceschi, qualcuno perfino Franceschi.» Our original name is truly De Franceschi. But once in the Austrian lands the authorities took the «de» for a claim of nobility, not knowing that in Italy it means the house and not a title; so they wrote Defranceschi in their decrees, and some, fearing the fine laid on anyone who claimed nobility he could not prove, brought themselves to sign Defranceschi, others took De Franceschi, and a few even Franceschi. This site's title carries a fourth form, Defranceski, and the reason is the same clerk in a different century.

Brhan's appendix transcribes the register of emigrants kept at Mione: «De Franceschi Matteo di Antonio e Maria, “Gracutta”, nato il 10 agosto 1756, calzolaio. Morto da qualche anno nell'Istria.» Matteo De Franceschi, son of Antonio and Maria, byname Gracutta, born 10 August 1756, shoemaker. Died some years ago in Istria. One man of this name, from this village, with a birth date, walking the road this page is about.

«La prima menzione del cognome (mistro Zuanne de Franceschi) è del 1661.» The first mention of the surname — master Zuanne de Franceschi — is of 1661. Not just a year in a register: a name, and «mistro», the title of a master craftsman. The Croatian text has «mistro» and the Italian «ministro», and mistro is plainly the right reading for a man in a village of weavers. Zuanne is Venetian for Giovanni. Eighteen years later, in 1679, a Zuane De Franceschi of Mione is entered on the headmen's list of weavers gone into that same county.

«In novembre del 1686 muore a Montecalvo Gian Battista, che nel documento dell'archivio parrocchiale viene nominato il vecchio stipite del ramo dei De Franceschi.» In November 1686 Gian Battista died at Moncalvo, called in the parish document the old stock of the De Franceschi branch. Twenty-five years after the surname first appears there, the parish priest is already calling one of them the founder of the line.

«Le fonti del 1712 menzionano Gian Battista, il parrocco a Montecalvo di Pisino, che ha preso le difese dei contadini nella rivolta contro le imposte del luogotenente del feudatario, per la quale ragione è stato arrestato e rinchiuso nel castello di Pisino, finché non lo ha liberato il signore di Montecalvo, il marchese de Prié.» Gian Battista, parish priest of Moncalvo, took the peasants' side in the revolt against the taxes of the fief-holder's lieutenant, and was arrested and shut in the castle of Pazin until the lord of Moncalvo, the Marquis de Prié, had him let out. A year after the house was built, a man of this name was in prison for defending the village against its landlord's agent — and was released by the landlord himself.

The Marquis de Prié is a name from the Austrian Netherlands, and this site already records that Gologorica became in the eighteenth century the fief of Charles Antoine Biotz, «a Belgian from the diocese of Liège». Two Netherlandish lords of one Istrian village within a generation. That is not a coincidence but a fact about how Charles VI's court disposed of Istrian fiefs, and it is worth a page of its own.

Sebastian and his son Gian Battista, public notaries at Buzet and in Carnia. Francesco, doctor of medicine of Padua, practising at Montona, in other Istrian places, and in Carnia. Cosmo Damiano, surgeon, also of Padua. Filippo, son of Gian Battista, parish priest at Previs. Gian Matteo, son of Gian Pietro, parish priest at Moncalvo, canon of the cathedral of Pedena and apostolic protonotary. Note how many of them were still working in Carnia: the road stayed open in both directions for a century and a half after the crossing.

This site published, this morning, a disagreement between Carlo and Kobler about who was castellan of Bribir. Carlo said his great-uncle Giovanni Battista, meant for the priesthood, took the sword instead, volunteered in Maria Theresa's army and was made castellan of Bribir. Kobler, from the Fiume registers, had a Giovanni son of Giovanni who died there in 1807. The encyclopedia gives: «Gian Battista II, figlio di secondo letto di Gian Battista, tenente, combatteva nella Guerra dei sette anni, e per i meriti ottenuti Maria Teresia gli ha affidato il controllo della difesa del castello di Bribir (1752–71).» A lieutenant in the Seven Years' War, given charge of the defence of Bribir by Maria Theresa, 1752 to 1771. That is Carlo's man, with dates, and a son of Gian Battista's second marriage. Kobler's Giovanni who died at Bribir in 1807 is a different and later man of the Fiume stock. Both were right and they were talking about two people.

