Zampiello
Zampiello
The rarest name in this family by a wide margin — and, it turns out, the name of one village.
About 123 people in the world
Forebears counts roughly 123 bearers of Zampiello worldwide: 84 in the United States, 37 in Italy, 2 in France. It is the 1,628,521st commonest surname on earth. Set beside Falco's 46,749, the difference is not one of degree.
A name that rare is, in practice, a single family. And the records say where it lives.
It is an Arpaia name
226 Zampiello records were recovered from the civil registers of the province of Benevento, running from 1861 to 1915. Every one of them is registered at Arpaia — the comune of some eight hundred people, four kilometres from Arienzo across the provincial border, where Francesca Zampiello was born in 1928.
The given names repeat as tightly as the surname: Francesco (14), Giuseppe (10), Antonio (10), Caterina (10), Maria Grazia (8), Michele, Marta, Filomena, Raffaele, Tommaso, Angelo.
Who they married
| Surname | Records | |
|---|---|---|
| Fucci / Fuccio | 32 | |
| d'Onofrio | 30 | |
| Magliano | 16 | |
| d'Ambrosio | 15 | |
| Caserta | 14 | |
| De Lucia | 14 | also an Arienzo Falco in-law name |
| Esposito | 12 | |
| Maione | 10 | also an Arienzo Falco in-law name |
| Petrarca | 10 | |
| Cimmino | 6 | also an Arienzo Falco in-law name |
| Castaldo | 5 | |
| Crisci | 4 | also an Arienzo Falco in-law name |
| Girardi | 4 |
The two families' worlds already overlapped
Carmine Falco married Francesca Zampiello at Arpaia on 15 January 1955, and it is easy to read that as two strangers meeting. The registers suggest otherwise. Maione, Crisci, De Lucia and Cimmino all appear as in-law names in both networks — among the Falco of Arienzo and among the Zampiello of Arpaia — a century before that marriage.
Costanza Maione married Raffaele Falco at Arienzo in 1897. Raffaella Maione appears as a Zampiello mother at Arpaia in 1899. Whether these are one kindred is untested, and the surname alone does not prove it — but four shared names across two villages four kilometres apart is not nothing.
Stated as a pattern, not a conclusion. It is exactly the kind of claim this archive exists to be careful about.
Francesca's mother — the name this page was missing
Francesca Zampiello's parents were Angelo Zampiello (31 August 1895 – 25 April 1972) and GIUSEPPA FERRARA. Until 2026 this page did not name her once — an archive built outward from the Falco surname had followed the Zampiello men and let the woman who bore the Zampiello daughters fall out of the account. That is now corrected, and the omission is recorded rather than quietly patched.
Three Italian civil records name her, and all three spell her FERRARO where the family papers write Ferrara: the two 1935 death entries for her infant sons, and her daughter Tommasina's marriage act of 26 August 1939. She and Angelo had at least five children — Tommasina (1921), Francesca (1928), Caterina, and two sons, Angelo and Aniello, both born in 1935 and both dead on 26 April 1935.
What is still missing
Also listed, with everything else outstanding, at Open questions.
- Angelo Zampiello's own birth record (31 August 1895) has not been recovered. FamilySearch's search caps deep paging at about 1,100 results and treats Zampiello as interchangeable with Zampella, Zampillo and Campiello, which floods the result set. His parents are therefore still unnamed.
- His war — corroborated, and by the family's own paper. The certificate was in
the family scans all along, filed under the wrong caption. The Ministero dell'Africa
Italiana conferred the Croce al Merito di Guerra by decree of 14 September
1938 on «all'operaio Zampiello Angelo di Tommaso», under the royal decree
extending the award to those who took part in operations in East Africa from 3 October
1935 — the day Italy crossed into Ethiopia.
Two things follow. He was there as an operaio, a workman, not a soldier: Italy sent tens of thousands of labourers to build the roads that campaign ran on, and the 1936 decree exists to extend a military award to them. And the certificate names his father, Tommaso Zampiello — a generation this archive did not have.
The part still unproven is the bravery. A merit cross is for service in a theatre of operations; an act of gallantry would ordinarily carry a Medaglia al Valor Militare. The family's account of lives saved may be true and separately awarded, or it may be their gloss on this same certificate. See the certificate. - His son Angelo, born at Arpaia in 1935, died there the same year, on 26 April.