Matarrese-Nitti Family Update

Walkers’ Trip to Italy, Fall 2005

 

Greetings! This is to bring you up to date on our family connections with Noci, Bari, Puglia. Karen and I had the good fortune to visit Southern Italy in late September and early October. The first half of our trip was in Calabria and Sicily. It was a combination of sightseeing, family history research, and visiting some of my Garcea Italian cousins for the first time. The second half of the trip was in and near the region of Puglia, including research in Noci. Some general sightseeing notes are in a separate document.

 

Civil Records

With some luck, we found the vital records office in one of several Comune of Noci municipal buildings. At first, the staff was a bit flustered by my poor attempts at communicating in Italian. I showed them the letter that I had previously sent (in Italian) and they began to mobilize. One fellow ended up staying with us all morning and part of another morning, not only finding specific records that we were seeking, but enthusiastically playing detective in figuring out which records to find next in order to keep the trail warm.

 

So, we ended up making a lot of progress. Unlike the microfilmed records, they had multi-year alphabetical indexes of records, which led us much more quickly to our targets.

 

I won’t go into the specific details here, but will mention the highlights. Let me know if you want to see proper descendant charts later.

·      Found:  records for grandchildren of Filomena Matarrese, older sister of Domenico. I think there may be enough information to enable me to track down a living descendant.

·      Found:  records for decendants of Domenico’s younger brother, Angelo Raffaele. With follow-up in the church records, I now have names of people who are almost certainly still living and probably can be found.

·      Found:  more (older) siblings of Domenico:  a first Domenico, Aurelia, and Angela Maria.

·      Found:  a marriage record for their parents, Stefano Matarrese and Isabella Amati, which indicates that Isabella Amati was a young widow when they married in 1840.

·      Found:  mother, maternal grandfather, paternal grandparents and great-grandparents of Stefano Matarrese.

·      Found:  the marriage record for Maria Giuseppa Nitti’s parents, Vitantonio Nitti and Paola Maria Notarnicola. Or at least we thought that was her name. We discovered that she was ‘Palma’ Maria at birth and marriage, before becoming Paola Maria.

·      Found:  parents, birth record, and death record for Palma/Paola Maria Notarnicola.

·      Found:  parents and paternal grandfather of Vitantonio Nitti.

·      Found:  more of their children – siblings of Maria Giuseppa Nitti:  Maria Lucia, Maria Teresa, and Margherita, but still no evidence of a Paola. (An aunt ‘Pauline’ was described in Genevieve’s letters.)

 

Church Records

We met a busy but helpful young employee (probably not a priest) at the Chiesa Madre, who was expecting us. He led us to a large table in a library room, a few steps down the hall from a large cabinet of old records. We did meet the older priest later on. He spoke with Karen in French.

 

We found that the church records here went back to 1606 for marriage records and 1544 for baptisms. This was great news for future reference, but we were focusing more on finding living people and we were somehow allowed to look at records extending up into the 1950’s. This helped us with the first two bullets, above, and would never be allowed in the civil records.

 

We also got a copy of the baptism record of Domenico Matarrese. Of course it is handwritten Latin, but you can clearly make out the name Stephano Matarrese – i.e., still no evidence of a Marchese.

 

Library

We went to the library in search of information about the Marchese, and we found some. We have copies of 2 articles that go into detail about La Villa Monte, the estate of the Marchesi De Luca Resta, and also cover a fair amount of detail about the people. I still need to sit down and properly translate them, but we gleaned some tentative conclusions.

 

Here’s how we think it goes:

·      Giuseppe “Magnifico” Resta had 10 children, including a son, Orazio, who became an ‘arciprete’ of Noci (1775-1828), and a daughter, Mariangela.

·      Mariangela Resta married Doctor Francesco Saverio de Luca (a nobleman of the city of Trani)

·      Their son Orazio (named after his uncle) received a royal concession to carry the combined surname of De Luca Resta. He was based in Noci, and his brother, Giuseppe, in Santeramo.

·      Orazio De Luca Resta built the ‘monumentale villa Scozia’. I haven’t quite figured out if this was a precursor to Villa Monte or located at a different place in the city.

·      On August 3, 1855, he was given the title of ‘Marchese’ by Ferdinando II, Duke(?) of Sicily.

·      Orazio married a lady of the noble house of Ruvo di Puglia.

·      Their son Francesco Saverio became the 2nd marchese.

·      Francesco Saverio married Clementina of the Principality of Brancaccio.

·      Their son, Orazio ‘junior’ became the 3rd marchese. He was born in Naples in 1874.

 

The Villa Monte is on the northern outskirts of Noci, just past the De Luca Resta soccer field. It was created by the 2nd and 3rd marchesi and it was purchased by the Intini brothers in 1971. It is on a hill, but surrounded by high walls, large trees, and a locked gate. We could not see the buildings, although we have some old pictures in the articles. The gate led to a very long, tree-lined laneway up the hill.

 

The articles wax on about the splendid gardens and grounds, and a little about the buildings too. I think there are other tidbits that will come out with a good translation.

 

So, which marchese had the alleged affair with Isabella Amati? Uncle Matt’s notes mentioned Orazio. It looks to me like Orazio senior would have been about the same age as Isabella. Domenico was born in 1859, four years after Orazio senior got his title. Even Francesco Saverio might have been too young. This means that perhaps the palazzo that Domenico and his sister described was not located where Villa Monte is now, but at the earlier villa Scozia. I’ll have to translate the articles better and study the maps.

 

Pictures

A subset of our trip pictures is on my Flickr site:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wnkwalker

 

A DVD is available, with more pictures, better quality pictures, and video clips.