The gismani were the ministerials of the Patriarch of Aquileia in Carnia, and they formed a recognised body — the third universitas of Carnia, standing beside the Quartieri and the town of Tolmezzo. They held their goods «jure recti et legalis feudi», by right of true and lawful fief; they were justiciable only before the Luogotenente's tribunal and not by the local courts; and they are described in the sources as «possessori delli beni di Gismania obbligati al servizio Militare». Patriarch Giovanni di Moravia's privilege of 9 August 1392 exempted them from watches, from guarding the passes and from the infantry levy — but not from the mounted militia owed to the Church of Aquileia. So the «obligation of military service» in the charters of 1467 and 1471 is the taglia di un cavallo armato, the tax of one armed horse.

The Gorto gismani sought confirmation of their investitures collectively and repeatedly — in 1511 they appointed a procurator expressly «per ottenere conferma delle proprie investiture», and in 1525 they were still litigating the horse-tax. Charters of 1467 and 1471 four years apart are almost certainly two confirmations in that long series rather than two grants of a lordship. That is a smaller thing than it first sounded and a much more findable one.

This page said, a few hours ago, that the family «held a castle at Agrons». That overstates it and this archive should not have written it that way. The castle of Agrons was rubble by 1400 and belonged to a line called di Agrons — Werniero and Wecellio, sons of Giovanni da Agrons, in 1274. The Francisci appear at Agrons only from the fifteenth century, as gismani living in a village whose castle had already gone, and their surname comes from a man called Francesco, not from the place. There is no evidence connecting them to the di Agrons lords, and any descent from them should be treated as unsupported. What the family held at Agrons was a ministerial fief, which is a real and documented thing, and enough.

Gabriele Siciliani's chapter «Jure recti et legalis feudi: la Carnia, Agrons e i gismani», in «Agrons. Storia di una comunità carnica dal Medio Evo all'Età Austriaca» (Società Filologica Friulana, Udine 2015), lists the gismanial families of the Canale di Gorto, and «de' Franceschi di Mione e Agrons» is among them. That is independent confirmation of Bertoša's claim from the Friulian end, in a book written by people with no interest in Istria at all.

«Pietro di Antonio Raineri da Agrons vende … a Leonardo del fu Francesco da Agrons, agente a nome del figlio Nicolò…» Peter, son of Antonio Raineri of Agrons, sells to Leonardo, son of the late Francesco, of Agrons, acting in the name of his son Nicolò. That is Leonardus quondam Francisci de Agrons — the man of the 1467 charter — ten years earlier, buying a rent-charge and already acting for a son.

Cristoforo, called Pizul, and Nicolò, sons of the late Giacomo di Francesco da Mione, resident at Agrons, sell a rent charged on their share of the tithe of Mione. A share of a tithe is a feudal right, and it is held by men described as of Mione and living at Agrons.

The testament of Gregorio, son of the late Leonardo Francisci of Mione, resident at Agrons, asking to be buried in the Pieve di Gorto «nella tomba dei suoi antenati» — in the tomb of his ancestors. The family drove to that church this autumn and photographed the graveyard around it.

Pietro, son of the late Leonardo De Franceschi of Mione. By now the surname is written the way Carlo would insist in 1876 was the original form.

Giovanni Gortani, «Le vecchie famiglie di Gorto» (Tolmezzo 1898): «Nel 1443 Francesco q. Tomaso, o Timeo, d'Ovasta era passato a Mione» — in 1443 Francesco, son of the late Tomaso or Timeo, of Ovasta, had moved to Mione. A man called Francesco arriving at Mione in 1443, and by 1457 a Leonardo «del fu Francesco». A patronymic hardening into a surname, in one generation, in one village. This archive marks it as inference: it is the right shape and the right dates, and it is not proved. Gortani also has «un de Franceschi vivente nel 1421» at Luint.

