Gavuzzo & Gavuzzi
Chapter I - The distribution of the surnames Gavuzzo & Gavuzzi Chapter II - The origin of the surnames Gavuzzo & Gavuzzi Chapter III - Gavuzzo of Rossi Chapter IV - Gavuzzo of Santa Vittoria Chapter V - Gavuzzo of Monticello Chapter VI - Gavuzzo of Turin Chapter VII - Gavuzzo family life in Monticello & Santa Vittoria 1600-1900 Chapter VIII - The dispersion of the Gavuzzo family 1300-1930 Appendix 1 - Medieval name lists for areas near Alba Appendix 2 - Roddi Gavuzzo genealogy 1620-1830 Appendix 3 - Santa Vittoria Gavuzzo genealogy 1600-1700 Appendix 4 - Monticello Gavuzzo genealogy 1612-1875
The aim of this work is to examine the origin, history and dispersion of families with the uncommon surnames Gavuzzo and Gavuzzi. The relatively high concentration of these surnames in the southeastern part of the Piedmont region, in northern Italy, suggests that the families roots are there. In order to pinpoint the unknown point of origin with greater precision we decided on a genealogical investigation. The results of our researches conducted over the years 2002–2005 are summarized below. The surname, in fact, originated in the village of Roddi, 40 kilometres south of Turin, probably about 1300, when the children of a man with the given name Gauso started to use it as a family name. There were several families with the adopted surname by 1450, but all of them remained within a few kilometres of Roddi until the eighteenth century. They then started to spread to other parts of Piedmont, to Sweden (1790), England (1888), California (1908), France (1920), Argentina (1922) and Mexico (1932). The geographical distribution of the surnames Gavuzzo and Gavuzzi is reviewed in Chapter I. The present distribution in Piedmont is concentrated between the towns of Alba and Asti (Fig. 1). The abundance of the surname in Turin, a city with nearly a million inhabitants, results from nineteenth century migration. The birth places of all men with surnames like Gavuzzo or Gavuzzi born in Piedmont during the fifty year period 1792-1841 are shown in Fig. 2. They are all documented in the genealogies forming Appendices 2 & 4. The great majority lived in the rural municipalities of Santa Vittoria d’Alba and Monticello d’Alba, which adjoin Roddi. The etymology of the surname is considered in Chapter II. We show that the spelling Gavuzzo, Gavuzzi, Gauzzo and many similar forms were used inter-changeably until the start of the twentieth century, and have no genealogical significance. The root is the Germanic (Longobard) name Gauso, well documented as a given name in northern Italy until the year 1000, after which it appears to have survived only as a surname. Chapter III details the Gavuzzo families of Roddi from 1450 until the last one died out about 1828. Most of the Gavuzzo families in Roddi were farmers, but one of them was not. For at least seven generations it produced lawyers, municipal administrators and doctors, of whom the most notable was the advocate Stefano Gavuzzo. He was appointed to the Piedmontese court of appeal (senato) in 1759 and is still remembered for his burlesque L’Adramiteno. Senator Gavuzzo and his children, who lived in Turin, are separately described in Chapter VI. The first significant migration from Roddi occurred about 1430 when the Gavuzzo surname appears in Santa Vittoria. This branch, described in Chapter IV, was relatively wealthy and well-educated. To it belonged the notary Benedetto Gheuzo (1600-1652), magistrate of Santa Vittoria, Monticello, Pollenzo and Roddi. The Santa Vittoria branch, however, died out before 1700. In 1630 a farmer’s son called Stefano Gavuzzo left Roddi to marry the elderly widow Margherita Visino in Monticello. He settled in Monticello, inherited her property, and with his second wife Ippolita da Como established the Monticello Gavuzzo branch (Chapter V). The Monticello branch expanded into the adjoining municipality of Santa Vittoria in the eighteenth century. All those with the surnames Gavuzzo and Gavuzzi alive today are descendants of Stefano, (Appendix 4 and Figs. 10–15). Members of this lineage include Stefano (Etienne) Gavuzzi (1763-1833), pastry maker to the queen of Sweden, his son Otto Gavuzzi (1796-1846), a wealthy industrialist in Stockholm, Giuseppe Gavuzzi (1830-1898), author of a well-known Piedmontese dictionary, Pietro Gavuzzi (1870-1945) once manager of the Victoria Falls Hotel, and Pete Gavuzzi (1905-1981) the celebrated ultra-marathon runner. In Chapter VII we attempt to depict what family life was like in Monticello and Santa Vittoria over the period 1600-1900. As in most of Europe at this time, family income per head was equivalent to about a euro a day, while child mortality rates were comparable with those now found in sub-Saharan Africa. The migration of Gavuzzo families away from Roddi over the period 1300 to 1950 is briefly reviewed in Chapter VIII. The migration distance increased exponentially with time, as shown graphically in Fig. 20. Sources The present distribution of the surnames Gavuzzo and Gavuzzi was taken from telephone directories available in 2002. To determine the birth places of men with surnames like Gavuzzo over the period 1792-1841 we used the military conscription lists, for there are no suitable census records in Piedmont. Military service was introduced into Piedmont by Napoleon in 1802 for men aged between 20 and 25 years. The State archives now have the indexed records regarding men born in 1792 and after. The State archive at Cuneo has the lists for the former province of Alba, while the archive at Turin has the lists for the city and province of Turin. Printed lists for the city alone are also available in the Archivio Storico Comunale. Knowing that men with the surname were formerly concentrated near Santa Vittoria and Monticello, as shown in Fig. 2, we started with a study of the parish registers of births, marriages and deaths in that area. We abstracted all the data on Gavuzzo individuals in the registers for 1835-1875, duplicate copies of which can be conveniently consulted in the archive of the Curia in Alba. The procedure was then extended to earlier registers in the parish archives at Santa Vittoria and Monticello. These data were woven together to form the core of the genealogy in Appendix 4. Similar techniques were used to build the Roddi Gavuzzo genealogy in Appendix 2. The genealogies are patrilineal lineages (Fox 1967, p. 45 & 49) in which, by definition, all individuals have the same surname. We use the word ‘family’ both for a lineage and for a husband and wife nucleus, with or without children. Most of the genealogies we have compiled do not extend beyond 1875, partly because the dispersion of the families makes the work difficult, but also because it was not relevant to the research objective. The main source used to illustrate the lives of the individuals making up the genealogies was the data in the notarial archive (ufficio di insinuazione). This office was established by the Piedmont government in 1610 to receive and conserve duplicates of all legal documents. The resulting volumes are now housed for public consultation in the State archives. The State archive in Cuneo has all the material for Alba and surrounding areas, while the State archive at Turin holds material for the city and the reminder of the province. The documents are mainly conveyances (land sales), dowries, wills and inventories. It should be remarked that virtually all rural families owned some land, and all women who married had dowries. The amount of material in this archive is vast, and except in Turin lacks indexes, so that the hundreds of manuscripts we cite are little more than a sample of those relating to the family. Two other sources which we have used extensively are the municipal land tax registers (catasti) and ecclesiastical censuses (status animarum). Unfortunately, these have survived in only a few localities. The Molinari collection in the diocesan archive at Alba is a rich source of manuscript material relating to Roddi which we have had insufficient time to fully exploit.
Sources in the text
are given in brackets along with the year, for example (Gavuzzi 1809) or (TI
1837). The first refers to the list of publications cited, and the second to
the list of manuscript sources. Both lists are at the end of the work.
Numbers in bold type refer to the original Italian texts placed immediately
after Chapter VIII.
Prefazione Lo scopo di questo lavoro è quello di esaminare l’origine, la storia e la diffusione nel mondo di una famiglia con i cognomi rari di Gavuzzo e Gavuzzi. La concentrazione relativamente alta di questi cognomi nella parte a sud est del Piemonte suggerisce che le radici della famiglia siano proprio lì. Per poter individuare con maggior precisione lo sconosciuto punto di origine abbiamo deciso di intraprendere uno studio genealogico. I risultati delle nostre ricerche, condotte tra il 2002 e il 2005, sono riassunti qui di seguito. Il cognome, in effetti, ha origine nel villaggio di Roddi a 40 chilometri a sud di Torino, probabilmente intorno al 1300, quando i figli di un uomo chiamato alla nascita Gauso iniziarono a usare questo nome come cognome. Già prima del 1450 esistevano alcune famiglie con questo cognome. Tutte rimasero a Roddi o nelle vicinanze fino al diciottesimo secolo. In seguito iniziarono a diffondersi in altre parti del Piemonte, fino in Svezia (1790), in Inghilterra (1888), in California (1908), in Francia (1920), in Argentina (1922), e in Messico (1932). La distribuzione geografica dei cognomi Gavuzzo e Gavuzzi è esaminata nel primo capitolo. La distribuzione attuale in Piemonte è concentrata tra le città di Alba e di Asti (figura 1). La frequenza del cognome a Torino, una città con circa un milione di abitanti, è il risultato dello spostamento migratorio avvenuto nel diciannovesimo secolo. I luoghi di nascita degli uomini con cognomi Gavuzzo e Gavuzzi nati in Piemonte durante i 50 anni tra il 1792 e il 1841 sono raffigurati nella figura 2. Tutte le persone suddette sono documentate nelle genealogie che costituiscono le appendici 2 e 4; la maggior parte di queste persone viveva nei comuni rurali di Santa Vittoria d’Alba e di Monticello d’Alba, confinanti con Roddi. L’etimologia del cognome è trattata nel secondo capitolo. Mostriamo come la grafia di Gavuzzo, Gavuzzi, Gauzzo e di molte altre simili forme è stata impiegata in modo intercambiabile fino all’inizio del ventesimo secolo e non ha alcun significato genealogico. La radice di provenienza è quella del nome germanico (longobardo) Gauso, ben documentato nell’Italia settentrionale fino all’anno 1000 come nome dato alla nascita. In seguito questo nome sembra essere soprav-vissuto principalmente come cognome. Il terzo capitolo elenca dettagliatamente le famiglie Gavuzzo di Roddi dal 1450 fino alla loro estinzione intorno al 1828. La maggior parte delle famiglie Gavuzzo di Roddi era costituita da agricoltori eccetto una da cui per almeno sette generazioni uscirono amministratori comunali, avvocati e dottori, il più noto dei quali fu l’avvocato Stefano Gavuzzo. Nominato al senato Piemontese nel 1759, viene ancora ricordato soprattutto per la sua opera L’Adramiteno. Il senatore Gavuzzo e i suoi figli, che vivevano a Torino, vengono descritti separatamente nel sesto capitolo. Il primo spostamento significativo da Roddi avvenne nel 1430 circa, quando il cognome Gavuzzo appare a Santa Vittoria. Questo ramo, descritto nel quarto capitolo, era benestante ed anche colto. A quest’ultimo apparteneva il notaio Benedetto Gheuzo (1600-1652), magistrato di Santa Vittoria, Monticello, Pollenzo e Roddi. Il ramo di Santa Vittoria, tuttavia, si estinse prima del 1700. Nel 1630 il figlio di un agricoltore di nome Stefano Gavuzzo lasciò Roddi per sposare l’anziana vedova Margherita Visino a Monticello. Si stabilì a Monticello dove ereditò la proprietà di sua moglie, e con la sua seconda moglie Ippolita da Como fondò il ramo dei Gavuzzo di Monticello (capitolo quinto). Nel diciottesimo secolo il ramo di Monticello si espanse nel comune confinante di Santa Vittoria. Tutti quelli in vita oggi con i cognomi Gavuzzo e Gavuzzi sono discendenti di Stefano e Ippolita (appendice 4 e figure 10-15). Membri di questo casato includono Stefano (Etienne) Gavuzzi (1763-1833) maggiordomo e pasticciere della regina di Svezia, suo figlio Otto Gavuzzi (1796-1846), un agiato industriale di Stoccolma, Giuseppe Gavuzzi (1830-1898), autore di un noto dizionario piemontese, Pietro Gavuzzi (1870-1945) il primo direttore del Victoria Falls Hotel, e Pete Gavuzzi (1905-1981) il celebre corridore. Nel settimo capitolo tentiamo di descrivere come era la vita di una famiglia a Monticello e a Santa Vittoria nel periodo che va da 1600 al 1900. Come nel resto d’Europa, allora il reddito famigliare pro capite era equivalente a circa un euro al giorno, mentre i tassi di mortalità infantile erano paragonabili a quelli di oggi in Africa a sud del Sahara. Lo spostamento da Roddi delle famiglie Gavuzzo nel periodo che va dal 1300 al 1950 viene brevemente esaminato nel capitolo VIII. La distanza di spostamento è aumentata in modo esponenziale con il tempo, come è illustrato graficamente nella figura 20.
Fonti La distribuzione attuale dei cognomi Gavuzzo e Gavuzzi è stata presa dagli elenchi telefonici del 2002. Al fine di determinare i luoghi di nascita di uomini con i cognomi come Gavuzzo per il periodo 1792-1841 abbiamo utilizzato le liste di leva militare, perchè in Piemonte non ci sono documenti di censimento per il primo ottocento. Il servizio militare fu introdotto in Piemonte da Napoleone nel 1802, per gli uomini di età tra i 20 e i 25 anni. Ora gli Archivi di Stato possiedono documenti relativi agli uomini nati nel 1792 ed oltre. L’archivio a Cuneo detiene le liste di leva dell’antica provincia di Alba, mentre l’archivio di Torino ha le liste della città e della provincia di Torino. Inoltre l’archivio storico comunale di Torino possiede le liste di leva stampate riguardanti la sola città. In considerazione del fatto che gli uomini con questo cognome erano nel passato concentrati vicino a Santa Vittoria e a Monticello, come mostrato nella figura 2, abbiamo iniziato con la consultazione dei registri parrocchiali contenenti le nascite, i matrimoni e i decessi in quelle zone. Abbiamo ricavato tutte le informazioni sugli individui con il cognome Gavuzzo, ecc., nei registri degli anni 1835-1875 i cui duplicati possono essere comodamente consultati nell’archivio diocesano di Alba. La procedura è stata poi estesa, andando a ritroso, ai registri di epoca precedente negli archivi parrocchiali di Santa Vittoria e di Monticello. Queste informazioni sono state messe insieme a formare il nucleo centrale della genealogia di cui all’appendice 4. Metodi simili sono stati usati per ricostruire la genealogia dei Gavuzzi di Roddi di cui all’appendice 2. Le genealogie sono discendenze patrilineari nelle quali, per definizione, tutti gli individui hanno lo stesso cognome. Qui noi usiamo la parola ‘famiglia’ sia per una stirpe, sia per il nucleo moglie e marito, con o senza figli. Alcune genealogie da noi compilate non vanno oltre il 1875, in parte per la difficoltà del lavoro dovuta alla dispersione delle famiglie. La fonte principale per illustrare le vite degli individui che formano le genealogie è stata costituita dai dati ricavati dagli archivi notarili (ufficio di insinuazione). Questo ufficio fu fondato dal governo piemontese nel 1610 con lo scopo di ricevere e conservare duplicati di tutti i documenti legali. I volumi risultanti si trovano ora per la pubblica consultazione negli archivi di stato. L’archivio di Cuneo possiede tutto il materiale di Alba e delle zone circostanti, mentre l’archivio di Torino conserva il materiale riguardante la città ed il resto della provincia. I documenti sono soprattutto atti di compravendita, doti, testamenti e inventari. Bisogna notare che quasi tutte le famiglie rurali possedevano del terreno e che tutte le donne che si sposavano avevano una dote. La quantità di materiale in questo archivio è vasto ed eccetto per Torino non ha un indice dei nomi, cosicchè le centinaia di manoscritti da noi citati sono poco più di un campione di tutti quelli che riguardano la famiglia. Altre due fonti da noi utilizzate sono i registri catastali dei comuni, e i censimenti ecclesiastici (status animarum). Sfortuna-tamente questi ultimi sono sopravvissuti solo in poche località. La collezione Molinari, nell’archivio diocesano di Alba, è una ricca fonte di materiale manoscritto relativo a Roddi, che purtroppo, non abbiamo avuto tempo di utilizzare a pieno.
