Where we begin
A town with one family’s name on it
There are only about 257 families named Femiano in all of Italy, and most of them live in Sant’Antimo, a town of 30,000 on the ancient plain of Atella, ten kilometers north of Naples, where the streets still follow a Roman survey grid from 131 BC. Our documented line runs there continuously from the 1730s. Everyone who carries this name in that town is our family.
It was hemp country. The plain grew the finest rope fiber in Europe, retted in canals and beaten free with wooden brakes; the ropes of the Bourbon navy came from villages our ancestors could walk to. Sant’Antimo’s own claim to fame was stranger: il Cristallo di Sant’Antimo, cream of tartar refined from wine-cask crust, produced in town from 1615 and once name-checked in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. And the town’s most famous son, born there while our great-great-grandfather worked its streets, was Nicola Romeo, founder of Alfa Romeo.
The evidence
The family tree
● Click or tap any box to open that ancestor’s story.
WHERE THE PAPER TRAIL ENDS · AND WHERE IT CONTINUES
A whole other century of this family is waiting in one room in Sant’Antimo
Italy’s civil registers begin in 1809, when Napoleon’s government ordered every town to record its births, marriages and deaths. Everything above Andrea the elder in this tree lies before that line, and it is not lost: it sits in the parish baptismal books of the Santuario di Sant’Antimo, kept by the church since the 1500s, written in Latin, generation after generation of Femianos in a priest’s hand.
No archive or website holds them and no law opens them; they are the Church’s own, and the parish priest decides who may look. Which means the oldest chapters of this family can only be read the old way: by going there, knocking, and asking. If one of us decides to visit and the parish is welcoming, the tree above could grow by another hundred years.
The old country
Farmers, spinners, builders
The registers record our people’s work in their own words, and the words climb: Domenico Femiano (~1810–1863) of strada Annunziata was a bracciale, a day-laborer, the bottom rung of the farm economy. His son Andrea (~1836–1886) appears as fabbricatore, builder, and at his death, in the great Ospedale degli Incurabili in Naples, as muratore, mason. Andrea’s grandson Pasquale carried the trade across the ocean and put it in the Washington phone book. One family, one craft, four generations, two continents. Further back still, an 1814 act records Gelsomina Femiano, a filandaja, a spinner. The hemp economy, written into a single word beside our name.
La cucina
What they ate
Neapolitans were called mangiafoglie, leaf-eaters, before they became mangiamaccheroni. The family's daily table was nearly vegetarian by necessity: bread, pasta rotating through the week with chickpeas, peas, and lentils, and always the greens of the plain. Meat meant the Sunday ragù at best, poultry on feast days. There is one mercy in this poverty diet: because the South ate durum pasta and greens instead of the North's corn polenta, our people were largely spared pellagra, the great deficiency disease of Italian peasants.
The district around Sant'Antimo grew three things worth bragging about: Asprinio, a sharp white wine from vines married to twenty-meter poplars, harvested from ladders in a "heroic vintage" and once sold to France as Champagne napolitain; the small crimson annurca apple, ripened by hand on beds of hemp straw; and the buffalo mozzarella of the aversano dairies. Every dish below is still on the family's table somewhere. That is the point of this section: taste one, and you are eating with them.
Minestra maritata
Wild and garden greens “married” to scraps of pork. The ancestral dish of the leaf-eating centuries, kept for Christmas and Easter.
Friarielli e salsiccia
Bitter broccoli shoots in oil and chili, the defining green of the plain of Naples; with sausage, a feast.
Pasta e ceci
The weekday rotation: pasta with chickpeas, then peas, then lentils. The engine of nine generations.
Ragù della domenica
The Sunday pot, hours on the fire. The one day the table had meat, and the smell the whole street shared.
Pastiera
The Easter wheat-and-ricotta pie under its lattice, scented with orange blossom. Aversa's own list confirms it.
Casatiello
Easter bread baked with cheese, salame, and whole eggs caged in dough crosses. Its cousin the tortano fed the rest of the year.
Zeppole di San Giuseppe
Fried at street stalls every 19th of March since at least 1837, when a Neapolitan duke first printed the recipe.
Struffoli
Fried honey-glazed dough pearls piled for Christmas. Convent kitchens designed them to make much from little.
Capitone della Vigilia
The Christmas Eve eel, fried for the meatless cenone. Buying the capitone was half the ritual.
Torrone dei morti
The soft chocolate-hazelnut torrone sold only around All Souls, when the family walked to the cemetery with flowers.
Asprinio & annurca
The wine of the married vines and the apple of the hemp-straw beds: the two flavors of the family's exact fields.
Mozzarella di bufala
The aversano's buffalo herds made the ingredient par excellence of the district; for a laborer's family, a market-day treat.
La festa
The year they lived by, and the songs
The calendar of Sant’Antimo ran on its saints. January bonfires in the streets for Sant’Antonio Abate. The Canzone di Zeza, a sung farce, at Carnival. On Easter morning the Alza Bandiera, the flag raised over the Sanctuary, opening the patronal season; on Easter Monday the fujenti, white-clad squads running to the Madonna dell’Arco, a rite the town still fields today. Late May brought the great festa itself: the procession, the saint carried into private homes, the Tragedia passion play, and the Volo degli Angeli. In June and October the whole district walked the Madonna di Casaluce between Casaluce and Aversa, as it has since the 1300s. November meant graves, flowers, and torrone dei morti; December brought the presepe and the zampognari, shepherd bagpipers down from the mountains playing the novena at every doorway shrine.