Danijela Doblanović, working the parish registers, isolates the surnames that appear in the «Status animarum» of 1734 in the town of Svetvinčenat itself and not in the surrounding villages: «Većinom je riječ o stanovnicima koji su došli s prostora Karnije… (prezimena De Franceschi, Crosila, Bergamo, Moro, Fiorencis i tako dalje)» — mostly inhabitants who came from the area of Carnia; the surnames De Franceschi, Crosila, Bergamo, Moro, Fiorencis and so on. And she adds what they did: «Krnjeli/Karnjeli su se uglavnom bavili trgovinom» — the Carnians were mainly engaged in trade.

Angelo Ciuffardi, on eighteenth-century Svetvinčenat: about three hundred and thirty inhabitants, «većinom venetskog ili karnijskog podrijetla» — mostly of Venetian or Carnian origin — and his list from the notarial records runs «Monti, Galante, Comin, Vorano, Volpi, Marani, Vernier, Manzin, Fiorencis, Zanetin, Lupieri, Defranceschi, Fabris, Bortolini, Manzoni, Bergamo, Zuliani». Lupieri and Fiorencis are Val di Gorto surnames. It is the same cohort, named twice by different scholars from different sources.

The house-owner protocol of the Franciscan cadastre for Svetvinčenat, transcribed by Altić and Kliman Grabar, gives three of the town's seventy-three houses to this surname: «Antonio de Franceschi (14/4)», «Pietro Antonio de Franceschi (29/51)» and «casa Antonio de Franceschi (30)». The authors note that «casa» marks the more important houses of the more prominent families. And the status column: only Grimani is a Ritter, a nobleman; a named group including de Franceschi is marked «Burgeri», citizens; and the majority are «Bauer», peasants.

Pietro Kandler's mid-nineteenth-century list of the Carnian-origin families of Sanvincenti, printed by Brhan, has «Lupieri, Fiorencis, Defranceschi, Fabris, Vernier, Gonano, Vorano, Zuliani, Crosilla, Sandri, Corva, Spinotti e altre». And Brhan's own eighteenth-century notarial material gives «D.no Vittorio De Franceschi» among the landed proprietors, and a «Gasparo De Franceschi, carnico pure lui» — himself a Carnian — whose widow Maria Zanco left his capital, should their children die, to his kinswomen Pasqua and Antonia De Franceschi.

Gologorica in the Habsburg county of Pazin, where a Gian Battista is «il vecchio stipite» dead in November 1686 and where his descendant cut ANNO · DOMNI · 1711 over the door. Gračišće — Gallignana — the next parish east, where the same stock is in the baptism book by 1679 and where the direct line of this archive is still holding houses 5 and 19 into the nineteenth century: Joannes Baptista the farmer born 1787, Antonius the «lapidarius» born 1825, Josephus born 1863. And Svetvinčenat, over the border in Venetian Istria — a different state, a different landlord, a different set of parish books — with a household of the name established by 1734 and still holding three houses in 1820. Gologorica and Gračišće are four kilometres apart and share their people; Svetvinčenat is forty kilometres south and shares only the valley it came from. Whether that is one family arriving twice or two households out of the same Carnian valleys taking different roads is not answerable from anything this archive holds. What can be said is that the second one was there, that it was Carnian, that it traded rather than farmed, and that it ranked as citizens in a village of peasants.

The Yugoslav cadastre of 1945 counts a single «De Franceschi» family at Svetvinčenat. The «Stanza De Franceschi» farmstead that Brhan names among the holdings around the castle is gone from the map: the surviving stancija names are Grimani's and Stancovich's. Two hundred years, three houses, and then one.

None of these three places is where the family is now. From Gračišće the direct line went down to Crikvenica on the Kvarner coast, and from there — by way of a labour camp at Pfullingen and a displaced-persons office — to Zimbabwe and to South Africa and to Australia. The wider surname went further and earlier: the largest cluster of all is in Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil from the 1880s, with names at Arroio do Tigre, Candelária and Porto Alegre; there is a thinner Argentine one from the same decade; the United States indexes carry forty-nine graves and a hundred and twenty-seven vital records, among them Basilio and Dario Defranceschi «born 26 September 1937 in GALLIGNANA, Austria» — the only American entry so far that names Gračišće outright. Australia holds fifteen graves and begins in 1949, with the post-war displacements. Which is the ordinary shape of it: a mountain valley empties into a province, the province empties into a coast, and the coast empties into four continents inside three generations.