Le fonti nel testo
sono citate tra parentesi insieme all’anno, per esempio: (Gavuzzi 1809)
oppure (TI 1837). Il primo si riferisce alla lista di pubblicazioni citate,
e il secondo alla lista delle fonti manoscritte. Entrambe le liste si
trovano alla fine di questo libro. I numeri in grassetto si riferiscono ai
testi originali in italiano collocati subito dopo il capitolo VIII.
Con este trabajo se ha realizado un estudio sobre el origen, la historia y la dispersión de las familias con apellidos raros, como Gavuzzo y Gavuzzi. La concentración relativamente alta de este tipo de apellidos en la parte sur de la región de Piamonte, en el norte de Italia, hace pensar que el origen de estas familias sea en esa zona. Para localizar con una mayor precisión el punto de origen hemos decidido llevar a cabo un estudio genealógico. La recopilación de datos llevada a cabo durante el periodo 2002 al 2005, ha permitido llegar a las conclusiones que resumimos a continuación. El apellido, tiene su origen en una aldea de Roddi, a unos 40 kilómetros al sur de Turín, cuando hacia el año 1300, los hijos de un hombre que se llamaba Gauso iniciaron a usar el nombre del padre como apellido. Hasta el año 1450 se pueden contar numerosas familias con un apellido adaptado y todas ellas, al menos hasta el siglo XVIII, se encontraban localizadas a pocos kilómetros de Roddi. Sucesivamente empezaron a difundirse en otras zonas del Piamonte, en Suiza (1790), en Inglaterra (1888), en California (1908), en Francia (1920), en Argentina (1922) y en México (1932). La distribución geográfica de los apellidos Gavuzzo y Gavuzzi se examina en el Capítulo I. Actualmente la distribución del apellido en Piamonte se concentra entre las ciudades de Alba y de Asti (figura 1). La frecuencia de los citados apellidos en una ciudad con más de un millón de habitantes como Turín, es la consecuencia de los desplazamientos llevados a cabo durante el siglo XIX. Las zonas de nacimiento de los hombres con apellidos como Gavuzzo o Gavazzi, nacidos en la región de Piamonte durante el periodo 1792-1841, se encuentran representados en la figura 2. Se encuentran todos documentados en las genealogías que forman los apéndices 2 y 4. La mayor parte vivía en las zonas rurales de Santa Victoria de Alba y Monticello de Alba, que limitan con Roddi. De la etimología del apellido se habla en el Capítulo II. Demostrando como el hecho de que se escriba Gavuzzo, Gavuzzi, Gauzzo o de otras maneras similares, inter-cambiándolas entre ellas hasta el siglo XX, no tenga ningún significado genealógico. La raíz de origen es la del nombre Germánico (Longobardo) Gauso, que se utilizaba solo como nombre en el norte de Italia hasta el año 1000, a partir de esa fecha parece que se halla mantenido solo como apellido. En el Capítulo III se hace una lista detallada de las familias Gavuzzo de Roddi desde 1450 hasta la última que parece ser se extinguió hacia 1828. La mayor parte de las familias Gavuzzo de Roddi eran de origen campesino, solamente una de ellas no lo era. Por lo menos durante siete generaciones hubo abogados, administradores del ayuntamiento y doctores, entre ellos el más importante fue el Abogado Stefano Gavuzzo. Nominado Senador de Piamonte en 1759 y se recuerda por su parodia L’Adramiteno. Del Senador Gavuzzo y de sus hijos, que vivían en Turín, se habla en el capitulo VI. El primer desplazamiento importante, alejándose de Roddi tuvo lugar hacia 1430 cuando el apellido Gavuzzo aparece en Santa Victoria. Esta rama del apellido que se describe en el Capítulo IV, era económicamente acomodada y bastante culta. Personaje representante el notario Benedetto Gheuzo (1600-1652), magistrado de Santa Victoria, Monticello, Pollenzo y Roddi. La rama de Santa Victoria, sin embargo, desaparece hacia 1700. En 1630 el hijo de un campesino llamado Stefano Gavuzzo abandona Roddi para casarse con la viuda Margherita Visino. Se establece en Monticello, y tras el fallecimiento de la anciana esposa hereda numerosas propiedades y con su segunda mujer Ippolita da Como funda la rama de Monticello Gavuzzo (ver capítulo V). La rama de Monticello se extendió, durante el siglo XVIII hasta el municipio de Santa Victoria. Todas las personas con apellido Gavuzzo y Gavuzzi actualmente en vida son descendientes de Stefano (Apéndice 4 y figuras 10–15). Los miembros de esta estirpe incluyen Stefano (Etienne) Gavuzzi (1763-1833), confitero de la Reina de Suiza, su hijo Otto Gavuzzi (1796-1846), un importante industrial de Estocolmo, Giuseppe Gavuzzi (1830-1898), autor de un conocido diccionario de Piamonte, Pietro Gavuzzi (1870-1945) durante un periodo director del Victoria Falls Hotel, y Pete Gavuzzi (1905-1981) corredor de ultra maratón. En el Capítulo VII se intenta describir como era la vida de la familia en Monticello y Santa Victoria durante el periodo 1600-1900. En Europa por aquel entonces, la renta familiar, pro capite era equivalente a casi un euro al día, mientras el índice de mortalidad infantil se puede comparar con el índice que encontramos actualmente en el sur del Sahara (África). El desplazamiento de las familias Gavuzzo de Roddi durante el periodo que va desde 1300 a 1950 se examina en el Capítulo VIII. La distancia crece de manera exponencial con el tiempo como se puede ver en el gráfico representado en la figura 20.
Fuentes La colocación actual de los apellidos Gavuzzo y Gavuzzi se ha llevado a cabo consultando las guías de teléfono disponibles en el año 2002. Para determinar el lugar de nacimiento de los hombres con apellido Gavuzzo durante el periodo 1792-1841 hemos utilizado las listas militares de reclutamiento, ya que no existen otro tipo documentos que permitan censar la región de Piamonte en dicho periodo. El servicio militar fue introducido en Piamonte por Napoleón en 1802, para todos los barones con edades comprendidas entre los 20 y los 25 años. Los Archivos Nacionales, poseen documentos analíticos de los barones nacidos desde 1792 en adelante. El Archivo Nacional de Cuneo tiene las listas de la provincia de Alba, mientras que el Archivo Nacional de Turín posee las listas de la ciudad y de la provincia. En el Archivo Histórico del Ayuntamiento se encuentran solo las listas de la Ciudad. Teniendo en consideración que los hombres con el citado apellido se concentraban precedentemente en los alrededores de Santa Victoria y de Monticello, como se puede apreciar en la figura 2, hemos iniciado estudiando los Registros de nacimientos y decesos de una parroquia de la zona. Hemos recogido todo tipo de información sobre los individuos con apellido Gavuzzo en los Registros relativos al periodo 1835-1875, las copias de los duplicados se pueden consultar sin ningún problema en el Archivo de la Curia de Alba. Hemos continuado con los Registros de los Archivos de la Parroquia Santa Victoria y de Monticello. Hemos entrelazado todo tipo de información para crear un núcleo central de la genealogía como se puede ver en el apéndice 4. El mismo tipo de técnica ha sido utilizada para reconstruir la genealogía de Roddi Gavuzzo como se puede ver en el apéndice 2. Las genealogías son descendencias de línea paterna (Fox 1967, páginas 45 y 49) donde por definición todos los individuos tienen el mismo apellido. Nosotros usamos la palabra ‘familia’ sea para una estirpe que para un núcleo marido y mujer con o sin hijos. La mayor parte de las genealogías que hemos compilado llegan hasta 1875, por una parte porque la dispersión de las familias dificulta el trabajo, pero también porque no es necesario para obtener el objetivo final del estudio Una de las fuentes principales, para monitorizar la vida de los individuos, que ha permitido crear las genealogías han sido los datos obtenidos en la Oficina de Archivo. Oficina creada por el gobierno piamontés en 1610 para catalogar y conservar los duplicados de los documentos legales. Dichos documentos se encuentran y pueden ser consultados en el Archivo Nacional. El Archivo Nacional de Cuneo dispone de todo el material de Alba y zonas circunstantes, mientras que en el Archivo Nacional de Turín se encuentra el material relativo a la ciudad y al resto de la provincia. Principalmente se trata de documentos relativos a actos de cesión, dotes, testamentos e inventarios. Hay que destacar que casi todas las familias campesinas poseían terrenos y que todas las mujeres casadas tenían una dote. La cantidad de material presente en el archivo es bastante grande a excepción de la parte relativa a Turín donde faltan algunos ficheros, los centenares de manuscritos que nosotros citamos son solo una muestra de todo el material relativo a la familia. Hemos utilizado otras dos fuentes, como son el registro del catastro del ayuntamiento y los censos eclesiásticos (status animarum). Estos últimos desgraciadamente no se encuentran en todas las localidades. La colección Molinari, en el Archivo de la Diócesis de Alba, cuenta con un gran número de documentos manuscritos relativos a Roddi, que no hemos tenido tiempo para examinarlos en profundidad.
Las fuentes escritas,
se citan entre paréntesis junto con el año, por ejemplo (Gavuzzi 1809) o (TI
1837). El primero se refiere a la lista de las publicaciones citadas, el
segundo a la lista de las fuentes manuscritas. Los números en negrita se
refieren a los textos originales Italianos que se encuentran después del
Capitulo VIII.
These uncommon surnames are now found mainly in Turin and Buenos Aires, the result of relatively recent immigration from rural Piedmont. During the fifty year period 1792-1841, which predates the main phase of emigration to the towns, the surnames were highly concentrated in the rural municipalities of Santa Vittoria d’Alba and Monticello d’Alba. Before 1792 they also occurred in the adjoining municipality of Roddi. The total number of people with the surnames Gavuzzo and Gavuzzi who are alive today can be roughly estimated from the number of telephone subscribers shown in Table 1. The ratio of the number of subscribers, usually the heads of families, to the total number of family members ranges from 2 to 4, depending on the region. The ratio for northern Italy is about 2.5 which, if assumed valid generally, gives a total of 198 individuals. Though not a large number, it is certainly not small enough to call the surname rare. Around 40% of the surnames in world telephone directories and electoral lists occur only once (Bartley et al. 2002). For example, the surname Pupione occurs only once in all the telephone directories of Italy. Surnames like this are rare indeed, but Gavuzzo and Gavuzzi would be better described as uncommon. The largest concentrations of the surnames are now found in Buenos Aires and Turin, the former due to emigration from Italy during the twentieth century, the latter to the nineteenth century urbanization of Piedmont. A historically much more significant cluster occurs between Alba and Asti, in northern Italy, with a mass centre near Santa Vittoria d’Alba (Fig. 1). The distribution of surnames before the movement of rural populations towards the towns of Piedmont in the nineteenth century can be obtained from the military conscription lists. These give the date and place of birth of the conscripts, together with the names of their parents. We selected the earliest records, which cover the fifty years 1792–1841, and plotted the birthplaces on a map (Fig. 2). The map includes all men with names like Gavuzzo or Gavuzzi born in Piedmont during this period. It shows a high concentration near the town of Alba, in Santa Vittoria d’Alba and Monticello d’Alba, suggesting that the family originated near there. It will be noted that there are no men from Roddi, the municipality next to Santa Vittoria. This is because the male line of the family, which once existed in Roddi, was dying out by 1792.
The conclusion that
the family originated near Alba is confirmed by a study of documents
in Turin and Carmagnola, two towns which attracted immigrants from all over
Piedmont in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The death registers for
Turin 1801-1863, the indexes to the notarial archive (insinuazioni)
for Turin 1725-1854, and the death registers for Carmagnola 1823-1867
contain only Gavuzzo or Gavuzzi individuals with ancestors in the
municipalities of Santa Vittoria, Monticello and Roddi.
