Arienzo

A comune of some six thousand people in the province of Caserta, at the western mouth of the Valle Caudina. For at least two centuries it was the whole world of this family.

What survives

The parish registers of the Collegiate Church of Sant'Andrea Apostolo are digitised and, since FamilySearch applied handwriting recognition to them, searchable by name rather than only page by page.

Series	Years covered	Note
Baptisms	1672–1738, 1761–1837	Collegiate Church of Sant'Andrea Apostolo
Marriages	1754–1900	with marriage supplements and proclamations into the 1920s
Deaths	1733–1888	bound with the marriage series

There is a gap in the baptism series between 1738 and 1761. Civil registration begins separately in 1809, when the Kingdom of Naples adopted the Napoleonic system.

A family that married its neighbours

Three hundred and sixty-one pages of the Arienzo baptism registers mention a Falco. Reading them for the other surnames on the same pages gives the shape of the family's world — and every in-law name in the direct line is there, over and over.

Surname	Pages	Why it matters
Crisci	113	Andreana Crisci married Vincenzo Falco. The commonest in-law name in the registers.
Morgillo	76	Angela Rosa Morgillo, daughter of Orazio, married Raffaele Falco.
Martone	49	Anna Martone married Aniello Maione; their daughter Costanza married into the Falco line.
de Lucia	40	Repeatedly beside Falco on the same register pages.
Rivetti	17	Chiara Rivetti, wife of Pasquale Falco.
Arricale	15	Giovanna Arricole, wife of Carmine Antonio Falco. Spelled Arricale in the registers.
Maione / Majone	9	Aniello Maione, father of Costanza. The register clerk used both spellings.
Ferrara	3	Also the family of Giuseppa Ferrara, who married Angelo Zampiello at Arpaia.
Falcone	2	Two glancing mentions only — which is the problem with generation 1.

Counts are of register pages in which the name appears anywhere, not of individuals. The handwriting recognition is imperfect on 18th-century Latin hands — Crisci is also read as Crisei, Morgillo as Morgitto — and the counts above merge those variants.

The couple at the frontier

The oldest members of this line who can be shown to exist are Pasquale Falco and Chiara Rivetti . They appear together, named as a married couple of the parish, in the baptisms of their children:

…baptizavit infantem natam ex Paschale Falco, et Clara Rivetta coniugibus huius Parochiae, cui dedit nomen Maria Raphaela. — Arienzo baptisms, 24 February 1794

Further entries for the same couple fall in 1795, twice in 1799 (a son, Domenico) and in February 1802 (a daughter, Maria Angela). The parish is named in one of them in full: the insignis archipresbyteralis collegiata ecclesia Sancti Andreae of Arienzo.

The date problem is resolved. One entry for the couple was read by machine as 1780, which was impossible — Chiara would have been eight. The Latin words on the page say anno … octogesimo nono: the eighty-ninth year, 1789. The words are authoritative and the digits were the machine's error. Pasquale was then 22 and Chiara 17.

The town

Arienzo is Argentium — Terra Argenti, the land of silver — and it stands on the ruins of Suessola, a city of the Osci. Local history holds that a fire during the wars between Lombards and Saracens at the end of the eighth century drove the Suessolans up onto Mons Argentarium, where a castle stood until King Roger destroyed it in 1135. They came back down to the valley and in 1154 built the Terra Murata, the walled town, which is the oldest part of Arienzo today.

So the family's parish sits on a site continuously inhabited since before Rome, at the narrow mouth of the valley of the Caudine Forks. See the bishop next door for the church and its most famous resident.