The country-by-country reckoning is on the Diaspora page →

Brhan, listing the buildings of the Comune censuario di Sanvincenti in the **Catasto franceschino of 1820**, notes that of the seventy-three the last five by number were the *stanzie* just outside the town — and that by 1820 some were **no longer in Carnian hands, «come la Stanzia Spinotti o la Stanzia De Franceschi»**. So there was a **Stanzia De Franceschi at Svetvinčenat**: a named farmstead, on the cadastral map, that the family had held and had already lost by the time the Austrians measured it. That is a great deal more than a scatter of register entries, and it is the strongest reason yet to treat this cluster as a Carnian household of substance rather than a coincidence of surname.

The same paper puts **Defranceschi among the Carnian families scattered through the contrade of Barbana** — Agostinis, Cleva, Defranceschi, Valle, Fornasar, Zuliani, Bordon, Ventin. And it quotes the Austrian report of **1816** on Barban: «*vi sono tre tessitori, due fabbri, due sarti e quattro muratori, tutti però foresti che annualmente si portano nella loro patria in Carnia*» — three weavers, two smiths, two tailors and four masons, all of them outsiders who go home to Carnia every year. **This archive's fourth line has Barban in it**, and has always read it as part of the southern-Istrian cluster out of Pula. It may instead be Carnian and seasonal. Left as a flag on the Lines page rather than a rearrangement.

Doblanović's paper on the seasonality of conception at Svetvinčenat, read in full in September 2026, adds a detail her better-known sentence does not. The Carnian surnames — **De Franceschi, Crosila, Bergamo, Moro, Fiorencis** — appear in the Status animarum of 1734 **only inside the *castello*, and not in the villages and *stancije* around it**. They were town people. And she says what they did: «**Krnjeli/Karnjeli su se uglavnom bavili trgovinom**» — the Carnians were mainly in trade — and specifically that their work as «**prekupci i preprodavači**», **buyers-up and resellers**, was busiest when there was most produce to buy. Set that beside the finding aid of this family's own archive at Rijeka, which describes the Gologorica house growing rich through the eighteenth century by «**lending money and buying up debts**» as far as Kastav, Mošćenice, Labin and Carniola. **Two scholars, two towns forty kilometres apart, one trade.** The Carnians who came to Istria were not labourers who prospered; they were the people who bought the crop and lent against it.

The Seget family is said by its own tradition to have come from Crete after 1669, by way of Rome. The Gologorica family is recorded at Moncalvo from 1661 — eight years before the fall of Candia — and every scholar who has looked at where it came from says Carnia. Those are not two branches of one story. They are two stories.

Dean Brhan, writing on the Carnian migration and listing the families it brought: «I De Franceschi di Moncalvo erano originari di Agrons e i loro consanguinei abitavano nelle villa di Mione. Non sono da confondere con i numerosi De Franceschi carnici presenti in Istria in altre località o con i De Franceschi di Umago che hanno un origine completamente diversa» — not to be confused with the De Franceschi of Umago, who have a completely different origin. He says it unprompted, in a study that has no interest in the question.

Gologorica bears a cross crossed by two arrows above a pomegranate, under a plumed helm — the blazon Carlo described from memory in 1876, and the one cut on the house, on both tomb tablets and on the urn. The Umag ironwork of 1890 bears a lion rampant and a five-pointed star under a coronet, and the Seget pediment a beast on a lined field. Two families, two coats.

The state archive at Rijeka holds «Obitelj de Franceschi iz Šegeta» as a discrete named fond. The Zagreb librarians who catalogued the Gologorica papers state that in the Rijeka boxes «došlo do spajanja fondova dviju obitelji De Franceschi koje zajedno nemaju ništa osim istarskog zavičaja i prezimena» — the fonds of two De Franceschi families were merged, families which have nothing in common but an Istrian homeland and a surname. The archivists who handled the papers reached the same conclusion this archive has.