Table 1. Numbers of Gavuzzo and Gavuzzi telephone subscribers _______________________________________________________________ Italy Argentina USA France Spain England Sweden Total _______________________________________________________________________________ Gavuzzo 7 15 2 3 1 0 0 38 Gavuzzi 25 5 7 0 0 1 3 41
______________________________________________________________ Uncommon surnames like Gavuzzo and Gavuzzi are today often possessed by men who share the same ancestor. This can be shown from studies of the Y chromosome, which determines male sex and is inherited along with the surname. A good example is provided by the English surname Sykes (Sykes & Irven 2000). There are currently about 10000 voters with this surname in England, so it is neither rare nor uncommon. The surname is now found mainly in the north of England, in an area about half the size of Piedmont, but in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was restricted to three villages. The DNA from a sample of living men called Sykes showed that about a half had the same Y chromosome, indicating descent from a common ancestor. This ancestor lived in the Middle Ages, when European surnames were established. The samples from the remaining Sykes had different Y chromosomes. Sykes & Irven conclude that this probably results from non-paternity events at the rate of 1.3% per generation over an assumed 700 year period, the result of adultery. DNA testing in recent years has shown that non-paternity within marriage occurs in all cultures and races at percentages at least as high as the figure stated above. At first sight it seems strange that the descendants of one man should be so common, like Sykes, while those of another are rare, like Pupione. The reason is that the number of a man’s descendants is determined by chance alone. It is sufficient to look at a well-researched genealogy in order to appreciate this. It will be seen that about 10% of all couples are infertile, and another 10% either have no male children, or those which they rear fail to marry. Some 30% of all couples have no male great-grandchildren and the percentage without male descendants in subsequent generations is even higher. By contrast, a couple with several male children, all of whom survive to maturity, marry and produce in their turn numerous male children, are destined to have many male descendants. A good example of the later is found in Santa Vittoria where, in 1850, there were 60 individuals called Gavuzzo (4% of the population), all descended from the same man in only five generations (Appendix 4). The area in which the Gavuzzo family originated lies astride the River Tanaro, about 40 kilometres south of Turin. Santa Vittoria and Monticello are on the northern side of the river, while Roddi is on the south (Fig. 3). The countryside is formed of low hills rising to no more than 200 metres above the river, and 400 metres above sea level. The hill slopes are covered by vineyards and hazel groves, with only the steepest parts wooded. The woodland trees are deciduous oaks and chestnuts, with a few maples, limes and hornbeams. Acacia (Robinia pseudoacacia), introduced from north America in the seventeenth century, is omnipresent. The River Tanaro is flanked by an alluvial terrace several kilometres wide, formerly occupied by irrigated meadows, but now mainly covered by poplar plantations and increasing numbers of factories. The municipalities of Santa Vittoria, Monticello and Roddi were constituted in the thirteenth century and remain today the administrative units responsible for local services. Each corresponds geographically to an ecclesiastical parish, and once corresponded to a manor, or feud. Consequently, each municipality has in its midst an ancient parish church, dwarfed by a huge brick-built medieval castle. The present population ranges from 1300 in Roddi to 2500 in Santa Vittoria. Apart from agriculture, the only significant industry in the area until recent years was the manufacture of the vermouth called Cinzano. The factory was established at Santa Vittoria in the early nineteenth century by Francesco and Giovanni Cinzano, and the name was eventually adopted as a frazione, or subdivision, of the municipality. It is worth noting, however, that there is no direct connection between the locality called Cinzano at Santa Vittoria and the municipality of Cinzano which lies about 20 kilometres east of Turin.
An episode in the
history of the Cinzano factory during the second World War is depicted in
the American film The secret of Santa Vittoria, directed in 1969 by
Stanley Kramer, and starring Anthony Quinn and Anna Magnani. In the
film the mayor (Anthony Quinn) refuses, even at gun point, to disclose to
the German army where the Company’s stocks of a million bottles of sparkling
wine had been hidden.
These surnames correspond to the Piedmontese family name Gavus. Documents written between 1450 and 1600 give the surname in the Latinized form Gavutius. After 1600 it is most commonly Italianized as Gavuzzo or Gauzzo. During the nineteenth century the spelling Gavuzzi was preferred, and gradually became dominant. The variant Gauzzo suggests that the name originated in the Longobard personal name Gauso, found frequently in contracts written between 750 and 1000 in northern and central Italy. Gauso was probably first used as a surname by a member of the family under discussion around 1300 at Roddi, near Alba in northern Italy. Gavuzzo and Gavuzzi are Italianized versions of the Piedmontese surname Gavus. Native speakers put the stress on the second syllable (Gav-us). The letter is u is pronounced as in French, while the v is scarcely heard. Italianization is achieved by adding an -o to the stem, in the same way that the city called Turin in Piedmontese becomes Torino in Italian. The origin of the surname, however, cannot be found by simply consulting a Piedmontese dictionary, for there is no word with which Gavus can plausibly be compared. A better approach is to examine the way it was formerly written with the aim of finding a meaningful root. For this purpose, the commonest spellings of the Gavuzzo surname from 1450 onwards are shown in in Table 2. It must be emphasized that the names in the Table were not selected at random but, rather, belonged to individuals who were members of the same family. The great diversity arises from the fact that this is a surname which lends itself to a multiplicity of spellings. Furthermore, almost all the examples in Table 2 were written in Latinized or Italianized form by priests or notaries for whom consistency in spelling was unimportant. Indeed, stability in the spelling of surnames in Italy only becomes evident after 1900. The Latinized form of the surname was always used before 1600. Gavutius was common in Roddi, but not in Santa Vittoria and Monticello, where Gheutius, Geutius, Ghecius and Geucius are found (see Table 2). Note that the letter h in both Medieval Latin and Italian makes the preceding g hard (as in ‘god’) rather than soft (as in ‘gem’). The examples given above, however, show that the h was frequently omitted. Most documents in Piedmont written after 1600 were in Italian. As already mentioned, the obvious way to Italianize Gavus is to add a final letter -o. For example, the surname of the lawyer Alessandro Gavuzzo in Santa Vittoria appears in the parish registers as Alexandro Ghuzo (in 1605), Alexandro Gheuzo (1606 & 1613), Alessandro Gheuzo (1611), Allisandro Gavuzzo (1617) and Allesandro Geuzzo (1622). Note that neither the surname nor the given name are spelt consistently. Most Italian surnames end in -i and there is a notable tendency for the final -o to be replaced by -i during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as shown in Fig. 4. The -i ending in Italian is a plural, like -s in English. So, a collective name for the members of a family with the surname Gavuzzo, is Gavuzzi, in the same way that in English one might refer to members of a Smith family as the ‘the Smiths’.
The change from
Gavuzzo to Gavuzzi is seen first in Roddi during the eighteenth
century. The surname Gavuzzo was always used in the notarial archive until
at least 1737. Gavuzzi appears for the first time in the parish
registers in 1710. The senator Stefano Gavuzzo (1711-1782) was born in Roddi
with this surname but used both Gavuzzo and Gavuzzi throughout his lifetime.
His children, born in Turin, were all called Gavuzzi. Many other individuals
born with the surname Gavuzzo changed it to Gavuzzi during their lives.
Perhaps the most remarkable transformation occurred in Monticello, where the
surname was usually written in the baptismal register by the parish priests
as Gavuzzo from 1772 until 1855, but subsequently as
Gavuzzi. Thus, the children of Table 2. Common Gavuzzo spellings in Piedmont 1400–1900
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
_____________________________________________________________________________________________ Names from parish registers are indicated by the letter r. For other references see the list of Manuscript Sources.
In short, the way the surname Gavuzzo is spelt has no genealogical significance whatever.
The Longobards The occurrence of Gauzzo as a common form of the family surname (see Table 2) is significant, for it closely resembles certain Longobard names. The Longobards, who originated in what is now Germany, ruled much of Italy from 568 until 773, leaving a legacy of Germanic place names, and contributing many words to the Italian language. About 10% of modern Italian surnames are of Longobard origin (De Felice 1978, p. 17). A Longobard presence in Monticello is attested by the place names Germania and Valdarimans (Molino 1984, p. 111). The town of Bra, only a few kilometres from Monticello, takes its name from the Longobard word brayde, signifying land and buildings belonging to the Church (Molino 1985, p. 20). The locality Gotta, about 3 km north-west of Bra, is also of Longobard origin (Milano 1924). During the early Middle Ages the old German word Gauta, meaning Goth, evolved into the Latinized forms Gauto, Gauz, Gauso, Cauzo, Gautius and hundreds of similar names (Förstermann 1900, vol. 1, cols. 610-611; Förstermann 1968, p. 142). The Longobard king Audoin (547–560) belonged to a tribe called Gausus, a fact recorded in the Longobard legal code known as the Edictum Rotharis, promulgated (in Latin) at Pavia in 643 (Baudi 1855, p. 10). The German (Neuhochdeutsch) derivatives of Gauta are names like Gauss, Gause, Göthe, etc. Names derived from the root Gauta appear frequently in late Longobard and early Medieval contracts. For example, in Lombardy, the Longobard heart-land, the personal names Gausus and Gauso are recorded six times between the years 761 and 910 (Porro Lambertenghi 1873, documents 25, 61, 126, 438 & 439; Schiaparelli 1933, document 284). At Lucca, in Tuscany, a man called Causo was witness to a contract signed in 759 (Schiaparelli 1933, document 133). Men called Causo and Causio also appear in documents dated 750 at Spoleto and 775 at Viterbo, respectively (Giorgio & Balzani 1879, vol. 2, pp. 37 & 86). The name is also found in southern Italy. A man named Gautius was party to a contract dated 842 which is among papers in the chartulary of the abbey of La Trinità della Cave, near Salerno (Morcaldi 1873, document 21). In Piedmont, the name Gauso appears in contracts signed at Asti between 880 and 1001 (Gabotto 1904, documents 14, 37, 45, 82, 110 & 127). Asti is only 30 kilometres from Roddi and Santa Vittoria. The personal names Gauso and Gauzo have been identified in medieval place names near Novara by Decio (1927). A contract written in 929 mentions in vico gausingo, where the personal name gauso is followed by the suffix –ing. In 973 there is ad monte Gausaldi, where the personal name Gaus is followed by the suffix –ald (Gabotto et al. 1913, documents 1 & 73). And in the year 1113 we find de busco uno qui nominatur Gauzo, or ‘Gauzo’s wood’, about 34 kilometres due south of Novara (Decio 1927, Gabotto et al. 1915). Place names like these are not found near Alba, however, apart from Gavuzzi Urbignano in Monticello, a locality created by the postal authority in the nineteenth century (see Chapter V). According to Bruckner (1895, p. 165 & 255), the family name Gavutius, once commonly used in Roddi (see Table 2), is the Latinized form of the Longobard personal name Gauzus or Gauzo. Thus, a likely hypothesis for the origin of the names Gauzzo and Gavuzzo is that they have been inherited from a man with a name like Gauso or Gauzo. The new surname might have been created when the children of the Gauso mentioned above started to use their father’s given name as their family name. This must have been long after the demise of the Longobard kingdom, for Italian surnames were created over the period 1000 to 1300 (De Felice 1982, p. 153). During the eleventh century, in fact, 96% of men in northern Italy had only a single name, but in the thirteenth century the average figure had dropped to only 30% and by 1300 was almost zero (Fulcheri 1906, p. 93). Gauso or Gauzzo are unfamiliar first names when compared with those of recent centuries, but names of Germanic origin predominated in northern Italy before 1150 (Fulcheri 1906, p. 19) and were still common around Alba as late as the fifteenth century. For example, in 1449 about 40% of mens' names in Roddi were Germanic, the commonest being Oddo, Oberto, Guglielmo, Enrico, Bardo and Teobaldo. Some of these Germanic names are no longer given to children in Italy, but survive as surnames. An example is Bardo, which gives rise to the Italian surname Bardi. Gauso and Gausus are others, for neither is found as a given name after the year 1001, at least in Piedmont. An examination of the Medieval name lists cited in Appendix 1 suggests that the surname Gavuzzo was first used in Roddi, for it does not occur in Santa Vittoria, Pollenzo, Monticello or Alba before 1448. There are, unfortunately, no extant name lists for Roddi before 1448, but since the family was well established there by this year (see Chapter III), it is the preferred point of origin.
Surnames like Gavuzzo Similar arguments to those outlined above may explain the origin of four other Italian families, three from the north and one from Rome, all with names probably derived from Gauzo or Gauso (Fig. 5); (1) Gauzzi (c.127 individuals) at Pavia, Milan, Rome and Spoleto, (2) Gaucci (c.92 individuals) mostly in Rome, (3) Cauzzo (c.262 individuals) now mainly around Padova and Varese, (4) Cauzzi (c.427 individuals) mainly around Mantova and Cremona, with a smaller group at Milan. This surname was also formerly spelled Cavuzzi. One branch of the Cauzzi family at Pieve San Giacomo, near Cremona, had attained nobility by 1329 but the male line died out in 1696 (Fazzi 1995). Another branch obtained the feuds of Binanova, Levata and Longardore, near Cremona, in 1689 (Crollalanza 1886, vol. 1, p. 265).
Italian telephone
subscriber lists have been used to estimate the numbers shown in brackets
above, according to the procedure noted on p. 3. Of the names listed above
Cauzzo, Cauzzi and Gauzzi occur almost entirely in Lombardy and Veneto, but
not in Piedmont. Consequently, any surname like Gauzzo in Piedmont is very
probably born by people descended from a Piedmontese ancestor. As we have
seen in Chapter I, all those in
Piedmont with surnames like Gauzzo or Gavuzzo had ancestors in the
south-eastern part of the region––in Santa Vittoria, Monticello or Roddi.
Another interesting feature of
Fig. 5 is the
geographical separation of the surnames Cauzzo and Cauzzi, which suggests
that the ending in -o or -i has more significance than for
Gavuzzo and Gavuzzi, which occur in the same area of Piedmont.
The earliest record of Gavuzzo men in Roddi dates from 1449 when they already formed about 5% of the local male population. The percentage remained at this level until the early seventeenth century when it declined rapidly. By 1644 there was only one Gavuzzo family left. This one family had been, and continued to be, particularly influential in municipal affairs and is documented in Appendix 2. Its members served as mayors, counsellors, notaries, priests and doctors in Roddi from the end of the sixteenth century until about 1828 when the male line died out. Its most notable member was the jurist Stefano Gavuzzo (1711-1782) who settled in Turin in 1740. Other Gavuzzo families in Roddi in the early seventeenth century were mainly farmers, each owning a few hectares of land. One such was that of Girolamo Gavuzzo. His son Stefano, who settled in the adjacent municipality of Monticello in 1630, is the progenitor of all those with the surnames Gavuzzo or Gavuzzi alive today (Chapter V). Sources dealing with Roddi families before the seventeenth century are sparse and provide us with little idea of their social condition. The earliest document dates from 1449 when all the 154 men of the municipality of Roddi were called to the parish church, Santa Maria dell’Olmo, to swear loyalty to their feudal superiors (AM 1449, TC 1449). Eight had the surname Gavutius, the Latin form of Gavuzzo: Antonius, Henricus, Petrus, Odonus, Thebaudus, Conradus, Johannes and Romanellus. In other words, 5% of the total male population was formed of men called Gavutius. A document dated the following year, 1450, lists 42 householders in Roddi, including Conradius and Oddonus Gavutius (AM 1450). These same two names occur in the 1449 list. However, the number of Gavuzzo families, as distinct from households, was almost certainly more than two. An average family had five men, women and children at this time (Beloch 1995, p. 4), This, together with the probable absence of boys aged fifteen years and under from the 1449 list, suggests that in Roddi there were four families, some of which may have been living together. A common ancestor for these families probably lived at least a century earlier, close to the period when Italian surnames were forming, i.e. about 1300. A document of 1470 cites Petrus Gavutius, who was one of the joint mayors of Roddi, and Henricus Gavutius, a householder (AM 1470). Only a few years later one of the Gavuzzo families owned a house facing on to the central square of the village, next to the parish church and the castle (AM 1487). The church and the square at that time, however, were not those of today, but were located by the existing campanile. In 1501 another oath of loyalty shows seven men with the surname Gavutius in Roddi: Odonus, Augustinus, Henricus, Stephanus, Ant[onius] Obertus, Petrus and Antonellus (RC 1501). By the late sixteenth century (1589-1600) children from six Gavuzzo families are recorded in the baptismal register in Roddi, the fathers being Bartolomeo, magnifico Giovanni Battista, Giovanni Vincenzo, Girolamo, Marc Antonio, and Stefano. In 1620 there were still five families (AM 1894). The fathers were signor Giovanni Battista, Giacomo, signor Stefano, Tibaldo, and Vincenzo. Most of these men were farmers, but some were not. Giovanni Battista was a physician (AM 1604), who died in 1621 aged 46 years. Another Giovanni Battista is recorded by Mussi (1979, p. 36) as municipal accountant (ragioniere), and land surveyor (atterminatore) in 1622. Signor Stefano was a notary about whom more is written below. By 1640 the number of Gavuzzo families in Roddi had declined to only one. The reason is unclear, but epidemics of plague were frequent about this time in nearby municipalities and may have significantly reduced the population of Roddi.
