Carfora
Five Carfora households on two Arienzo streets, a line that reaches back past where the civil registers begin — and a gentry Carfora of Santa Maria a Vico that is not joined to any of them.
CARFORA is the fifth-largest surname in this archive — 406 records, ahead of Cioffi, Morgillo and Rivetti, all of which have had a page for months. It had none until 22 September 2026, because until the week before that this archive believed the Carfora were a Forchia family who had nothing to do with Arienzo. They were living fifty yards from the Falco the whole time.
The mistake, and how it was found
The Carfora entered this archive through Mariantonia Carfora , who married Sabatino Annecchino of Forchia at Arienzo on 21 January 1860. Because the Annecchino are a Forchia family, the Carfora were filed as one too, and searched for there.
Then the Arienzo birth register for 1831 was swept for the marriage's other name, and three separate Carfora households appeared in that single year — two of them on strada Camellara, the Falco's own street. A second sweep of the same volume, at the band that reads the mother rather than the declarant, found three more Carfora women the first pass could not have seen: Elisabetta, thirty-six; Anna, thirty; Carmela, thirty, of strada Santa Lucia. Six Carfora households in one year of one register.
Francesco Carfora and Pasqua Morgillo, strada Signorindico
This is the house Mariantonia came from, and it is not on strada Camellara at all.
They married at Arienzo on 29 June 1828, act 11 — Francesco Carfora (of Matteo, m. 1828) , twenty-eight, a contadino of strada Signorindico, «figlio di MATTEO CARFORA DEFUNTO … e di GRAZIA ZIMBARDO DEFUNTA»; and Pasqua Morgillo , twenty-five, of strada Crisci, «figlia di GIOVANNI MORGILLO, di professione contadino, domiciliato ivi, e di DOMENICA CRISCI». The church celebration followed the next day at Sant'Andrea Apostolo.
Their daughter was born on 30 December 1830, act 142, at seven in the morning in her father's own house — read from the register itself, not from the certified copy that sits in her marriage dossier. She was baptised at Sant'Andrea the same day and married Sabbatino Annecchino twenty-nine years later, three weeks after her birthday.
His name was wrong here for two days, and the correction is left where it happened. The 1860 marriage act writes the forename across a line break, and this archive read the second half as «lerio», reasoned that no Italian forename ends in -lerio except one, and published VALERIO CARFORA with the reasoning attached. The fragment is «cesco». His own written consent, given at Arienzo on 1 January 1860 before the same sindaco who wrote the marriage act three weeks later, spells it out — and so does his daughter's birth act, twice. The correction →
The Morgillo behind them — three generations, from one death act
Pasqua Morgillo's father died at Arienzo on 10 November 1864, and the act was found while reading the death registers for somebody else entirely: «è morto … GIOVANNI MORGILLO — VEDOVO DI DOMENICA CRISCI, nato in Arienzo, di anni OTTANTADUE, di professione COLONO, domiciliato nel Villaggio CRISCI, figlio del fu PASQUALE … e della fu MARIA VIGLIOTTA».
The identification rests on his wife's name, not his own. Morgillo is among the four commonest surnames in these registers and Giovanni is a common forename; what settles it is «vedovo di DOMENICA CRISCI», which is exactly the woman the 1828 marriage act names as Pasqua's mother, on the street that act gives her. Eighty-two in 1864 puts his birth about 1782, and his own parents — Pasquale Morgillo and Maria Vigliotta — belong to the 1750s or earlier. Arienzo's civil registers begin in 1809 and cannot otherwise reach them.
The Carfora of strada Camellara
Three households, all found in the births of 1831, two of them on the Falco street.
| Household | What the acts say |
|---|---|
| Antonio Carfora × Giuseppa Perreca | Married 18 August 1827, act 16 — he twenty-one «finiti», a contadino of strada Camellara, «figlio di PASQUALE CARFORA DEFUNTO … e di MARIA CARBO=/NA»; she seventeen and a minor, «figlia di NICOLA PERRECA … e di ORSOLA MORGILLO». Their daughter Maria Rosa was born 4 November 1831. |
| Aniello Carfora × Orsola Porrino | He thirty-one, a contadino of strada Camellara; their son Antonio born 10 January 1831. |
| Raffaele Carfora × Francesca Cioffi | He thirty-seven, a contadino; their son Pietro born 12 September 1831. |
The two witnesses who keep appearing beside them are furniture, not kin. Don Marcantonio Martinisi and Luigi Verdicchio stood for Antonio Carfora and Giuseppa Perreca in August 1827 and for Francesco Carfora and Pasqua Morgillo in June 1828 — two unrelated households on two different streets, eleven months apart. They are the parish's standing pair, and a Carfora act that names them has said nothing about kinship.
The Carfora who married Falco
Twice, thirty-six years apart, and both into the same house.
- 13 December 1854 — Angela Carfora , fifty-nine, of strada Signorindico, «figlia del fu ANGELO … e della fu CAMILLA CRISCI … VEDOVA DI GENNARO CARFORA», married Giuseppe Falco of strada Costa — seventy-one, a widower, by then living at Santa Maria a Vico. A Carfora who had married a Carfora, widowed, marrying a Falco.
- 30 December 1880 — Pasquale Carfora married Pasqua Falco , a daughter of the same household, found in the margin of her own birth act.
The gentry Carfora, and why they stay separate
Act 20 of the Arienzo marriage register for 1815 — found in the half of the volume nobody had opened, and not by looking for Carfora at all — marries «il Signor PASQUALE CARFORA di anni quaranta, di professione MEDICO CERUSICO, domiciliato nella comune di SANTA MARIA A VICO, figlio legittimo delli fu Signori PAOLO CARFORA ed ANNA SABATELLI» to «la Signora ALESSANDRA DE ANGELIS, di professione GENTILDONNA, nativa di NAPOLI».
Paolo Carfora died in 1782 — the earliest dated Carfora this archive holds by twenty years. A surgeon marrying a Neapolitan gentlewoman is not the same world as a contadino of strada Signorindico, and nothing found so far joins them. The 1861 registers add a Raffaele Luigi Alfonso Carfora, proprietario of Santa Maria a Vico, son of Tommaso Carfora. Neither line is claimed as kin to the other, and the name identifies nobody.
What would move this line
- Marta's surname — three readings, no two alike. Act 33 of the 1827 Arienzo deaths has now been read: «è morta nella sua propria casa MARTA ⟨———⟩, di anni TRENTA, MOGLIE DI FRANCESCO CARFORA … figlia di ALESSANDRO CAS——— DEFUNTO … e di CARMINA PORRINO», declared by Giovanni Carfora, forty-five, «vicino della defunta», and Stefano Carfora di Pietro, twenty-one — both of strada Signorindico. The street, the trade, the husband's name and the date all say she is our Francesco's first wife, dead thirteen months before he married Pasqua Morgillo. Only the surname disagrees: this archive published GRIFO, the 1828 act says «vedovo di MARTA CRISCI», and her father's own surname begins CAS. It is the one word on the page that will not resolve, and she is carried here under her forename alone rather than under a guess.
- Matteo Carfora's own marriage. He was dead by June 1828 and is the oldest Carfora of this house the archive can name.
- Pasqua Morgillo's death act. It is item 7 of the 1860 marriage dossier and it is not in the bundle — all four death extracts filed there are from the groom's town. Where the Arienzo one went is not known.
15 households on this site carry a Carfora; 122 of these 406 records were read off the registers line by line. All of them are listed with their sources at the register →