Puhmajer's book is a careful architectural study and this site relies on it for Seget. The two-branch sentence is one line, unfootnoted, resting on a gazetteer, in a work about a building; and the word Carnia never appears in it. It is the kind of thing anyone writes when a surname turns up twice in one province. This archive has published both families for months and kept them apart, and now has three independent reasons to go on doing so.

Camillo De Franceschi — Carlo's son, of the Gologorica family — published «Il Consiglio nobile di Parenzo e i profughi di Creta» in the «Atti e memorie della Società istriana di archeologia e storia patria», new series volume 2, in 1952. It is a study of exactly the migration the Seget family's tradition claims: the refugees who came out of Crete when Candia fell in 1669, and how the noble council of Poreč received them. If a De Franceschi family arrived from Crete and settled in Venetian Istria, that paper is where it would be named — and the man who wrote it was a professional archivist who knew his own family's papers better than anyone alive. This archive has not read it. It is not digitised, and no library within reach holds the 1952 volume. It is now the first item on the acquisition list, because it is the single document most likely to decide the question either way.

«Un caso a parte era sicuramente la famiglia De Franceschi di Moncalvo-Gologoriza, un villaggio del comune di Cerreto vicino a Pisino. La famiglia, presente in Istria dal 1650 circa, originaria di Mione, si era distinta nella zona come possidente… Rimane non chiaro il loro legame con le radici carniche, che erano piuttosto deboli se paragonate con altre famiglie presenti sul suolo istriano. In un contesto compattamente croato i de Franceschi, che erano una delle pochissime famiglie carniche del paese, erano stati i promotori dell'italianità dell'ex Contea di Pisino e dell'Istria.»

A case apart was certainly the De Franceschi family of Moncalvo–Gologorica, a village of the commune of Cerreto near Pazin. The family, present in Istria from about 1650, originating from Mione, had distinguished itself in the area as a landholding family… Their link with their Carnian roots remains unclear, and was rather weak compared with other families present on Istrian soil. In a compactly Croatian setting the de Franceschi, who were one of the very few Carnian families of the village, had been the promoters of the Italian-ness of the former County of Pazin and of Istria. — Two dates in one sentence: present from about 1650, originating from Mione. And a judgement this archive is not going to soften: the specialist thinks they kept the Carnian origin more thinly than their neighbours did, and turned into the local standard-bearers of an Italian identity in a Croatian village.

Listing, village by village, the Carnian households that show in the Franciscan cadastre of 1820: «Nel vicino borgo di Lindaro c'erano Giuseppe Picot, Giovanni Pascoli, Matteo, Antonio e Francesco Gortan… A Gallignana le seguenti famiglie; Gortan, De Franceschi, Festa, Picot, Baldè; mentre a Pedena i Rovis e i Comisso.» De Franceschi at Gallignana, counted as Carnian, in 1820 — which is the village of houses 5 and 19 and the year the farmer Joannes Baptista of house 5 was thirty-three.

«Durante il XVIII secolo due Lupieri, Matteo e GioBatta, erano stati sepolti nella chiesa matrice di questo borgo istriano. Nello stesso luogo si trovano le tombe di numerose famiglie carniche come i Crosilla, i Gherssan, i Misdaris, i De Franceschi, i Mirai, i Merlin e i Zambiasio.» De Franceschi tombs inside the parish church of Svetvinčenat, among the Carnian families. Burial in the matrice is not where the poor go.

From the household lists of Svetvinčenat: «Il Domino Giobatta Lupieri Cargnello di anni 33 era il giudice della comunità per quell'anno e viveva insieme al garzone Piero Defranceschi, un giovane di 19 anni.» Giobatta Lupieri, Carnian, thirty-three, judge of the community that year — and living in his house, Piero Defranceschi, a lad of nineteen, his «garzone»: apprentice, shop-boy, servant. The Carnians of Svetvinčenat took each other's sons in.