Gavuzzo jurists The most prominent Gavuzzo family in Roddi in the early seventeenth century was that which included signor Stefano, the notary. This lineage can be traced from the late sixteenth century down to about 1828 (see Appendix 2 & Fig. 6) using the parish registers. Abundant bio-graphical details come from dowries, wills and conveyances recorded from 1636 onwards in the notarial archive (insinuazioni). Such documents reveal a lot about family structure, contemporary life and attitudes of mind. They invariably repay careful scrutiny. We start with the wills of signor Stefano, the notary, and his wife. Stefano Gavuzzo, the notary, died leaving no surviving children. His will, written 25 January 1645 (CAI 1645), is thus largely concerned with legacies to charities, to his wife, nieces and friends. Like all wills of the period, the legacies start with charities, in this case the confraternities of the Santissimo Rosario and the Compagnie del Carmine. He wanted a hundred and fifty masses said during the six months following his death for the repose of his soul. Considerable space in the will is devoted to the chapel of San Sebastiano which Stefano had endowed in 1640. The endowment gave him the right (juspatronatus) to nominate the priest. Stefano’s wife Giovanna was left all the linen and clothes, furniture, four plates, two (solid) tin serving dishes and four brass spoons, together with six sacks of wheat and a carra (591 litres) of good red wine which represented part of her dowry. She had also to be provided annually by his heir with 15 lire in cash, three sacks of wheat, six staia of good red wine, and the cost of her food. The exact volume of six staia of wine at Roddi is uncertain, but would certainly be several hundred litres. Immediately after Stefano’s death his heir was to buy for Giovanna a mourning dress of black wool (cadizzo negro). Stefano’s heir was his nephew, the lawyer Franceschino Gavuzzo who appears at the start of the genealogy in Figure 6 and Appendix 2. The nieces who received the legacies, probably the sisters of Franceschino, were four. Two of them, evidently uppermost in Stefano’s mind as he dictated his will, are mentioned near the beginning of the document, while two others appear near the end. The first two were Caterina, wife of Giuseppe Crocetto and Lucia, wife of Bartolomeo Sineo. They were left 15 lire each. In addition, Caterina received the life tenancy of a house in the contrada Piazza, in the centre of Roddi village, a wine barrel of capacity 3 staia, and a half share in a hemp field of unspecified size at Goretto. Lucia got the other half of the hemp field. The other two nieces were Anna Caterina, wife of Sebastiano Sineo, and Giovanna, widow of Giovanni Andrea Adriano. They were left 10 lire each. The legacies in cash total 165 lire, while the capital needed to maintain Stefano’s widow can be estimated at around 400 lire. The overall value of his estate was evidently much greater than this (565 lire), making him one of the wealthier inhabitants of Roddi, even though some items, like the spoons and the plates, suggest a simple life-style. Solid tin tableware, it should be noted, was often used instead of silver or porcelain at this time. The will says nothing about where Giovanna was to live. However, eight years later, in January 1653, she was in her own house in Roddi. Here she dictated her will while lying ill in bed (CAI 1653). The numerous legacies virtually all regard property, for she evidently had little disposable cash. She left wheat due to her, probably from a tenant, to finance the rebuilding of the chapel of Sant’ Agostino. Other legacies include a fur coat (to Anna Caterina, wife of Sebastiano Sineo), a black twill dress (to Caterina, widow of Giuseppe Crosetto), a red jacket and a black mantle (to Marchetta, wife of messer Franceschino Gavuzzo), 2 emine (about 50 litres) of wheat and a staio of red wine (to Giovanni Amedeo), 2 emine of wheat (to Francesco Rogna), two bed sheets (to Antonio Sineo), her house and a barrel of capacity 4 staia with the wine it contained (to Carlo Picho), and half a pig (to messer Franceschino Gavuzzo). Raising a pig to slaughter at Christmas has long been a custom of country people in Italy. Giovanna had apparently agreed with a neighbour to pay half the cost of rearing one, and the products (hams, sausages) were then in her kitchen. Carlo Picho, who was given the house, was required to celebrate fifteen masses for the repose of her soul, and buy her coffin. Giovanna’s servant Ippolita Sarda was left the use of the house for as long as the new owner did not need it, together with the remaining wine, a barrel containing 90 kilograms of flour, two aprons, and a chemise. Giovanna’s heirs (heredi universali) are named in the will as Francesco Adriano di Adriana and messer Giovanni Francesco Rogna. The former, however, lost his right to inherit if he were to die without male heirs. He may have been Giovanna’s brother. Giovanna’s heirs were required to celebrate thirty masses for the repose of her soul. This insistence on having masses said was by no means peculiar to Giovanna and her husband. Marchetta, the wife of Franceschino Gavuzzo (see below), on receiving a legacy of land worth 170 lire from her uncle in 1666, spent 65 lire on masses to be said weekly over two years in the chapel of San Sebastiano in Roddi (CAI 1666). The custom of leaving money in one’s will for the saying of masses continued well into the nineteenth century. The genealogy of the family contained in Appendix 2 and shown graphically in Fig. 6 begins with messer Franceschino Gavuzzo and his wife Marchetta Garesio. Franceschino, from his title, was a law graduate, like his father Sebastiano and his uncle signor Stefano who is discussed above. Franceschino’s eldest son, Stefano was the parish priest of Roddi from 1681 until he resigned in 1717. The younger son Ottavio, who was one of three notaries in the municipality, appears as joint mayor in 1675 (Mussi 1979, p. 36 & 81) and was permanent secretary to the municipality 1677-1689 (Mussi 1979, p. 81). His autograph is shown in Fig. 7. The permanent secretaryship was, and still is, a cardinal position in the municipal administration, for it was occupied by a lawyer whose function was to provide legal advice to the mayor and elected counsellors. Girolamo Francesco Gavuzzo (Fig. 6, II.1), the son of the Ottavio mentioned above, was a law graduate and military magistrate (vice-uditore di guerra). He appears in the 1711 land register for Roddi as owner of a house and 13 hectares of land (RC 1711, fol. 31). The land included a plot 3 hectares in extent next to the chapel of San Sebastiano, where the house, farm buildings and threshing floor were situated. The farmhouse and surrounding land was called della Valle (TI 1790i), corresponding to what is now Via Ferreri and the Piazza S. Gavuzzi. The chapel of San Sebastiano was probably where the modern chapel dedicated to the war dead now stands. Girolamo’s brother Stefano Giacinto was parish priest of Roddi from 1719 until 1778. The most notable of Girolamo’s sons was Stefano Giuseppe Gavuzzo (Fig. 6, III.5) who was appointed to the advocate general’s office in Turin in 1740. He was a member of the Piedmontese court of appeal (senato) from 1759 and retired in 1779 with the courtesy title of president of the senate. Stefano’s numerous family, who used the surname Gavuzzi, remained in Turin, becoming army officers, archivists, architects and administrators during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Appendix 2). The senator’s fame, however, comes from his comic libretto L’Adramiteno, written sometime before 1769 (Manno 1884) but only published after his death (Gavuzzi 1809). More is written in Chapter VI about the senator’s life and work. The last of the Roddi family was Amedeo Gavuzzi (Fig. 6, IV.25), who graduated in medicine in the University of Turin and practised as a physician in Roddi until his death about 1828. He had eight children, but only two were sons and neither survived childhood. There is no evidence that any members of this family were more substantial land-owners than Girolamo. The entry of the family into what may be termed the administrative class seems to have been determined as early as the sixteenth century for reasons as yet unknown.
The Mantelli marriage The Mantelli family were notaries, lawyers and priests in Roddi for many generations. Senator Gavuzzo’s elder sister Anna Cecilia married the lawyer Sebastiano Mantelli in 1723 with a dowry of 2000 lire. Although this is four or five times more than the dowries of other members of the same family a century earlier, its real value was little different. The unit price of land, for example, increased by a similar factor over the same period. In 1735 ill-fortune struck the family. Cecilia’s father died and she herself fell seriously ill. Her dowry had still not been paid in full, even though twelve years had elapsed since the marriage. At this point her husband asked for the balance immediately, to the consternation of her uncle Stefano and her brother Stefano Luigi who were now responsible for paying it. They hastily mortgaged some land (CAI 1735a) and settled the dowry only five months before Cecilia died (CAI 1735b). Cecilia, who was about 30 years old, left a young daughter, Paola Maria Mantelli. The following year Sebastiano Mantelli was killed, probably in a duel, and the child was made a ward of her grandmother Paola Maria Gavuzzo and her uncle Stefano Gavuzzo, the future senator (CAI 1736a). The only positive outcome of this tragic story is the inventory of the Mantelli possessions, required by law to protect the interests of the child, which provides us with a minutely detailed account of the family patrimony (CAI 1736b). It was compiled by Paola Maria and Stefano Gavuzzo, the child’s legal guardians, over a period of three days; 21-22 & 27 August 1736. Sebastiano Mantelli owned 17 hectares of land in Perno and Roddi, including two farmhouses, but the most interesting feature of the inventory is the contents of his house in Roddi. His wife’s jewel box contained two gold ear-rings, a gold cross, a ring decorated with gold, enamel and an emerald, a ring with three diamonds, a silver necklace with fourteen diamonds, two silver ear pendants with four diamonds, a silver buckle, a silver pin, a scissor case decorated with silver filigree, a small silver bowl, probably for cosmetics, four silver buttons for a man’s jacket, a slender belt of silver thread, and a silver tie pin. The house contained eight pictures, almost all of religious subjects. There was 16 kilograms of tin-ware. Twenty serving plates alone weighed 9 kilograms. There were knives and forks for eight people, but apparently no glassware, porcelain or earthenware. There is a long list of furniture and clothes, some of the latter of notable elegance. Cecilia’s clothes include only five dresses and no fur coat, suggesting that some of her possessions had been already dispersed. The child’s clothes and toys are not mentioned. Nor are any musical instruments or games listed. There were several firearms, including a blunderbuss, a shotgun, and two pistols. Of thirteen books listed, most have a religious content, of which one is particularly ironic considering the family’s relative wealth: La povertà contenta, descritta, e dedicata a’ricchi non mai contenti (Bartoli 1650). This can be translated as ‘a description of the delights of poverty, dedicated to the rich who are never satisfied’. Another thirty-six books in a store room included classical texts in Latin, more religious works, a few legal reference books, and a volume entitled Reggia Parnassi. A book with the same title was in senator Gavuzzi’s library in Turin when he died in 1782 (see Chapter VI ) and one may wonder if it first caught his eye whilst making the inventory in Roddi in 1736. There are only three books out of the total of forty-nine which could be described as light reading. Two of them are by the seventeenth century writer Giovan Francesco Loredano (Scherzi geniali & Delle Lettere) and one by Antonio Lupis (Il corriere). Scherzi geniali fictionalises episodes from classical history, for example the philosopher Seneca pleading with the Emperor Nero for his life. The Lettere are sample letters for every occasion, some of which might bring a smile to a modern reader. For example, one is to a man who has seduced the writer’s sister, calculated to induce remorse but without provoking a duel. Il corriere, published in 1692, consists of some five hundred short essays on a variety of topics, designed to be amusing and uplifting. The reader might wonder if there were no books more entertaining than these to be had, but it seems that at this time there were not. The fate of the rich little girl Paola Maria Mantelli is uncertain. She did not marry in Roddi, nor did she die there. Her grandmother and guardian Paola Maria Gavuzzo did not die in Roddi either. Perhaps they both moved elsewhere, to Alba or to Turin. It will be recalled that the child’s other guardian, Stefano Luigi Gavuzzo was living in Turin by 1740. It is possible that his mother and niece went with him.
