Catania, Sicily

Piedimonte Etneo

The town on the north-east flank of Etna that gave this family its surname — and, of the four quarters, the one the archive knows least about.

people placed at Piedimonte Etneo

1879

the earliest Mazza birth with a date

Mazza here who are joined to nothing

The town

Piedimonte Etneo means the foot of the mountain, and it is exactly that: a comune of the province of Catania standing on the north-eastern slope of Etna, above Fiumefreddo and the Alcantara valley, looking out at the Ionian Sea. The neighbouring towns in this archive — Mascali, Giarre, Linguaglossa's side of the mountain — are all within a few kilometres.

Living on Etna is a recurring administrative fact, not a metaphor. In 1928 the eruption that destroyed the town of Mascali — the only town Etna has swallowed whole in modern times — happened eight years after Sebastiano Mazza was born here, and the archive records Mascali as a birthplace for people in this family.

The line that carries the name, and stops

Three men, and then nothing.

Generation 3

Rosario Mazza — no dates, no places, no record. He exists only because his son's record names him.

—

Generation 2

Salvatore Mazza — born at Piedimonte Etneo, died at Catania. Married Maria Nicotra .

1879–1929

Generation 1

Sebastiano Mazza — born here, arrived Fremantle 4 October 1949, died at Brisbane and buried at Nudgee.

1920–2002

Four generations. It is the shortest of the four quarters by five generations, and the surname the whole archive is named after runs out at a man about whom precisely one fact is known: that he was Salvatore's father.

The hundred and eleven

The family tree also contains 7 Mazza of Piedimonte Etneo — Mariano, Leonardo, Orazio, Umberto, Giuseppa, Serena, Graziella and the rest — who form a complete little world of their own: parents, children, marriages, cousins. Not one record joins them to Sebastiano's line.

They are almost certainly the same family. A town of a few thousand people does not produce two unrelated Mazza kindreds. But "almost certainly" is not a document, and the join has to be made by a record rather than by an assumption — most likely by the birth act of Salvatore Mazza, 1879, which would name his father Rosario and his father's age, or by Rosario's own marriage act. Until then this archive keeps them apart and says why. The open questions →

Name	Placed at	Status
Josephine Mazzitelli	New York, New York	unjoined
Dominick Mazzitelli	Italy	unjoined
Joseph Mazzitelli	New York, New York	unjoined
Mary Mazzitelli	New York, New York	unjoined
Frances Mazzitelli	New York, New York	unjoined
Yolada Mazzitelli	New York, New York	unjoined
Dominick Mazzitelli	New York, New York	unjoined