Radici

Before the names, understand the geography — because it shaped everything. Our Italian ancestors came from two distinct worlds within Italy, separated by roughly two hundred miles but united by hardship, mountain air, and the bone-deep stubbornness that comes from working land that doesn't want to be worked.

Two lines. Two landscapes. One American family.

Our Mangini/Mancini line came from Ofena, a tiny hilltop village in the province of L'Aquila, in Abruzzo — the mountainous spine of central Italy. Ofena sits in a narrow valley between dramatic limestone cliffs, at the foot of the Gran Sasso massif, isolated enough that its dialect and customs remained distinct for centuries. The ancient Romans knew it as Aufinum, a settlement of the Vestini people dating back to the 9th century BCE. This was sheep country, wheat country, saffron country, and earthquake country. The people were tough by necessity.

Our Salomone line came from Calitri, in the province of Avellino, Campania — further south, in the Apennine hills east of Naples. Calitri was a proper hill town, perched defensively above the Ofanto river valley, with a Norman castle and a long memory of invasion, plague, and resilience. The ancient geographer Strabo called it Aletriom; the Hirpini tribe — a Samnite people — had inhabited it since before the Romans came. The name itself carries a pre-Etruscan suffix meaning "locality," suggesting settlement older than the 8th century BCE.

Both places produced emigrants. Both places still exist. And both places hold records — church registers, civil documents — that can take our family back further than almost anywhere else in the world. Remarkably, both Ofena and Calitri sit at almost exactly the same elevation: 530 meters above sea level, as if the mountains themselves were drawing a parallel between these two families long before they would meet.

The oldest ancestors in our tree that carry real documentary weight are Onofrino Salomone (1751–1809) and his wife Domenica Scaglione (1751–1828), living in Calitri in the second half of the 18th century.

To understand their world: in 1751, southern Italy was part of the Kingdom of Naples, ruled by the Bourbon dynasty since 1734 when Charles III of Spain claimed the throne. Calitri was a feudal town — the local baron held power, the church held souls, and families like ours held onto whatever land or trade they could manage. The Salomone surname itself derives from the Hebrew "Shlomo," meaning "peace" — and Campania holds the highest concentration of Salomones in all of Italy, with 33% of the name found in this region alone.

The surnames clustering around the Salomones — Scaglione, Gizzi, Tetti, Di Napoli, Di Muro — are all consistent with Calitri and the Avellino province. This kind of tight surname clustering is actually a strong signal of authentic local records rather than invented connections. Many of these same surnames still appear in Calitri today.

Onofrino and Domenica had a son, Pasquale Salomone (1784–1841). His world was dramatically different from his parents' — he was born into the chaos of the Napoleonic period, when French forces swept through southern Italy, abolished feudalism, and reorganized the Kingdom of Naples entirely. Pasquale lived through this transformation, and his adult life would have been documented in the new civil records that began in 1809.

Pasquale married Angela Maria Lettieri (1791–1854), daughter of Nicola Lettieri and Giovanna Scoca — again, Calitri surnames tying the community together in the way these small towns always did.

Running parallel through the Salomone line are the Ricciardi and Ianuale families — almost certainly also from the Calitri and Avellino area. The way these surnames cluster together across multiple generations is one of the most authentic markers in our tree.

Vito Maria Ricciardi (1803–1863) and Antonia Cioffari (1762–1838) anchor the Ricciardi branch. Their daughter Rosa Ricciardi (1832–1888) married into the Salomone line. Note the significant age gap between Vito and Antonia — it may indicate a data entry issue worth investigating.

Alessandro Ianuale (1778–1817) and Flavia Maria Scoca (1775–1841) produced Maria Gaetana Ianuale (1806–1878). The Scoca surname also appears on the Salomone side — again, that Calitri community tightly weaving together.

The Passari line connects through Mariantonia Passari (1834–) and her father Giuseppe A.M. Passari (1799–1867), back through Angelo Passari and Rosalia Lampariello. Further back, Luigi Passari Romano (1771–1835) and Donata Cialeo (1742–1835) appear — though Donata's attributed lifespan of 93 years is unusual for the era and deserves verification.

What's striking about this entire cluster is how thoroughly interconnected these Calitri families were. If we were to visit the Calitri church records or the Avellino state archives today, we would find these same surnames — Salomone, Ricciardi, Ianuale, Scoca, Passari, Competiello, Gizzi — appearing together across the 18th and 19th centuries. This was a bounded community with deep, traceable roots.

Now shift north to Abruzzo, to Ofena — a village so small and so tucked into its limestone valley that it seems to exist in its own dimension of time. This is where our paternal Mangini/Mancini line begins. The village sits on the southern slope of the Gran Sasso massif, within what is now the Gran Sasso e Monti della Laga National Park. At its peak in 1921, Ofena had 2,654 residents. Today, fewer than 430 remain — an 84% decline driven largely by the same emigration that brought our family to America.