Gavuzzo farmers So far we have dwelt on the most important Gavuzzo family in Roddi, but as mentioned above there were several others. A Gavuzzo family from a quite different social level is described in a document written at Roddi on 13 November 1666 (CAI 1666b). It concerns the division of the estate of Giacomo Gavuzzo. Giacomo was born in Roddi in 1592, the son of Bartolomeo Gavuzzo. Both Giacomo and his wife Caterina were dead by 1666. Giacomo may have inherited property, but also acquired a hectare of meadow and vines in 1645 (CAI 1645d) and more land subsequently (1646a, 1648b, 1650a). His heirs were his four children Vincenzo, Giovanni Tommaso, Antonina, and Agnesina. Giovanni Tommaso had already died and it is likely that the land had been taken in hand by the remaining son, Vincenzo. Antonina was the wife of mastro Francesco Minetto, from his title a master craftsman, and the only person in the family who seems to have had any money. Agnesina, who was born in Roddi 16 March 1644, is described in the document as an ‘unmarried, poor girl (povera giovine) working as a domestic servant away from home’. The formal division of the estate would probably never have taken place but for Agnesina’s desire for a dowry. She had contracted on 8 October 1665 to marry Giovanni Gugliermino Thibaldi from Pocapaglia, a municipality eight kilometres from Roddi. To this end she had borrowed 12 lire from her brother-in-law Francesco, probably to buy the few new items which appear in her trousseau. But the dowry had been fixed at 70 lire, to be paid within a year, i.e. by October 1666. The required sum came from the division of her father’s estate into four parts, which yielded her 66 lire, paid by her brother-in-law Francesco. The nature of the divided property is not specified in the document, but from its value (264 lire) might have been two hectares of land and a small farmhouse. Agnesina’s trousseau is described as follows;
Four sheets, and a new blanket of patterned cloth; an apron made of rushes, used, and three of white canvas, one of yellow canvas, one of linen, new; eight chemises, used, two of linen, new, one of silk; six scarves, three used and three new; a double-sized scarf, seven scarves of patterned cloth, and three of Venetian cambric, used; five used serviettes; three head bands of Venetian cambric, used; two new towels; three dresses, one of grey twill, new, one of grey felted wool, new, and one of thin grey wool, used, with a new jacket of felted wool; three pairs of shoes, one pair white and two pairs black; two pairs of stockings, one pair of finely woven wool, new, the other pair used; a silver hair pin; eight strings of garnets including 30 hollow golden pearls; two light straw hats; seven ribbons; two embroidered table cloths; (two) jackets of patterned cloth with two strings of red coral; two night caps of Venetian cambric, with a quilt, with a silver cross and a wedding ring.[1]
The rushes(biodi) used to make the apron were species yielding a fibre like rafia. Several words in this passage fell into disuse centuries ago and are difficult to translate. The ‘patterned cloth’ (tella novena in the original), probably had a pattern which repeated every nine threads. The ‘Venetian cambric’ (tella di marzaro) refers to a fabric used for scarves, translated as cambric for this reason alone. Marzaro was a street in Venice. The scarves were squares of embroidered material to cover the head or neck. The most surprising item in the list is the wedding ring, normally provided by the husband. Maybe it had belonged to Agnesina’s mother. There is no mention of a box to contain the items listed above, perhaps because she was working in Pocapaglia in the same house as her husband. To get a rough idea of the value of the dowry (70 lire) it is sufficient to recall that a hectare of farm land then cost about 100 lire. By comparison, the dowries of women in Franceschino Gavuzzo’s family at about this time were between 350 lire and 450 lire (CAI 1656, 1668, 1691), about six times what Agnesina got. However, there was some good news; ‘to demonstrate the deep affection which Giovanni Gugliermino has for Agnesina his future wife he contracts to add 50 lire to her dowry’. The contribution by a husband was usually only a quarter of the wife’s dowry, so perhaps the ‘deep affection’ was more than just a legal formula. Giovanni also contracted to buy for his future wife a wedding dress (veste nuptiale) together with the necessary accessories (dependenze).
From the point of
view of those who now have the surname Gavuzzo, the most significant family
in Roddi in the seventeenth century was that of Girolamo, who died there in
1617. It was his son Stefano who founded the Monticello branch of the
family, the only one which survives today (see
Chapter V). Unfortunately,
Girolamo’s death predates the earliest surviving notarial documents, so that
we have to learn what we can from the parish registers. In these he
appears without any title, such as messer, or signore,
making it very probable that he was a farmer like Giacomo Gavuzzo,
described above.
The wealthy and evidently well-educated Gavuzzo family in Santa Vittoria makes its first recorded appearance in 1448. They are not listed as residents of the municipality in 1433 and are presumed to have come from Roddi shortly before 1448. The most notable member of the family was the notary Benedetto Gavuzzi (1600-1659), appointed by the Duke of Savoy as magistrate (pretore) for Roddi, Santa Vittoria, Monticello and Pollenzo. The male line of the family appears to have died out by about 1700. The numerous Gavuzzo families in Santa Vittoria in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came from Monticello (see Chapter V). The first occurrence of the Gavuzzo surname in Santa Vittoria is in 1448 when Obertus Gheucius appears as a witness to a property sale (SV 1448). The land register for the following year contains two entries regarding the family. The first lists land and buildings belonging to Obertus and his grandsons Menfredus and Johannes Geucius (Obertus geucius suo nomine et Menfredi et Johannis eius nepotum), who jointly owned two houses and 49 fields covering 9.08 hectares. The second family is that of Menfredus Geucius, representing Giovannina de Quarto, his mother. The original register entry is reproduced in Fig. 8. Giovannina de Quarto owned a large house and two fields covering 0.5 hectares in all (SVC 1449, fol. 64 & 65). The houses and some of the fields the family owned can be located exactly, thanks to Baldassare Molino’s detailed research on old place names (Molino 1984, p. 137-142; Soletti 1984). All the houses were in burgo solani, by the church of San Rocco, which still stands near the castle. The land described as being at Ad confurcium plani (the market place) was lower down, where the present borgo is located. The family had several fields about 1.5 kilometre to the east of the borgo, near Cascina Carnevale and the Rio Genta, where in medieval times there was a settlement called Castelletum. These fields appear in the register with locality names ad sanctum martinum (San Martino) and Pontuxellum (Pontizello). About a kilometre north-east of the present borgo they had more fields at ad villam veterem (Villavecchia) and ad crossam Sancti Petri (San Pietro). The last group of fields that can be identified was at sanctus ambroxium (Sant Ambrogio), a locality which still exists about 1.5 kilometres north-east of the present borgo. There are several sixteenth century land registers for Santa Vittoria. In 1529 we find a Manfredus Geutius owning 70 fields (SVC 1529, fol. 67), and in 1542 a Manfredus Gheutius, son of Obertus, with a comparable number of fields, extending over 11.37 hectares (SVC 1542, fol. 75). Manfredus also owned 0.66 hectares of arable land in Pollenzo (SVC 1542 fol. 77). The land register for 1570 lists 65 men, including Manfredus Gheucius with 22 fields covering 8.06 hectares, and Joannes Gheutius with 5 fields covering 1.51 hectares (SVC 1570, fol. 57 & fol. 158). It is probable that the Manfredus in all these land registers is the same man. However, the surname disappears shortly afterwards, for the list of Santa Vittoria men who swore loyalty to their feudal superiors in 1578 (SV 1578) contains no surname like Gheutius. There were two Gavuzzo land-owners in Santa Vittoria only eight years earlier, and there were several Gavuzzo families resident in the municipality in the early seventeenth century, which makes their absence in 1578 quite puzzling. It is possible that those listed in the land registers for the sixteenth century were actually resident elsewhere, perhaps in the adjoining territory of Pollenzo. Some of the men in Santa Vittoria in the early seventeenth century had, in fact, been previously resident in Pollenzo (see Appendix 3). For the seventeenth century there are registers of births, marriages and deaths in the parish archive which allow the identification of at least three Gavuzzo families in Santa Vittoria, the heads of which were probably brothers, all born between 1583 and 1617 (Appendix 3). The reason for thinking them brothers is that they appear as witnesses at each other’s weddings, and as godparents of each other’s children. The eldest brother, Alessandro, is always styled messere, indicating that he was a graduate, probably in law. He was a municipal councillor in Santa Vittoria in 1613. However, the most prominent member of these families was Alessandro’s son Benedetto Gheuzo, a magistrate (pretore and also podestà) from 1640, or earlier, until his death in 1653. In the death register he is described as ‘magistrate (pretore) of Santa Vittoria, Pollenzo, Monticello and also Roddi’. Benedetto’s autograph is reproduced in Fig. 9. Benedetto Gheuzo was a popular man, often invited to weddings to act as a witness, and to baptisms as a godfather. He and his brother Simone were evidently on friendly terms with the Romagnano family, the feudal lords of Pollenzo and Santa Vittoria. Giovanni Francesco Romagnano was godfather to Simone’s son Giovanni Francesco in Pollenzo in 1635. Cavaliere Amedeo Romagnano was witness at the wedding of Simone’s son Sebastiano in Santa Vittoria in 1638. The same year Benedetto baptised one of Francesco Romagnano’s children, just born and expected to die, in Santa Vittoria. And in 1644 Count Giovanni Francesco Romagnano of Pollenzo was godfather to one of Benedetto’s children born in Pollenzo.
By the end of the
seventeenth century all Gavuzzo families had disappeared from Santa
Vittoria. Benedetto Gheuzo left a widow and four adult sons, none of whom
died in Santa Vittoria. However, he owned at least one house in Bra, a town
5 km from Santa Vittoria, and his family may have moved thence after his
death. If so, his descendants left no trace, for the surname does not figure
in the annals of Bra either in the seventeenth century or later (Mathis
1888).
Stefano Gavuzzo left Roddi for Monticello in 1630 to marry the widow Margherita Visino. Stefano established himself as a landowner in Monticello and died there in 1652. All those with the surnames Gavuzzo and Gavuzzi alive today are his descendants by his second wife Ippolita da Como. The family expanded into the adjoining municipality of Santa Vittoria in the eighteenth century where by 1850 it constituted some 4% of the total population. Some notable members of the family detailed in this Chapter are Stefano Gavuzzi (1763-1833), who was major-domo to the Queen of Sweden, his son Otto Ignazio Gavuzzi (1796-1846) a wealthy industrialist, Giuseppe Gavuzzi (1830-1898) author of a Piedmontese dictionary, Pietro Gavuzzi (1870-1945) manager of the renowned Victoria Falls Hotel, and Pete Gavuzzi (1905-1981) the celebrated ultra-marathon runner. Steano Gavuzzo and his descendants are shown graphically in Figure 10. We know relatively little of Stefano’s ancestry, and nothing about his relationship to the other Gavuzzo families of Roddi, of which there were six, including that detailed in Appendix 2. From the parish register of deaths we find that his father Girolamo died in Roddi in 1617 aged about 45 years. Girolamo and his wife Margherita had their first child Antonina born 19 January 1597, but there is no extant register of births for Roddi covering the period 1601-1615, so that the date of Stefano’s birth cannot be determined. No descendants of Girolamo are mentioned in the notarial archive for Roddi (from 1636 onwards), suggesting that Stefano was Girolamo’s only surviving son. Stefano’s first marriage in Monticello was most unusual in that he was about 20 years old while his wife was 56. The dowry contract (CCI 1630a) stipulated that Stefano was to be Margherita’s heir should she die before him without children, as in fact happened. The value of her inheritance is not stated in the contract. However, Stefano’s contribution (controdote) was 50 scudi. This suggests that Margarita’s dowry was worth at least 200 scudi. In terms of the silver lire, introduced in Piedmont in 1632, the 200 scudi were roughly 300 lire, the value of about three hectares of land. One might have expected that the marriage would be brief, for at this time hardly anyone survived to the age of 60 years. In fact it lasted 14 years, by which time Margherita was 70 years old. Only five weeks after she died, in 1644, Stefano remarried, this time a woman of his own age, Ippolita da Como, widow of Cristophoro Testa. Ippolita’s dowry was 150 lire and Stefano’s contribution (controdote) 25 lire (CCI 1652), both much less than for his first wife. Stefano and Ippolita had two children, both mentioned in Stefano’s will of 1652 (CCI 1652). The dowry allotted in the will to his daughter Margherita was 250 lire. Assuming that this represented half the total value of his property (the other half going to his son), and taking into account the average value of farm land, then about 100 lire per hectare, it seems that Stefano owned about 5 hectares of land. He also owned at least two farm houses, at Overo and Valombria. By Piedmontese standards this was quite a substantial property, the reason no doubt for his nomination as a municipal councillor in 1643 (CCI 1643). Stefano’s heir was his son Girolamo, named after his grandfather. The genealogical tree, Figure 10, shows Girolamo and his immediate descendants . Girolamo (Fig. 10, I.2) owned houses in Monticello at Overo del Beale and Urbignano. Overo, bought by his father in 1634 (CCI 1634), was near the castle of Monticello. Urbignano consists of a group of farm-houses half way between the two main villages––Villa, surrounding the castle, and the Borgo, down near the Torrente Mellea. Some members of the family still own property at Urbignano, and in the nineteenth century so many Gavuzzo families were concentrated there that it was denominated Gavuzzi Urbignano for administrative and postal purposes (Poste 1880, p. 274). Lunardon (1997, p. 100-102) recalls the rivalry between the inhabitants of the Villa and the Borgo, and recounts an anecdote regarding Urbignano and one of the Gavuzzo family who lived there. The inhabitants of the Villa used to call those from the Borgo Paciariné (from the Piedmontese word paciarina, meaning mud), while those of the Villa were called Fasorté (from the Piedmontese faseul, meaning bean). Sometimes they would insult each other with these names:
One day it rained so much that the roads of beaten earth up at Villa sent a veritable mudflow down to the Borgo. The mud even got into the houses. When the rain stopped the inhabitants of the Borgo gathered in the square and decided to go up to Villa to complain, hoping that something would be done about it. As they made their way up the muddy track they suddenly heard a burst of laughter from the inhabitants of the Villa, who were mocking them. Paciariné...! they shouted from their superior position. The poor residents from the Borgo, already irritated by what had happened, started to throw stones and then, responding to the name they had been called, shouted altogether, Fasorté....! All day the two groups insulted each other, the Paciariné sitting in the mud and the Fasorté sheltering behind rows of beans. Eventually, when they had begun to look at each other with an air of shame, a woman who lived half way up the hill, at Libignano [Urbignano] suddenly said “Paciariné or Fasorté, you all come from the same place, you must be hungry and thirsty, and its nearly night”. For some minutes they all looked at each other in silence, and then exploded into laughter. The woman had a large house and invited in all the Paciariné and Fasorté who ended their laughter by happily eating and drinking together. [2]
Girolamo Gavuzzo had two sons. The eldest, called Stefano (Fig. 10, II.2), is the progenitor of the Gavuzzo and Gavuzzi families of Monticello. The younger brother Felice (Fig. 10, II.5) acquired substantial land holdings in Santa Vittoria during the eighteenth century (Table 4) and generated the Gavuzzo family in Santa Vittoria which, by 1850, accounted for 4% of the population. The Gavuzzo men of Monticello and Santa Vittoria in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were mostly small farmers owning no more than 8 hectares of land (see Table 4). Farms of this size may seem small by international standards, but even now 78% of farms in Piedmont are under 10 hectares, and 60% are less than 5 hectares (ISTAT 2001, Table 2.2). In the eighteenth century few of the Gavuzzo farmers thought of abandoning agriculture to find other types of work, but subsequently emigration became increasingly frequent and there are today no members of the family resident in Monticello and only a few in Santa Vittoria. Some of the more notable emigrants are described below.
