Italy wants to help you discover your roots—and meet distant relatives
This writer traced her roots back to a small Calabrian village and found 100 living relatives. A new Italian initiative makes it easier for descendants to do the same in the country’s less-traveled towns.
Between the late 1800s and early 1900s, my great-grandfather Frank Fiorentino was one of 5.5 million people who moved out of Southern Italy to escape the mob, poverty, and disease—and they've been leaving ever since. While tourists flock to Venice and the Amalfi Coast, half of Italy’s small towns are already in an advanced state of abandonment or almost completely depopulated, according to the Italian government.
The country designated 2024 the Year of the Italian Roots in the World to draw 80 million Italian descendants (like me) back to trace their roots.
"Most of Italy's emigrants left small rural towns and want to visit them. By making travel to these places easier, we stimulate more responsible tourism that doesn't oversaturate destinations and focuses on sustainability," says Giovanni Maria De Vita, the councilor of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation leading the initiative.
What is roots travel?
Roots travel or tourism is when people travel to visit their country of origin to connect with their cultural or genealogical heritage. It began at the end of World War II to encourage cultural diplomacy and stimulate European economies, with successful campaigns including Sweden’s 1966 "Homecoming Year” and the Gathering of Ireland. It also reignited in the 1970s for Black families shortly after Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family was published and adapted into a popular television miniseries.
As access grew to shared DNA via at-home genetic testing on sites like Ancestry, the number of roots travelers increased by 500 percent between 2014 and 2019. It continued to grow with Ghana’s 2019 “Year of the Return” and India: The Homecoming in 2024.
Italy’s “Year of the Italian Roots in the World” dedicates $20 million to a new platform helping visitors trace their roots, Italea.com, and the initiative partners with local cultural organizations and emigration experts to personalize tours and itineraries—and form a responsible framework for other countries. The idea is to prevent over-tourism by revitalizing the tiny towns many Italians are leaving—like Gasperina.
Finding family in Gasperina
My journey to trace my Italian roots started in 2020 after my sister's double mastectomy. My siblings and I decided to get tested for genetic mutations and confirmed what we suspected, that cancer ran in our family. Unlike my dad, my sister beat it, and while in remission, we turned from using our DNA results to find out more about our health and pivoted to exploring our family tree—until there were no more photos, and war, naturalization, and birth records left to sift through online.
For my mom’s 70th birthday, she and I took a two-week road trip through Sicily and Calabria to finish tracing my father’s roots 17 years after he had died. On the last day, we visited Gasperina, Italy, a village of about 2,000 residents where 100 are my distant relatives.
Last September, my mother and I drove for hours along the southern coast of Italy through Calabria’s centuries-old olive groves and herds of sheep when the foothills transitioned into steep hairpin turns. The road brought us to the center of a town in Italy’s Catanzaro province, where we took our seats at a table in Gasperina’s historic cobblestone square with Giovanni Lupica. I found Calabrian genealogist Antonello Zaccaria online, and he connected me with Giovanni, who had spent hours completing our family tree that my sister had started.
He handed me a folder with my family records he pulled from the local town hall and churches on behalf of Il Sotterraneo Pro Gasperina, the organization he co-founded to preserve Gasperina’s culture and to draw young people back to the town. I found out later that the town’s population had dropped every year since my great-grandfather left in 1902, from 3,935 to 1,861.
My mom and I walked with Giovanni down the narrow streets, passing granite homes with decorative pillars and imposing bright blue doors. A woman waving at us had just donated her old home, like others, to Giovanni’s organization to restore. With so many dilapidated houses, Italy started incentivizing young people to move to Calabrian towns by offering $33,000 to start a business and the country also started offering old homes for a dollar.
We stopped at a series of adjoining homes stretching down the block, where Giovanni explained, that my Fiorentino ancestors lived for generations––starting with my sixth great-grandfather Xaverius, who was born in 1720. After migrating from Florence, they worked in Gasperina as landowning farmers in the business of oxen breeding for carts and tanning leather or the process of treating the hides of animals to produce leather. Fiorentino means “from Florence,” touted as the home of the world’s best leather tanneries since the 8th century B.C. My dad once said his great-grandfather left Calabria because the mob tried to take over the family’s leather business.
While in Gasperina, Giovanni introduced me to my distant cousin, Teresina “Fiorentino” Messina (our fifth great-grandfathers were brothers) and her two adult children, Giovanna and Gerardo Messina, who I now call friends, since we kept in touch.
The history of my big Italian family
After my trip to Italy, I used the family records from Giovanni, our genealogy research, and stories passed down through generations to help piece together my family tree and our history. I had never met my great-grandfather Frank, but he was short like the rest of us. I learned that he served in the Italian army, and when he was 26, he left Gasperina to live in East Boston, where the name “Fiorentino” is still cemented on his old building.
After tanning cow hides in Gasperina, Frank started a business brewing beer with one of his 12 siblings, who came to Boston from Italy with their parents, Raffaella and Domenico. When Prohibition began in 1920, Frank turned to creating pastry recipes and became the owner of the Orient Heights Baking Company, which he ran for 30 years.
In 1911, Frank (at 36 years old) entered an arranged marriage with my great-grandmother Caroline Celia, who was 16 years old at the time. I found out that she cried for the entire boat ride from Gasperina to the U.S. Caroline may have been 20 years younger, but she ran the household and spoke Italian to their four children, including my gentle-natured grandfather Dr. Domenic Fiorentino. My grandfather married my Sicilian grandmother, and they had three children: my dad (Robert Fiorentino), my uncle Paul, and my aunt Carol.
Eighty-four of my relatives with the last name Fiorentino still live in Gasperina as well as some of my relatives living among the town's 101 Celias, since that side of my dad's family has lived in Gasperina since the 1700s. Plus the ones with different last names by marriage, like the Messinas.
I’ll never forget that day and how our visit to Gasperina ended, celebrating my mother’s birthday over a Calabrese pizza (like my dad used to make) with my newfound family members, and Giovanni, who made it happen. We all raised our glasses in a toast to my remarkable father, Robert.
One amazing part about tracing your roots is the bonds you form in the process with family members—and the new ones you meet, if you’re lucky.
How to trace your roots
Building your family tree on Ancestry or MyHeritage at least six months before your trip, use record hints, searches, and messaging to connect with relatives, automatically populating your family tree down to birthplace. Mailing back the at-home DNA spit sample analysis will link you to relatives and break down your genetics by country.
After exhausting online birth, death, and naturalization records, many countries (Germany, Scotland, India, and now Italy and sites like African Ancestry) provide services to complete your family tree and connect with distant relatives through genealogy tours and itineraries.
Pay a genealogist in your ancestral region to dig up archives or ask a local cultural organization or municipality; most want to help with enough notice.
(Related: Tips for planning a roots travel trip.)