«Prencis Zuane da Dignano (cognato di Sebastiano de Franceschi e di Micoli)» — Zuane Prencis of Dignano, brother-in-law of Sebastiano de Franceschi. And at Buzet: the weaver Giobatta Zanier called «Zuel», born at Mione in 1790, «si era accasato in Istria insieme alla moglie Maria De Franceschi» — settled in Istria with his wife Maria De Franceschi, and bought the Micoli Toscano property at Pinguente in 1825. A De Franceschi woman of the Mione stock, marrying another Mione weaver, and the pair of them going down together.

«SEBASTIANO SORAVITO DE FRANCESCHI ✻1889 ✝1958», with «ANNA CROSILLA VED. SORAVITO DE FRANCESCHI ✻1900 ✝1990» beneath him. This archive first met «Soravito De Franceschi» in David's family tree and did not know what to make of it. It is a Carnian house-name, it is cut in stone at Ovaro, and the woman beside him is a Crosilla — one of the surnames Kandler and Brhan both list among the Carnian families that went to Svetvinčenat.

«DE FRANCESCHI UGO, 24.11.1930 – 4.6.2020.» A photograph behind glass, a lamp burning in front of it. Another stone in the same ground is dated 2022. This site has published that the surname is down to about ten people in Croatia; in the valley it came from, it was being buried five years ago.

«DE FRANCESCHI VITTORIO» and «DE FRANCESCHI ISIDORO», among the fallen and the missing of 1940–45, with Micoli, Spinotti, Stefani, Lorenzini and Fabris beside them — the same dozen surnames that run through every document in these villages and through the Carnian settlements in Istria.

The Romanesque campanile of Santa Maria di Gorto over the graves. This is the mother church of the Val Degano, and its two parishes — Ovaro and Luincis — are the ones whose headmen made the return of 1679 that names «Zuane De Franceschi con un suo fiolo, Zuane d'Erman: questi tre nell'Istria, luogo imperiale». The men who wrote that list are buried under this tower.

Read the stones as a list of in-laws and something jumps out. A De Franceschi at Gorto married a Soravito, a Pustetto, a Rovis, a Giorgis, a Fiorencis, a Corva, a Crosilla, a Misdariis, a Dell'Oste, a Mirai, an Adami, a Cecconi. Rovis are the Carnian family of Gimino in Istria, out of Agrons. Giorgis are the Carnian family of San Pietro in Selve, out of Mione. Fiorencis and Crosilla are two of the four surnames the household book of Svetvinčenat names in 1734 as «inhabitants who came from the area of Carnia», alongside De Franceschi itself. Corva appear in the Sanvincenti court papers. Spinotti, on the war memorial three names above ours, are the one Carnian house that got Venetian noble recognition, and they settled at Grisignana. So this graveyard is not simply where the family came from. It is a directory of the exact set of families that colonised Istria — and they married each other at home as consistently as they did abroad. The literature calls that a marriage strategy for holding property together. The stones are what it looks like.

A tablet on the cemetery wall: «INS. MARIO FURLANI · ALBONA 1912 · OVARO 1978». A schoolmaster, insegnante, born at Albona — Labin, in Istria — in 1912, and dead at Ovaro in 1978. Everything on this page describes a road out of Carnia into Istria. This is a man who came back up it, and lies in the valley his family had left. Labin is also where the surname is first indexed anywhere in Istria — Aloÿsius Defranceschi, 1615. Furlani is not our name and nothing joins him to this family. He is here because the whole argument of this page is that the two countries were one world, and a stone that says born Albona, died Ovaro proves it in five words.

De Franceschi Anna, born 22 February 1925, died 5 October 2022. The most recent burial of the surname in the churchyard, four years ago, with fresh flowers on it. Whatever happened to the Istrian branches, in the Val Degano the name is still being cut into stone.

The Pustetto stone carries six people under one roof of marble, each with a porcelain portrait: Pustetto Francesco 1891–1978 and De Franceschi Eufemia 1889–1960, and then their sons Augusto 1921–1943 — photographed in uniform, dead in the year of the armistice — and Giobatta 1922–1945. Their sister Maria Maddalena 1926–2015 outlived them by seventy years. This stone has been on the archive's return-visit list for months because the death years were out of frame. They are in frame now.