The Cinzano branch Girolamo Gavuzzo (Fig. 10, III.2) who was born in Monticello in 1711, worked for the Marquis Della Chiesa of Cinzano from about 1735 until his death at Cinzano in 1790. Cinzano is a rural municipality 20 kilometres east of Turin, with a population of only a few hundred souls, mainly occupied in tending the vineyards. The tiny village surrounds a brick-built castle and an old parish church. The Marquis was also lord of Roddi, not far from Monticello, which probably explains how Girolamo came to be employed at Cinzano. The Marquis gave ‘the noble Girolamo Gavuzzo his present agent in the said feud of Cinzano’ power of attorney (procura speciale) to act during his temporary absence from the estate in 1770. This suggests that Girolomo was by then entirely responsible for the administration of the castle and the estate . When Girolamo’s daughter Lucia decided to marry in 1770 he promised his son-in-law that she would have a dowry of 100 lire (equivalent to about 600 euros today). In the event she only got 50 lire. The rest was paid in instalments over the following twelve years. Considering the responsible position held by Lucia’s father one might have expected a dowry of around 800 lire, which was the average value of those for countrywomen around Turin in 1770, and similar to those of artisan’s daughters in the city (Duglio 1975). Perhaps Girolamo’s parsimony had to do with the fact he had five marriageable daughters, all needing dowries. Lucia’s trousseau was constituted as follows:
A list of the clothes, linen and money given by Gerolamo Gavuzzi to his daughter Lucia on the occasion of her marriage to Gioani Battista Salerio of Fosano: a two-piece dress consisting of a felted wool jacket and finely woven woollen skirt; another dress with a camel-hair jacket and a grey, combed woollen skirt; another dress with a felted goat-hair jacket and a striped camel-hair skirt; and another with a coarsely woven cotton jacket and a flanelette skirt; a dress of combed silk; a jacket of ambrosiera; a fur mantle as new; fifteen fine hemp blouses; twelve hemp aprons; ten hemp kerchiefs; four muslin kerchiefs; two aprons of printed cotton fabric and two of muslin; seven pairs of stockings made of home-spun cotton; six muslin aprons of various sorts; a mantle; six hemp table-napkins; a new wooden trunk, worth nine lire, to serve as a clothes chest; and 50 Piedmontese lire in cash...[3]
Ambrosiera, or ambrosëtta was a thin, light woollen cloth named after its manufacturer. The kerchiefs were embroidered squares to cover the head or the neck. The Gavuzzo family in Cinzano was extinguished with the death of Girolamo’s great grand-daughter Spirindia in 1834. Other descendants emigrated to localities nearer Torino. Sweden Girolamo’s last child, baptized ‘Stefanus Gavuzzo’ at Cinzano in 1763 (Fig. 11, IV.11), emigrated to Sweden in 1790 when he was 27 years old. On arrival he adopted the name Etienne Maria Gavuzzi. This new name seems to suggest a deliberate break with his past, emphasized by the fact that he defied Piedmontese custom by failing to give his father’s name Girolamo to either of his sons, but instead preferred that of his brother Ignazio. Nor did he name any of his daughters after his mother, Maria. The first documentary evidence of Stefano’s residence in Sweden is in 1791 when he appears in the Swedish port of Helsingborg as a lodger in the house of Anna Hülse, widow of the customs officer Friedrich Torgstedt (LM 1791). Helsingborg is just across the strait from Copenhagen. The widow Torgstedt had two children, a son Christian, aged 14 years, and a daughter Ulrike aged 15 (SSB 1948b). Stefano presumably worked in Helsingborg, and learned Swedish, doubtless with the assistance of Ulrike, whom he later married. In 1793 Stefano went to Stockholm to work for the dowager queen Sofia Magdalena, widowed the previous year by the assassination of her husband, Gustav III. She was 47 years old while Stefano was 30. She engaged him as head waiter (hofmästare) and pastry maker (konditor). The following year, 1794, Stefano married Ulrike Torgstedt in the cathedral of Stockholm, near the royal palace. However, she died in 1799, aged only 24 years, leaving Stefano with three children. The youngest was only two years old and Stefano was forced to find a nursemaid to care for them. This was almost certainly Brita Carlsdotter, or Melin. Brita Carlsdotter was the daughter of a Carl Larsson, a small-holder in Lilla Mellösa––a rural parish about 100 km north of Stockholm. Of his six children Brita was the only one to survive childhood. In 1789, when she was 16 years old, both her parents died. She took her fate in her hands and went to Stockholm to find work as a domestic servant, and assumed the name Christina. Almost a year after the death of Ulrike, Stefano and Brita married. She then changed her surname from Carsdotter to Melin to conceal her peasant origin. The dowager queen died in 1813, but Stefano continued to work for the court. The following year, 1814, ‘Hof Conditor Gavuzzi’ is listed in the account book of the queen Hedwig Elizabeth Charlotte as receiving an annual salary of 300 Riksdaler (Rdr) plus costs of 228 Rdr. The costs included an assistant who was paid annually 50 Rdr (SRS 1806-1814). However, the queen died in 1818 and it is probable that Stefano, now aged 55 years, retired. On 4 May 1814 he received a royal license to sell confectionery, ice-cream, liqueurs, lemonade and Swiss pastry in Stockholm. His bakery was about 200 metres south-west of the royal palace, in the block of houses called Milon. He lived, however, at Typhon #16/49. Typhon is a block of buildings about 200 metres south of the royal palace. Stefano employed two women in 1820, but closed the shop in 1830 when he was 67 years old. He was receiving a substantial pension from the state when he died in 1833 (SSI 1833). Stefano’s children remained in Stockholm; his daughter Angelika (one of Brita’s children) was matron of the Wallinska School from 1842 until 1869. This was the first boarding-school for girls in Stockholm, founded in 1831. Stefano’s son Otto Ignatius (child of Ulrike), was an extremely successful businessman. Otto (Fig. 11, V.20) was apprenticed in the counting office of the silk weaving mill of Zacharius Fagerlund in Stockholm when he was 14 years old, about 1810. He became the firm’s accountant in 1820 and a partner in 1823. This was the year that Otto married, and was elected a member of Stockholm city council. He was admitted into the S. Johannes-Lodge of the Freemasons in 1827. When Fagerlund died in 1828 Otto bought the mill from his widow for 79000 RdrR and was able to pay off all the debt by 1832. Subsequently, however, the profits from the mill must have declined, for it was closed 20 March 1846, about two months before Otto’s death on 1 May. It seems probable that it no longer made money, for it does not appear in Otto’s estate inventory as an asset. There were eighteen silk weaving mills in Stockholm in 1842, all in the Södermalm district. That belonging to Fagerlund & Co was the fifth largest by turnover (SNM 1932a). In 1842 it had sixty workers and forty-one looms. In 1837 the Almgren mill, the third largest in Stockholm, had only thirty workers. This mill had 13 plain looms, 4 shaft looms and 4 Jacquard looms. It appears from these figures that the Fagerlund company was producing less than Almgren’s mill despite employing twice as many workers. This may explain its demise.
Table 3. Estate inventories of Otto Gavuzzi (dated 14 July 1846) and his widow Carolina Ling (dated 5 February 1852). Both inventories are in the Stockholms stadsarkiv (SSI 1846 & 1852). Values are in Riksdaler Banco.
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Otto and his family lived in Stockholm in Östgötgatan (Södermalm), but in 1838 decided to go and live in the country. He bought and renovated a farmhouse at Sofielund, by Lake Båven, about 60 kilometres from the city. The house in Stockholm was sold the same year. The move to the country was doubtless intended to benefit the children (six over the age of 5 years), who could skate and make snow-men in the winter, and swim in the lake and play in the woods during the summer. However, the birth of their son Etienne on 3 February 1840 at Sofielund was followed two weeks later by the death of their eight year old daughter Angelique, in Stockholm. The distraught parents must have taken her thence by horse-drawn carriage through the snow in the vain hope of finding medical assistance in the city which was lacking in the country. Perhaps it was this episode which convinced them that the rustic life had serious disadvantages. In any case, late in 1840 they all moved back to a house overlooking the sea in Gamla Stan, the heart of Stockholm. The Gavuzzi house, which still stands, was one of series of very large merchants residences along the west side of Skeps Bron, only about 100 metres from the house Otto’s father occupied in Typhon. The house has a frontage of 20 metres, between Norra Dryckesgränd and Södra Dryckesgränd. It is on four floors, together with a basement and attic. The estate inventories of Otto Gavuzzi and his wife (Table 3) indicate an opulent life-style. The rental of the house they lived in was 1360 RdrB per year in 1846. They regularly entertained up to 30 people, for whom there were solid silver forks, silver handled knives, including a set for dessert, and Dutch damask napkins, together with glasses for water, wine, punch, liqueurs and port. The house was mainly illuminated by candles in silver candlesticks and candelabra. The total weight of the silver was 23 kg and it is not surprising that after Otto died his widow Carolina, put most of it (about 270 items) into store. To travel around town Otto had two four-wheeled carriages (landau), both of which Carolina retained after he died. No horses are listed in the inventories, however. The financial assets in 1846 (Table 3) were mainly interest-bearing loans to companies, and the unsold stocks of silk. The 1852 inventory shows but little increase in the value of the loans, which is surprising in view of the almost complete disposal of the stocks, and the sale of the Sofielund property in 1848, which together realized 43000 RdrB. The main debts were the funeral expenses. For Carolina these amounted to 830 RdrB, of which 500 RdrB was for mourning clothes for her ten surviving children.
Carmagnola Luigi Gavuzzo (Fig. 10, IV.29) and his family left Monticello between 1818 and 1828. His wife and children settled in Carmagnola, except for his eldest son Girolamo who had already gone to Racconigi. Luigi owned land in Santa Vittoria which he doubtless inherited from his father, but also had land in Monticello, purchased in 1797 for the quite substantial sum of 1256 lire. Luigi had six sons who survived to maturity, including two who disappeared after conscription into the army. There may consequently be descendants of his alive today, as yet untraced, in addition to those who still live in Carmagnola with the surname Gavuzzi. The municipality of Carmagnola lies on the flood plain of the River Po, immediately east of the river. In the early nineteenth century the population of 13000 was concentrated in six villages, or borghi, each corresponding to a parish. The original centre, called the Borgo Vecchio, surrounded the church of Saints Pietro & Paolo and included, in 1836, a ghetto with 157 jews. Four other villages lay about 2 kilometres distant; to the north was Borgo Salsassio, to the north-west Borgo San Michele, to the west Borgo San Bernardo, and to the south Borgo San Giovanni. Lastly, some 6 km to the north-east, lay the Cistercian abbey of Casanova, which gave its name to the parish of Santa Maria di Casanova. The agricultural production of Carmagnola was dominated by hemp, used mainly for making ropes. The municipality at this time had a population ten times greater than that of Santa Vittoria, and it might be supposed that, like most emigrants, Luigi’s family had in mind to abandon the land and become artisans. In fact, however, his sons continued to work the land as labourers. The family may have settled first in Borgo San Michele, for it was here that Luigi’s sons Filippo and Luigi (Fig. 13, V.56 & V.58) were living when they married in 1828 and 1834, respectively. By 1833, however, Filippo was in Borgo San Bernardo. In 1840 he was living in the Borgo Vecchio, along with his brothers Luigi and Giovanni Battista. In 1837 Luigi Gavuzzo, the father, died in Borgo Salsasio, where in 1858 Filippo owned a small house, which he had perhaps inherited. The fate of Luigi’s land in Santa Vittoria and Monticello has yet to be clarified. Racconigi, Villanova Solaro & Rome Luigi’s eldest son Girolamo (Fig. 13, V.51) died in Racconigi in 1837, just a year before it became obligatory to record the occupation of the deceased on the death certificate. Consequently, his motive for moving there remains uncertain. Racconigi lies about 8 kilometres south-west of Carmagnola, and has the former royal castle and park as its main claim to fame. The town used to have thirty silk spinning mills, employing 3000 workers, and a hundred shoe makers, employing 300 craftsmen, out of a total population of 10000. The mill worker’s health was said to be poor (Casalis 1847, vol. 16, p. 126). Girolamo’s son Luigi was the baker at Villanova Solaro, a small municipality on the alluvial plain of the Torrente Varaita (a tributary of the River Po) about 9 kilometres from Racconigi. Agriculture was the main employment of the population, who evidently suffered from malaria. Of the inhabitants we read, ‘breathing unhealthy air they are generally of weak constitution; goitre is common among them’ (Casalis 1854, vol. 25, p. 457). The goitre was due to lack of iodine in the soil. It was once common in parts of northern Italy, but now less so due to the use of iodized salt. Panizza (1890, p. 221) had an even gloomier view of Villanova, describing the peasants’ appearance as ‘miserable and half starved’ (aspetto gramo e cachettico). Luigi’s enterprising son Girolamo (Fig. 13, VII.45) set off from Villanova in 1860 for Turin, perhaps to work for his third cousin Giovanni Battista Gavuzzo. Girolamo emigrated to Rome in 1872 where he later established a large and very profitable coffee house. Liqueurs, rather than coffee, however, were the heart of his business, for the premises had G. Gavuzzo liquorista written on the façade. Girolamo got prizes for his Cognac Gavuzzo, which contained nutmeg, and the Amarone Gavuzzo which had quinine as an important ingredient. In 1896 he bought a lithographic printing business which operated in Rome until 1909 under the name Stabilimento Litografico G. Gavuzzo e C. Girolamo’s descendants still live in Rome.
Caramagna Caramagna lies only 6 kilometres south of Carmagnola. It had a population of about 3500 when Carlo Gavuzzo (Fig. 14, V.78) from Santa Vittoria settled there in 1822. Casalis has little to say about Caramagna, except that 500 towns-women used to work in silk spinning mills thereabouts. Carlo’s son Giuseppe (VI.87), who used the surname Gavuzzi, made a significant contribution to Italian culture when he published his Piedmontese dictionaries (Gavuzzi 1891, 1896), still widely consulted and studied (e.g. Pineri 2003). The first one is rich in now-forgotten dialect words from the area around Santa Vittoria and is particularly useful when reading old legal documents from that part of Piedmont. Giuseppe was an official in the State land registry, not a university graduate, which makes his scholarly achievement all the more remarkable. The touching dedication he wrote for the 1891 volume deserves to be recorded:
Asti The present Gavuzzo colony in Asti descends from Lorenzo, who was born at Barbaresco (near Alba) in 1797, and married there about 1817 (Fig. 12, V.32). Lorenzo inherited land in Monticello, but moved from Monticello to Alba about 1822. Several of his children were born in Alba, including Stefano, in 1829. Stefano (Fig. 12, VI.25) had four sons . Numerous descendants of his now live in and around Asti, and also in the United States of America. Lorenzo’s decision to leave Monticello does not seem to have advantaged his children or grandchildren, who were all landless agricultural labourers. Stefano was a farm worker, first in Montechiaro d’Asti, but later in villages nearer to Asti. He died at Valle Tanaro, near the town of Asti, in 1903. Two of his grandchildren emigrated to California. These were Enrico Secondo Gavuzzo (1892-1973) who settled in San Francisco in 1909 and Stefano Lorenzo Gavuzzo who emigrated to Sacramento about 1913. Descendants of Enrico still live in California with the surname Gavuzzi.