The earliest documented ancestors here are Francesco Mancini (1719–1784) and Maria G. D'Addario (1719–1809). They had a son, Domenico A. Mancini (1760–1812), who married Prudenza D'Orazio (1774–1840). The D'Orazio surname is genuinely common in the L'Aquila and Ofena area — another authentic geographic marker. The Mancini name itself derives from mancino, meaning "left-handed" — one of the most common surnames in all of Abruzzo, with over 58% of Italian Mancinis concentrated in this region.

Their son Angelo G. Mancini (1810–1848) died young at 38. Through the Moscardelli line — another distinctly Abruzzo surname, strongly associated with the L'Aquila province — the family continues through Maria C. Moscardelli (1808–1872) and her parents Domenico Moscardelli (1765–1839) and Rosa Salvati (1766–1824).

The Moscardelli name is uncommon enough that it actually helps with research — there are fewer false matches in the archives. F. Moscardelli (1734–1797) and Anna DeLuca push this line back toward the mid-18th century, with the caveat that Anna's attributed longevity (approximately 99 years) should be verified before treating it as fact.

The generation that bridges the old world and the new begins with Luigi Mancini (1837–1888), born on June 23, 1837 in Ofena. On October 10, 1868, Luigi married Lucia Maria Naddio (1841–1922) — known as "Louise" — in the neighboring Abruzzese village of Castel del Monte, a small hilltop community just 25 kilometers from Ofena on the western slope of the Gran Sasso. Lucia's parents were Nicola Naddeo (b. 1815) and Grazia Mucciante (b. 1812) — adding two more distinctly Abruzzese surnames to our family tree.

Luigi and Lucia had at least two children: Concetta Mancini (1870–1953), born on November 15, 1870 in Castel del Monte, and Angelo Mancini (1876–1933), born in 1876 in Italy — the Angelo who would become the patriarch of our American family. Their life in Ofena was the life of the Abruzzese mountain villages: hard labor, close community, the rhythms of the agricultural calendar.

Then, on April 9, 1888, Luigi Mancini died in Roma, Lazio — far from Ofena. He was 51. Why he was in Rome is unknown — perhaps seeking work, perhaps ill and seeking treatment. Angelo was just twelve years old when he lost his father. Lucia was left a widow at 46 with children to raise alone in a mountain village with few prospects.

Note the surname shift, at some point, from Mancini to Mangini. Research by the New York Public Library has thoroughly debunked the myth that names were changed at Ellis Island — inspectors checked names against ship manifests and never wrote them down independently. The shift more likely reflects regional dialect variation, a phonetic rendering at the point of ticket purchase in Italy, or a deliberate choice by the immigrant family themselves in America. Angelo's ship manifest clearly records him as "Mancini" — the name that sailed was not the name that stayed. Our name changed somewhere along the way.

Some branches of our Italian tree reach back into the early 1600s — names like Buccio Gervasi (c.1621), the Corcia, Petagina, and Maffuccio families, and the D'Alifi and Matallo lines with dates in the 1630s–1670s.

This is where honest genealogy requires a different kind of storytelling. Records for southern Italian commoners this far back are extraordinarily rare. While Italian church records can theoretically reach this far — the Council of Trent mandated systematic record-keeping from 1563 — survival rates for small southern towns are low, and access is limited.

Much of this deep data likely arrived via the shared trees feature on Ancestry — other users' research absorbed into our own without primary source verification. This is the single most common reliability problem in online genealogy, and it doesn't mean the information is wrong. It means it requires independent confirmation before being trusted as fact.

The most verifiable ground in our Italian story is firmly 1800 to the present. The 18th century connections — Onofrino Salomone, Francesco Mancini, the Ricciardi and Ianuale lines — are plausible and likely accurate. Anything reaching into the 1600s deserves its own investigation before it becomes family canon.

The late 19th and early 20th century is where this Italian story becomes an American one — and it is one of the most dramatic demographic events in history. Between 1880 and 1924, over four million Italians emigrated to the United States, the majority from exactly the southern regions our family comes from — Campania and Abruzzo.

They were pushed by the economic devastation of post-unification Italy, which promised much and delivered little to the south. Taxes skyrocketed, land reforms failed, and the great estates that had employed tenant farmers were broken up without meaningful redistribution. Then came a series of catastrophic earthquakes — Abruzzo sat on major fault lines and was particularly vulnerable. The devastating 1703 earthquake had destroyed most of L'Aquila; the 1706 quake struck Sulmona near Ofena. For many families, emigration wasn't a choice so much as a survival imperative.

Before Liberata Salomone became an American, she was a girl who lost her mother young. Maria Gaetana di Napoli, born around 1860 in Calitri, was orphaned herself — both her parents, Francesco and Rosa Di Napoli, died around 1876. That same year, at just sixteen, Maria Gaetana married Pasquale Salomone (1853–1920). Three years later, on May 28, 1879, she gave birth to Liberata. And then, sometime before 1887, Maria Gaetana died — likely still in her mid-twenties. Liberata was at most seven years old.

