Italian Peoples
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Lacedonia – Frank Cancian’s Pictures of a Disappearing World
In 1957, it must have been a trip of a lifetime. Frank Cancian was going to Italy. An American student, child of Italian immigrants, he had won a Fullbright scholarship. The project would combine his love of photography and his studies in anthropology. He would use his camera to document the life of Lacedonia, a town in the hills of Avellino. To reach Lacedonia you have to climb into the Apennines to the east of Naples. In ancient times this had been the land of the Samnites, Rome’s bitter enemies, who had long resisted conquest. Later it became the border lands of southern Lombard duchies before the Normans placed their…
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Genes and the Intimacy of Place
The pictures above were made by scientists who study genes. They tell a story. Two completely different kinds of information are combined to tell it: a map of Europe from our physical world and overlaid on it, the genetic relationship of 1378 people from Europe, shown in two dimensions. The scientific paper from which the diagram comes actually looks at these patterns around the world, and similar patterns are found worldwide to a greater or lesser degree. They were not the first to notice such patterns, but they took their study worldwide. They observe: “geography plays a strong role in giving rise to human population structure“. By “structure” they mean clustering…
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The Fifty-Three Known Forefathers of the Italian People: Latest Discoveries from Genetics
This is a story about Italian y-DNA. But putting it that way is misleading. For there is not a single coherent story of “Italianness” that stretches back in time. And that story is almost inseparable from the stories of the surrounding populations with which developments in Italy are intimately connected. But it is the case that the science of genetics is gradually unfolding a richer picture of the past than was known before. If we go back far enough (thousands of years) we find (along the patrilineal line) that virtually all Italians are descended from only fifty-three men. Why there are so few, we will see below. Casual labels are…
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Baby Wrapping – Traditional Baby Swaddling in Italy and Beyond
Baby wrapping or traditional baby swaddling is an ancient practice that was once widespread in Italy and much of Europe and the Mediterranean. It was still used in baby care in parts of 1960s Italy. How did this custom of baby wrapping arise? The image above, in which the baby is in a bassinet at a spinner’s feet, involved wrapping a newborn in a long broad strip of cloth that constrained the movement of the baby with its legs straightened out and its arms by its sides. This particular image comes from a 12th century English illustration for the Hunterian Psalter. Swaddling is still used today throughout the world to…