Turin By 1900 there were about 70 individuals called either Gavuzzo or Gavuzzi resident in Turin, most of whom were born in places such as Carmagnola, Bra, Santa Vittoria or Monticello, and emigrated to the city during the preceding forty years. We are mainly concerned here, however, with those who emigrated to Turin earlier in the century. The research is hampered by a lack of indexed records––there were nearly 200 parishes in Turin in the nineteenth century and to search their registers one by one would take years of work. However, the city kept indexed records of deaths from 1802 until 1865, births from 1801 until 1837, and marriages from 1801 until 1814. All these have been examined. The earliest immigrant in the nineteenth century was probably Giuseppe Gavuzzo (Fig. 11, VI.4), born in Cinzano about 1808 and resident in Turin from 1837 at latest. He may have had several more children than those listed in Appendix 4. The next immigrant is Giovanni Battista Gavuzzo (Fig. 12, V.46), born in Monticello in 1805 and working in Turin by 1828 . Few of his children have been identified. No sons of his appear in the military conscription lists. Late in the century he was a restaurant owner (trattore), and it is interesting that in the 1868-1870 Turin election rolls he is the only man with the surname Gavuzzo or Gavuzzi. At that time electors had to be men over 25 years old, able to read and write, and paying annual taxes of at least 40 lire (equivalent to 150 euros today). Giovanni Battista was evidently politically involved and relatively well off. He does not appear to have died in Turin. It is possible that he retired to Monticello, for a ‘Giovanni Battista Gavuzzi’ was mayor of the municipality in 1879. Felice Gavuzzo (Fig. 14, VI.82), born at Santa Vittoria in 1814, had three sons who appear in the military conscription lists. His eldest surviving child was Teresa, born in 1844 in Turin, who married Carlo Candellero in 1865. His son Giuseppe Stefano Teobaldo (called Teobaldo, see Fig. 14, VII.62), born in Turin in 1848, had several sons of his own who were called for military service later in the century. Giovanni Gavuzzo (Fig. 15, V.105), who was a master mason, and his wife Anna Galissio, emigrated to Turin from Santa Vittoria about 1860. They had several children, including two sons, and quite possibly have descendants in Turin today.
England The brothers Pietro and Battista Gavuzzi (Fig. 12, VII.40 & VII.41), both eminent cooks, emigrated from Monticello to England in the late nineteenth century. Pietro’s active life led him from London, where he had a restaurant, to the Grand Hotel in Bulawayo (in Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia). In 1904 he was appointed the first manager of the now famous Victoria Falls Hotel. The Falls had just been reached by the Beira, Mashonaland and Rhodesia railway, then under construction from the coast, and the railway company was keen to exploit their tourist potential by building a temporary hotel. The hotel staff comprised a French chef, a barman from Chicago and waiters who were either Arabs or Indians. Pietro was also responsible for the management of the dining-cars on the railway. The principal clients of the hotel appear to have been railway engineers engaged in building the bridge over the Zambese River, the atmosphere resembling more the Wild West than the staid surroundings of today (Creewel 1994, p. 6-9). However, a special train in 1904 brought the first of many royal visitors to the Falls––Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein. The hotel had been built for a hundred visitors, but in 1905 had to cope with close on a thousand who had come for the first regatta to be held on the Zambese. Later in the year the members of the British Association arrived to witness the opening of the bridge across the river. From then on the hotel’s unrivalled reputation was established and Pietro returned to London in 1906. Pietro eventually retired to Alba, as did his brother Battista. Battista’s son Pietro, better known as Pete, is celebrated internationally as a long distance runner. He was born in Folkestone, England, in 1905. Being rather small, Pete chose to train as a jockey when he left school at the age of fourteen years. He was apprenticed first at Alfriston in Sussex, and then at Westbury in Wiltshire, but also found time for boxing and long-distance running. But by the age of nineteen, however, he weighed 51 kg, too heavy to continue as a jockey. He decided to see the world by joining the White Star liner Majestic as a steward. Competitive running was a sport the crews of the liners were encouraged to follow, and during the four years he was a steward he three times won mile races at the Van Courtland track in New York. The year 1928 was fateful for Pete. When he heard of the projected foot race from Los Angeles to New York (about 5700 km), and the $ 25000 prize money, he decided to enter the competition. The race started in early March. Pete remained in the lead, along with the eventual winner Andy Payne, until they reached Wauseon, 200 km east of Chicago, about two months later. He was then obliged to drop out with an abscessed tooth, which prevented him from eating. The following year he entered the race again when it was run in the reverse direction, New York to Los Angeles. Pete remained far in the lead until near the end, when he was asked by the race organizers to slow down in order to create a more exciting finish. He took time off long enough to be photographed standing in a stream fishing and smoking a cigarette, but as a consequence lost the race by 2 minutes 47 seconds, after 526 hours running. He never got the second prize of $9250––the race organizer went bankrupt. Nevertheless, in consequence of this race, Pete Gavuzzi is still regarded as one of the finest long distance runners of all time, and figures in the Guinness Book of Records. During 1930-1931 Pete teamed up with the Rhodesian runner Arthur Newton. They won the five-hundred-mile Peter Dawson relay race from Montreal to Quebec City and back again in 1930, and also competed in 200 mile snowshoe races during the winter. The end of Pete’s athletics career was in 1938 when he went to the Empire Games in Sydney as coach to the Canadian marathon team. By 1939 he was working in France and was caught up in World War II. As a British citizen he was regarded as a potential enemy by the pro-Nazi French government, and was consequently interned until 1945 in a camp at Sarthe, near Le Mans. He spent his time organizing sports in the camp. When he returned to England he worked as a caterer at the American Airforce base at Ruislip, and later as a school caretaker. He died at his home in England in 1981 (Jewell 1981). Pete Gavuzzi’s grandson and great- grandsons still live in England. France & Mexico In the the early nineteenth century the Cinzano family of Turin founded a company for the production of vermouth at Santa Vittoria. The Company became a major employer in the area, and eventually gave its name to the lower part of the municipality (sometimes now confused with the municipality of Cinzano, near Turin). It employed hundreds of workers and sent some of the more technically capable abroad to direct its operations. Thus, in 1920 the enologist Marco Gavuzzo (Fig. 14, VIII.62) arrived in France as the Company’s technical director. He married there and his descendants still live near Aix-en-Provence. In 1929 Marco’s brother Felice (VIII.66) was sent to Canada for similar reasons. He was transferred to Mexico in 1933 and remained there till his death in Mexico City in 1971. He has numerous descendants in Mexico.
Argentina
Argentina has the
greatest number of Gavuzzo and Gavuzzi family members after Italy (Table
1). Most of them are descended from Domenico Gavuzzo (Fig.
14, VIII.90), born in Santa Vittoria in 1890. Domenico’s father Matteo
Luca was a farmer in the borgo of Santa Vittoria but turned to carpentry
about 1900 and shortly afterwards moved to Turin with his family. Domenico
was also a carpenter. He and his wife emigrated from Turin to Buenos Aires
in 1923. Two of his descendants subsequently emigrated from Argentina to
Spain.
Stefano Gavuzzo, born at Roddi in 1711, had a distinguished legal career in Turin leading to his appointment as a Piedmontese senator in 1759. He is best known, however, for his comic libretto L’Adramiteno published in 1809. Stefano had two spacious homes, one in the heart of Turin and the other at Vinovo, in the country south of the city. He had many children, but the male descent appears to have died out by about 1870. Those with the surname Gavuzzo and Gavuzzi in Turin today belong to the Monticello branch of the family. This chapter deals with the life and work of Stefano Gavuzzo, born at Roddi in 1711 and already mentioned in Chapter III. Stefano came from a long line of lawyers; his father Girolamo was a military magistrate, his grandfather Ottavio was a notary in Roddi, and his great-grandfather Franceschino was a lawyer, also in Roddi. Stefano Gavuzzo’s legal career is summarized in the genealogy of the Gavuzzo family of Roddi, Appendix 2, and will not be repeated. His capacity as a jurist is evident from the citation which accompanied his appointment to the Piedmontese senate, signed by Carlo Emanuele III in 1759:
The King’s expectations appear to have been satisfied indeed, for in 1781, two years after the senator had retired with the title of president of the senate, he appointed his son Patrizio as an archivist with an annual salary of 765 lire. The accompanying citation reads Considering the favourable information which we have had about the capabilities of the advocate Francesco Antonio [Patrizio] Gavuzzi, and with the intention of offering to the President his father a further demonstration of our singular pleasure in his long admired and faithful service, we are well disposed to appoint the above-mentioned advocate, his son, to one of the vacant positions as substitute archivist at the Treasury.[6] The extraordinary aspect of Stefano’s character, however, is the fact that his legal acumen was accompanied by a vivid sense of humour, illustrated by two anecdotes related by Carlo Dionisotti (1824-1899) in his history of the Piedmontese justiciary. One relates how on his way to the law courts [in Turin] on the last Thursday of carnival, wearing a toga, as magistrates and advocates customarily did, he encountered a group of masked revellers in Piazza Savoia who obliged him to dance with them. Consequently, in subsequent years the audiences were suspended on that day. Another story concerns a violin which he kept under the bed, ready to be brought out and played when he was bored by the grumbles of his wife Teresa Cocchis.[7] The senator’s literary qualities were summarized by the anonymous editor who wrote the introduction to the libretto L’Adramiteno (Gavuzzi 1809, p. ix): Endowed with a lively mind and inclined to witticism, learned in many fields, including music, and occupying a prominent position in the legal profession, he used his learning and his knowledge of legal practice and terminology, and of the theater, and music, together with Piedmontese idiom, to improvise humourous stories and jokes, and to gracefully mock vulgarity, and perhaps also some of his contemporaries, combining pleasantly eccentric ideas in a totally original way.[8] L’Adramiteno appears to have been written for the amusement of family and friends, but nevertheless circulated widely in manuscript in Piedmont during the eighteenth century. It is a parody of Metastasio’s librettos (Basso 2001), written sometime before 1769 (Manno 1884) but only published in full after Stefano’s death (Gavuzzi 1809). It is this work which accounts for his inclusion in the national biographical dictionary (De Rosa 1999). The farcical libretto deals with the unhappy love of the Roman general Adramiteno for the nymph Ciborra, and the marriage of Somarinda, who is love with Adramiteno, to Asinio. To convey an idea of the content of L’Adramiteno we give in Table 4 the cast of the work, together with an attempted translation. The proper names, mostly invented, contain allusions which can only be appreciated with a knowledge of Italian and Piedmontese, and an acquaintance with classical literature. Adramiteno was one of the emperors at Constantinople (715-717). The terms interlocutori and interlocutorie can be taken to mean male and female interlocutors, respectively, but the second word is also a legal term signifying an interim injunction. Gattorba, the surname of the character who does not see, means literally gatta-orba, or blind-cat, but is also the children’s game called catorba in Piedmontese, equivalent to blind man’s buff. Gargatelli Terlucco, the character who is not heard, has a name recalling garganella (Italian for drinking at a single gulp) and terluch (Piedmontese for a simpleton). Somarinda, evidently comes from somaro, a donkey. Asinio comes from asino, another Italian word for a donkey, but also recalls C. Asinius Pollio, the Roman orator, poet, historian and friend of the Emperor Augustus. Mr Ganazzi in the libretto takes his name from the Piedmontese word ganassè, a chatter-box. Lerice, or Lerici, is a fishing village on the Ligurian coast which could never have had a naval dockyard as implied in the libretto However, the Ridotto di Venezia is real, for it was, and still is, a Venetian theater. Other allusions and absurdities can be easily found in Table 4, but it is already clear what kind of readership the author had in mind when he wrote L’Adramiteno. L’Adramiteno was republished in Turin in 1828, 1840 and 1885. The only public performance of the work that we know of was at the Teatro delle 10 in Turin in November 1968.
