The Atlas
Six towns of the Valle Caudina, one cemetery in Brisbane — and, underneath, the nineteen streets of one small town that carry almost all of the evidence.
This family did not travel far until it travelled very far indeed. Eight generations lived within eight kilometres of each other in the Valle Caudina; the ninth is in Brisbane. Everything between those two facts is on this page.
The bars are counted, not asserted — they are how often each place actually appears in the 10,445 records.
The towns
The six places that matter
| Place | Province | When | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arienzo 7,824 records | Caserta | 1672 – 1913 | The home parish. The Collegiate Church of Sant'Andrea Apostolo holds baptisms from 1672, marriages from 1754 and deaths from 1733. Every Falco generation from Pasquale to Raffaele was born, married and buried here. |
| San Felice a Cancello | Caserta | 1818 – 1818 | Birthplace of Angela Rosa Morgillo, who married into the line in the 1840s. The next comune west of Arienzo. |
| Arpaia 126 records | Benevento | 1913 – 1935 | Across the provincial border, four kilometres from Arienzo. Gerardo Falco was born here in 1913; the Zampiello family were here through the 1920s and 1930s. |
| Forchia 105 records | Benevento | 1930 – 1938 | Where Carmine Falco was born in 1930. The comune takes its name from the Forche Caudine — the Caudine Forks, where the Roman army was made to pass under the yoke in 321 BC. |
| Benevento 515 records | Benevento | 1955 – 1955 | Where Carmine Falco and Francesca Zampiello married, and where Giuseppina was born in 1955. Capital of the Lombard duchy that gave southern Italy the personal name Falco. |
| Brisbane 8 records | Queensland | 20th c. – present | Where the line arrives. Carminantonio Falco and Filomena Annecchino are buried at Nudgee Cemetery. |
The streets of Arienzo
The real geography of this archive is not a map of towns. It is nineteen streets. Read off the death registers act by act, they are how the sweeps tell one household from another — and strada Camellara is the family's own.
Strada Camellara is the whole archive in one line. Across four volumes it has given up Falco, Cioffi, Morgillo, Carfora, Martone, Giglio, Sepistella, Belletta, Majone, Manna and della Cava — every surname that flanks this line, living on one street, standing as witnesses at each other's deaths. Arienzo →
What is not on this map
- No coordinates, and no map tiles. This page counts places; it does not plot them. Drawing a map would need a geocode for every street of a town that has renamed most of them, and the archive has not done that work.
- Melizzano, Bisaccia, Montesarchio, Aversa appear only as birthplaces of incomers — a man dead in an Arienzo inn, a family of hatters, two Capuchin friars, a gentlewoman. They are where other people came from, not where this family went.