Pasquale remarried — Filomena Competielo (1862–1916), who became Liberata's stepmother and bore additional children: Maria Giuseppa (1888), and later, after the family's own emigration, Joseph (1893, New York), William (1894, Dumont, NJ), Carl James (1896, Dumont), Rose Marie (1898, Dumont), and Angelina (1900, New Jersey). Pasquale had blazed the trail to America around 1892–1893.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the late 1890s — and this is one of the great mysteries of our family story — Liberata met and married Angelo Mancini, a young laborer from Ofena, Abruzzo. How a girl from Calitri in Campania came to marry a man from Ofena in Abruzzo remains unknown. Perhaps Angelo was working in the Campania area as a laborer, as so many young Abruzzese men did. Perhaps they met through the networks of families already preparing to emigrate. What we know is that they married in Italy and had at least two sons before Angelo left.

On June 3, 1900, Angelo Mancini — age 24, listed as a labourer, nationality Italian — arrived in New York aboard the SS La Bretagne, a French Line steamship out of Le Havre. His residence was listed as Torriglia, a small town near Genoa in Liguria — far from his native Ofena. This suggests Angelo had already migrated internally within Italy, perhaps working in the Genoa area, before making the transatlantic crossing. The Le Havre departure makes sense from a Ligurian starting point — overland through France to the port.

He came alone. He left behind a wife and two small sons.

Fifteen months later, on September 4, 1901, Liberata Salomone — approximately 22 years old — arrived in New York aboard the SS Hohenzollern, a North German Lloyd steamship out of Naples. The handwritten manifest, line 19, records her with the notation: "husb. & 2 sons" — she was joining her husband, who was already in New York, and she brought their two boys with her.

What happened to those two sons born in Italy is one of the story's quiet tragedies. One child death in that early timeframe has been found in the records. The other remains unconfirmed — possibly lost without leaving a trace in the archives. Their first American-born child, Dominic, arrived on September 21, 1902 in the Bronx. Then came Antonio in 1904 — who died the same year, an infant. Then John J. in November 1905, Louis in March 1908, Anthony in 1910 — who died in 1911, another infant lost. Then Carmine in 1913, Anna in 1915, and Joseph in 1917.

Eight children born in America. Two more brought from Italy. Four lost — two in Italy or shortly after arrival, Antonio at less than a year, Anthony at barely one. Six survived to adulthood. This was the arithmetic of immigrant life: they kept going, they kept building, they carried their grief quietly and named the next child after the one they lost. We are here because of that resilience.

They came to New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania — wherever the labor contractors directed them. Angelo Mangini (1876–1933) arrived from Abruzzo. Liberata Salomone (1879–1946) arrived from Calitri, Campania. And in the immigrant neighborhoods of the Bronx, these two families — from completely different parts of Italy, speaking different dialects, carrying different regional cultures — built a life together.

This was not uncommon. Italian immigrant communities in America mixed people from different regions in ways that would never have happened in the old country. The shared identity of being Italian — or more precisely, the shared experience of being immigrants together — created connections across regional lines that geography had previously made impossible.

Angelo worked as a laborer in the Bronx. By 1905, they were settled enough to be counted in the census. By 1910, Angelo was listed as head of household. The family grew. The name on the records shifted from Mancini to Mangini — a small change that marked a larger transformation.

Then, in 1933, Angelo died. Liberata was 54 years old, with children ranging from teenagers to adults. It was the depths of the Great Depression. She lived as a widow for thirteen more years, dying on April 25, 1946 in New York City at the age of 66.

Liberata — known to the family as Mary, and to those closest as Libby — had carried many names across her life: the formal Liberata of her Calitri baptism, the Americanized Mary that appeared on her children's records, and the familiar Libbythat family remembered. Each name marked a chapter — the Italian girl, the immigrant mother, the woman her grandchildren knew.

Among Angelo and Liberata's children who survived to adulthood, John J. Mangini (1905–1992) and Joseph Mangini (1917–2001) were brothers who carried the family forward — and from their lines, all of us reading this today descend. John's son John Kenneth Mangini (1941–2019) and Joseph's family continued building what Angelo and Liberata started.

The surnames in this story — Mangini, Salomone, Mancini, Moscardelli, Ricciardi, Ianuale, Passari, Competiello — are our surnames, the names of real communities, real villages, real church registers that still exist and can be explored.

The story is most solid from 1800 forward. The 18th century connections are plausible and likely accurate for the Calitri and Ofena lines. Anything reaching into the 1600s should be held lightly — fascinating, possibly true, but not yet proven. What is certain is that we are the product of two distinct Italian regional traditions — the mountain shepherds and saffron farmers of Abruzzo, and the hill town community of Calitri in Campania — who made the extraordinary decision to leave everything they knew, cross an ocean, and build something new.

Radici means roots. Ours run deep.