And the music: the tammurriata of the plain, frame drum and castanets, danced as a contest; the fronna ’e limone, wordless calls sung across the fields; and from the city, carried to weddings and festivals by wandering players, Funiculì Funiculà (1880) and ’O sole mio (1898). Two songs belong to this family above all, both current hits when Pasquale sailed: Santa Lucia luntana (1919), written for the emigrants watching Naples shrink from the ship’s deck, and Lacreme napulitane (1925), the emigrant’s Christmas letter home. Play them at the next reunion.
The crossing
Naples → New York → Washington
The story in Pasquale’s own words, written down by the family in 1978: he first sailed in August 1923, came home to Italy for lack of work at Christmas 1926, and then, after the family buried baby Vincenzo, sailed for good on 8 June 1929 aboard the ship ROMA, landing in New York on 17 June 1929 with Annunziata and little Dominic, then five years old. The ships out of Naples in those years rang with Santa Lucia luntana, the song written for exactly these passengers, watching the bay recede from the deck.
In Depression Philadelphia, before the stone work came, Pasquale sold bananas at five cents a bunch. The fruit-seller lore of this family was true on both sides of the ocean and both sides of the tree.
They landed into Philadelphia’s Italian world, where James was born in 1930, then settled in Washington DC by 1933: Highwood Drive SE, five children, and eventually the family business whose ad ran in the Evening Star every Sunday: “STONE and brick retaining walls, firepls., flowerboxes, flagstone and conc. walks, patios. P. FEMIANO & SON.” There are Femiano-built stone walls standing in Washington yards right now.
The ones who stayed
Our cousins are still there
And the family’s own 1987 tree names an even closer branch: Pasquale’s brother Andrea Femiano (1897–1985) stayed in Italy and raised eight children, born 1936 to 1952: Nicola, Maria, Fortuna, Domenico, Anna, Giuseppina, Andrea, and another Pasquale, married into the Gallone, Merlando, Tarantino, DeRosa, Puca, Fierro, and Angelino families, with grandchildren born into the 1980s. These are our first cousins twice removed and their children, most plausibly in or near Naples today, and we have their names.
A parallel Femiano branch also never left Sant’Antimo: Antimo Femiano, born at Via Cappella 16 in 1880, died in town in 1970; his son Andrea, born at Via del Commercio 25 in 1922, married there on 10 October 1954. His children, our cousins, are in their sixties and seventies in Sant’Antimo today. If one of us decides to visit, the addresses and photographs are ready, along with one sentence in Italian: “Cerco i discendenti di Andrea Femiano, figlio di Antimo, classe 1922.”
The town hall: Comune di Sant’Antimo, Ufficio di Stato Civile, Via Roma 168, phone +39 081 832 9177, email protocollo@pec.comune.santantimo.na.it. Holds every birth, marriage and death record back to 1809; go on a weekday morning.
The church: Santuario di Sant’Antimo Prete e Martire, Piazza della Repubblica 1, phone +39 081 505 6835. The mother parish, with the baptismal books older than 1809; ask gently, offer a donation, and consider timing a visit for the festa in late May.
The helpers: Italea Campania (italea.com/en/campania), Italy’s official and free roots-tourism program, which assists descendants with genealogy and trip planning; they answer in English.
When to go: the festa, late May to early June, when the whole town including every Femiano in it is in the piazza; avoid August, when everything closes. Getting there: seasonal nonstops fly from US East Coast hubs to Naples roughly May through October; then a regional train from Napoli Centrale to the S. Antimo–S. Arpino station takes about twenty minutes and costs a few euro. Base yourself in Naples or in Aversa’s Norman old town, 4 km away. A US passport is all you need at present.
Family legends, audited
The Capone story
The lore says great-grandpa had ties to Al Capone. The records say: the family really was in Philadelphia at the same time as Capone. But Capone spent his entire Philadelphia residence (May 1929 to March 1930) locked in Eastern State Penitentiary, the biggest news story in the city, while Pasquale was laying stone a few neighborhoods away. Decades of newspaper coverage show our family exclusively in graduation lists, weddings, Navy notices and masonry ads. Verdict: we were there, and the retellings did the rest. It’s still a good story. Now it’s an accurate one.
For the record
Vital dates of the direct line
| Name | Born | Died | Place |
|---|---|---|---|
| Andrea Femiano & Maria Verde | ~1730s | before 1814 | Sant’Antimo (probable line) |
| Andrea Femiano & Maria Di Lorenzo | ~1780s | he before 1837 | Sant’Antimo |
| Domenico Femiano & Antonina Petito | ~1810 | 26 Apr 1863 · she 1863–86 | Sant’Antimo, strada Annunziata |
| Andrea Femiano & Giuseppa D’Errico | ~1836 · ~1835 | 12 Mar 1886, Naples | Sant’Antimo (builder) |
| Domenico Femiano & Maria Damiano | 1862 · 1865 | 1956 · 1936 | Sant’Antimo |
| Pasquale Femiano & Annunziata Durante | 14 Mar 1901 · 7 Sep 1899 | 6 Jul 1987 · Jul 1983 | Sant’Antimo / Secondigliano → Beltsville MD |
Pasquale and Annunziata rest together at Gate of Heaven Cemetery, Silver Spring, Maryland, Section 1. A family that reached ~94 (Domenico), ~103 (Dominic, God willing still counting), 91 and 91 (Vita and Mary). Longevity is in the blood.