The senator’s house in Turin Some idea of eighteenth century home life among the wealthier residents of Turin can be had from the detailed inventory of the senator’s possessions made shortly after he died in 1782 (TI 1782d). The total value came to 2300 lire, which can be compared with the Senator’s pension of 1000 lire, and the dowry of his daughter-in-law Orsola in 1782, which was 3000 lire. The second floor apartment the senator occupied was next to the Hospital of San Giovanni Battista, in the heart of the city (TI 1770a). It had seven rooms, together with a kitchen, servant’s room, wine cellar and attics. The rooms had self-closing doors (porte-volanti) covered with cloth, usually tinted yellow or green. There was neither a bathroom, nor a portable bath, but there was a large copper basin (bacile) in the kitchen which might have been used for washing oneself. The apartment was occupied by the senator and at least seven of his children (Patrizio, Giacinto, Ferdinando, Teodoro, Luigi, Paola and Teresa) ranging in age from 30 years down to 14. Patrizio, the senator’s eldest son, married in 1781, but was still living with his father on 28 June 1782, presumably with his wife (TI 1782c). One of the rooms in the apartment was dedicated to pleasure, for it had a harpsichord and a games table, but all the others were used as bedrooms, for they contained beds. Each of the beds consisted of two mattresses––one a pagliariccio and another made of wool. The pagliariccio would have been stuffed with the husks of corn cobs and placed beneath the woollen mattress. The sheets are described as being made of hemp, and the blankets and quilts of wool. Only the pillow cases were made of cotton or linen. The mattresses lay on a plank supported by two trestles, or on a wooden chest. One bed, doubtless the senator’s, differed from the others in having a canopy and hangings of silk brocade. The brocade was yellow, apparently the favourite colour of either the senator or his wife, for it was extensively used for doors, screens and wardrobes throughout the apartment. The only working clock, valued at 60 lire, was in the senator’s bedroom. It is described as a pendulum clock striking the hours and half hours, with a silvered dial and an ‘old-fashioned’ walnut case. The almost complete absence of lamps suggests that the family rose early and went to bed at dusk. There was an oil lamp in the entrance hall and a wooden candelabra in another room. Six brass candlesticks in the kitchen were perhaps for use in the dining room. Hemp tablecloths and napkins were used at table. The plates and wine goblets were all made of tin––a metal like silver, but softer and cheaper. Nevertheless, tin-ware was the most valuable item (76 lire) in the entire inventory. Coffee, roasted, ground and made in the kitchen, was drunk from cups of Vinovo porcelain, of which there were six. Dinner guests were apparently few, for there was silver cutlery for six people only. Otherwise there were only brass forks and brass-handled knives, just sufficient for the family. No glassware is listed. Table 4. The characters in L’Adramiteno and their imaginary actors. The original text (Gavuzzi 1809, p. 4-5) is in the left-hand column, and a translation on the right. ____________________________________________________________________________________
There were two servants, probably a married couple, who lived in the room next to the kitchen. The man wore a suit of livery while he waited at table and went out on errands. The kitchen had a fireplace with a large spit for roasting whole carcasses. The spit is described in the inventory as ‘old fashioned’, with a long axis and stone counterweights. Cooking was done in copper and bronze pots which could be hung from a chain over the fire. A wooden cage in which capons were fattened stood in a corner of the kitchen. The senator’s interest in music is attested by two violins and a double-bass, together valued at 35 lire. There was also a broken harp in the attic. The contents of one room, apparently reserved for the youngest children, included a damaged violin, a harpsicord case, a drum and a blackboard. As for art, there were twenty-eight pictures (worth 77 lire), half of them of religious subjects, and one of Carlo Emanuele III (King of Sardinia 1730-1773) which hung in the games room. The 67 books in the inventory, valued at 111 lire, are mainly legal texts of the late sixteenth century, but there are a few which clearly indicate the senator’s other interests. One deals with astrology (Giuntini 1581), another with magic (Del Rio 1599) and a third with beggars (Guevarre 1717). The senator was appointed avvocato dei poveri in 1749. The book on the ephemerides (Ghisleri 1729) may relate to the poetic weather forecasts which, according to Mussi (1979, p. 121), the senator contributed to the almanac published annually at Turin by Giovanni Battista Fontana: Il corso delle stelle osservato dal pronostico moderno Palmaverde almanacco piemontese. Perhaps the most interesting book in the collection (Regia Parnassi 1683) is the compendium of descriptions of distant lands by classical authors, which recalls aspects of his play L’Adramiteno. However, there is nothing by Pietro Metastasio (1698-1782), the Italian poet and librettist whose work the senator is sometimes thought to have parodied in L’Adramiteno. The senator’s summer residence at Vinovo, near Turin was a small farmhouse bought in 1767, described in the conveyance as having on the ground floor three rooms and on the first floor two rooms, together with attics, hayshed, byre, pig-stye, henhouse and threshing floor. Included in the sale were about 1.6 hectares of land at Pedelchire (about 2 km from Vinovo). The total cost was 6500 lire (TI 1767b). An adjoining house bought in 1770 (TI 1770a) was united with the first to form a commodious villa. The senator bought some more farm land at Pedelchire in 1774, bringing the total to about 2 hectares. The Vinovo land register of 1772 specifies that the house was at Polenghera and had a garden of 0.16 hectares, next to an irrigation canal (bealera). One of the items in the inventory (TMC 1782) was the water wheel used to supply water to the garden. Polenghera is a cluster of houses about 200 metres north-east of the central square of Vinovo, now called Piazza Marconi. The irrigation canal formely followed the line of the present Via Marconi. The Gavuzzi villa and garden, bounded by the present Via S. Gavuzzi and Via Edoardo Calvo, survived until about 1975 when they were sold for redevelopment. The house was comfortably furnished, and better illuminated than the apartment in Turin. The first-floor room, where the senator died, had oil lamps, candelabras and candlesticks. Two silver candlesticks and their accompanying wick trimmers were valued at 201 lire, by far the most valuable items in the house. There were only four beds, suggesting that most of the family was left at Turin. Two shotguns were presumably used by the senator or his sons during the winter hunting season. The only musical instrument was a spinet, said in the inventory to belong to one of the senator’s children. There were no books, but quite a lot of prints and a few pictures. A green-painted four-wheeled carriage (biroccio) and horse, which would have been suitable for excursions, are also listed in the inventory, The family continued to live in the Turin apartment until 1784 (TI 1784a) when Paola married and Patrizio moved out. The family nucleus then re-established itself around Ferdinando. From 1787 Ferdinando and his first wife were living in the Casa del Barone S. Secondo, in the parish of Saints Processo & Martiniano, along with the four Gavuzzi brothers Ignazio, Giacinto, Teodoro & Luigi, their sister Teresa, and two servants (TA 1787). Of the senator’s first wife Teresa Cochis we know little except for her rare skill as a mother. Apart from one child which may have died in infancy, she bore and brought to marriageable age ten children––a remarkable achievement by any standards, and for the eighteenth century little short of miraculous. The vital statistics for Turin at this time show that half the children born had died before the age of ten years. Even the King of Piedmont Vittorio Amedeo III and his queen lost two of their eleven children in childhood. The royal children were born between 1751 and 1764, virtually the same period as the senator’s (Galli 1798, vol. 3, p. 22-23).
The Senator’s estate The definitive division of the senator’s estate in 1785 (TI 1785c) identified three main assets; the furnishings of his house in Turin (2308 lire), the Vinovo property, including the contents of the house (5500 lire), and the Roddi property, comprising the farmhouse and about a hectare of land (18818 lire). The apartment in Turin did not belong to the senator. From the total of 26626 lire there had to be deducted his debts (4610 lire), and the dowries for his two unmarried daughters Teresa and Paola, fixed at 1500 lire each. This left 19016 lire to be divided between the senator’s six sons. Luigi, the youngest, got his share immediately in cash, a sum roughly twice the dowry his two sisters were to receive when they married, but similar to the dowry which his sister Cecilia had when she married in 1773. The value of the Vinovo property was relatively small, despite its proximity to Turin, because ‘the widow Gavuzzi née Barberis’ had a right of use over it. This widow Gavuzzi was, of course, the senator’s second wife Teresa Barberis, a relatively young woman who made the Villa Gavuzzi her home and was still living there with her unmarried sister Maddalena in 1799.
The Senator’s children The lives of the senator’s many children, documented in detail in Appendix 2, are here briefly summarized. The appointment of his eldest son Patrizio to a position in the State archive has already been mentioned. His second son Giacinto was a priest and lawyer. Ignazio, the third son, was an architect––one of the group of seventeenth and eighteenth century architects responsible for creating the architectural gem which is the centre of Turin (Lupo 1990). The next two sons, Ferdinando and Teodoro, were officers in the Piedmontese army. Both retired during the Napoleonic regime (1792-1814) but rejoined the army afterwards. Ferdinando worked as an architect during his absence from the army, and also developed an interest in silk production. He published a book on the subject in 1818. The Senator’s last son, Luigi, is the only one who seems not to have had a successful career. He was appointed a clerk in the state treasury when he was 28 years old, and further news of him is lacking. A wedding broadsheet issued to celebrate from the marriage of the senator’s youngest child Teresa in Turin in 1790, is reproduced in Figure 16. The poem is in Venetian dialect. The senators’ grandsons number six, only one of whom (Prospero) is definitely known to have had a son. The male line descending from the Senator may, indeed, have died out in the late nineteenth century. Those who now live in Turin with the surnames Gavuzzo and Gavuzzi descend from the Monticello branch of the family (see Chapter V).
All those who now have the surnames Gavuzzo and Gavuzzi descend from ‘Steffano Geuso’ who left Roddi in 1630 to settle in Monticello. Monticello and the adjoining municipality of Santa Vittoria remained the cradle of the rapidly expanding family until the end of the nineteenth century. It is possible to imagine how this area might have appeared in the past by mentally subtracting from the present landscape the asphalt roads, the traffic and the factories which are invading the meadows next to the River Tanaro. But it is impossible to imagine what it was like to live there, for so many aspects of family life were quite unlike those of today. In this chapter we attempt to sketch some of the main differences. The cycle of life starts with the cry of a child, whose name in rural Piedmont was predetermined. The eldest son and daughter were called after the paternal grandparents, and the second son and daughter after the maternal grandparents (Milano 1973, p. 21). Of the Gavuzzo children born in the Monticello and Santa Vittoria between 1700 and 1850, listed in Appendix 4, about 90% of the first born males and females were given names according to the rule. About 70% of the second born sons were named after the mother's father. Nothing can be said about the names of second born daughters because before 1835 the marriage registers never give the name of the wife's mother. Once born the infant was taken to be baptised, sometimes on the same day, swaddled like a parcel, and protected from evil spirits by the Agnus––a square of material embroidered with a crucifix, or the monogram for Jesus Christ (IHS). The urgency of baptism was dictated by the belief that if an unbaptised child should die its soul would remain in limbo, denied the sight of God. Moreover, canon law required that it would have to be buried in that part of the cemetery set aside for public sinners, such as prostitutes and victims of suicide. After baptism the infants were qualified for paradise, where many soon arrived. Gavuzzo child mortality (i.e. before the age of 5 years) in Santa Vittoria between 1600 and 1664 (Appendix 3) was about 40%. It is worth remarking that these families were relatively wealthy, but even Benedetto Gheuzo, the magistrate, lost four of his ten recorded children at an early age. Such sad statistics recall the observation of Girolamo Mercuriale in his book on child care, published in 1583, that at that time in Italy there were more funerals of children than of adults. In other parts of Europe the situation was similar. For example, in France before 1750 child mortality ranged from 30% to 58%, depending on the parish (Flinn 1981, Tables 2.2 & 9). Child mortality in Monticello and Santa Vittoria over the period 1737 to 1800 (Appendix 4) was 35%, little better than in the previous century. To find comparable figures for the recent past one has to look to Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1960s when health care expenditure was virtually non-existent. Child mortality in Italy only started to decline definitively towards the end of the nineteenth century. The present day figure for Italy is 0.5%. The education of the children that survived infancy was rudimentary at best. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the sons of prosperous land owners, like Benedetto Gheuzo of Santa Vittoria, or many of the Gavuzzos of Roddi, would have been taught reading, writing and Latin in order to prepare them for university, but the sons and daughters of subsistence farmers would have remained at home to work. Female education was not contemplated except in wealthy city families, where it was intended to prepare women to organize the households of their future husbands, and provide pleasant conversation, preferably in French, for their husband's friends (Bernardi 1991, p. 17-20). Free schooling was introduced in Piedmont for boys from 6 to 10 years old in 1822, with the object of teaching ‘reading, writing, Christian doctrine, the elements of Italian language, and arithmetic’. School became obligatory for girls in 1846, but it was not until 1864 that there were equal numbers of both sexes receiving education. By this year the illiteracy rate for army recruits from Alba had fallen to 25%, even though about 50% of the adult male population in the town was still unable to write. The end of schooling for a boy meant the start of a working career. No more would he sleep in his parent’s bed, but instead in the hay loft (Grazioli 1958, p. 99).
Love and marriage One of the main entertainments of young women in this part of Piedmont seems to have been divining the nature of their future husbands. For example, at New Year or Epiphany the girl's friends would secretly conceal a flower, a ring, a coin and a thimble under the four corners of a head scarf, and then ask her to lift one of the corners. If she discovered the flower, she could look forward to engagement, and if it was the ring, she would be married within the year. If the coin emerged she would marry a widower, but if it was the thimble she would remain a spinster. Another of many customs was for the girl to throw one of her clogs into the farmyard at Epiphany and see in what direction it pointed. If the toe was towards the house there was no hope of a husband that year. But if it pointed away from the house, that was the direction from which he would surely come (Milano 1973, p. 38-39). It is interesting that there are no accounts of men using similar techniques. Love germinated in autumn during the threshing of the cereal crop, or during the grape harvest, when families from adjacent farms pooled their labour. It blossomed during the winter in the byre where the family gathered to pass the long evenings. The courtship was brief: the couple had probably known each other since childhood, and so had their parents. We can be sure that most of the couples lived less than a kilometre apart before marriage, for knowledge of one's neighbours is obviously best for these close by and is known to decline exponentially with increasing distance (Boyce et al. 1967). This conclusion can be confirmed from the data in Appendix 4. Three-quarters of all the Gavuzzo couples who married there before 1870 were resident in the same municipality, i.e. in either Santa Vittoria or Monticello, despite the fact that they are barely 2 kilometres across. If marriage was in prospect the two families had next to sit down and negotiate the dowry. This was a gift to the future bride, intended to sustain the expense of the marriage. It was paid by the bride's family, though the husband was expected to contribute 25% more as a supplementary dowry (controdote). In addition, the bride was provided with a trousseau, the value of which was usually relatively small. It seems strange now to think that it was the bride's family that had to assume this financial responsibility, but so it was in Italy from Roman times until the twentieth century. The law regarding dowries was only repealed in 1975. The dowry was administered by the husband, on behalf of the wife, to whom it ultimately belonged. As an example of how dowries were treated we can cite the will of Stefano Gavuzzo, written as he was dying in his home in Monticello in 1652. He left an arable field of 0.64 hectares to his wife Ippolita as restitution of her dowry, specified that a dowry of 250 lire should be paid to his only daughter Margherita when she married, and left the rest of his property to his only son Girolamo. Fortunately for Girolamo his sister never married, otherwide he would have been responsible for finding the cash for her dowry. The dowry is a measure of a family's wealth, for it roughly corresponded to the wife's prospective inheritance. Since few families could easily raise so much money quickly, the dowry was usually paid in instalments over periods as long as ten years. The dowry of Lucia Gavuzzo from Cinzano, who married about 1770, aged twenty-six years, has already been described in Chapter V. As an example from Monticello we cite the dowry contract of Lucia Mollo and Stefano Gavuzzo in 1837. The bride and groom were aged fifteen and twenty-three years, respectively. Stefano and his brother Giovanni Battista (Fig. 12, V.48 & V.46) had inherited the family farm at Urbignano the previous year when their father Carlo Gavuzzo died. This inheritance enabled both brothers to marry. Lucia's dowry was 500 lire, of which 200 lire was paid immediately and the rest in the form of a promissory note. Stefano Gavuzzo undertook to contribute 125 lire to the money coming from the bride's father. The trousseau was valued at 400 lire. The total of 900 lire had a purchasing power equivalent to about 5000 euros today. The trousseau contained the following items:
Twenty-four new chemises, and four others, used; two new king-sized sheets; six short mantels; four scarves to cover the head, two new and two used, three of them embroidered and one plain; four frilly caps, two new and one used; a band of tulle to wear during festivities; two cotton caps to wear in bed; six silk kerchiefs for the neck, three double and three single; nine kerchiefs for the neck, for use when working; six handkerchiefs; twelve dresses, three of coloured cotton, one of white embroidered muslin, one of red Indian cotton, one red and black Indian cotton, one in shades of blue, two of red and blue cotton, and three of coloured home-spun cotton, used; nine aprons for feast days, and nine more for work; nine pairs of short stockings of home-spun cotton, new, and another five pairs, used; three pairs of shoes, two pairs of calf and one pair of morocco; a new fur coat; a new jacket of green felted wool; a wardrobe complete with lock and key. [9]
The chemises were the common undergarment for women, essentially a linen or hemp shirt extending from the neck down to the knees. They also served as a night gowns. Underpants (mutande) and pyjamas were not used. They are absent from all the sets of country-women’s clothes which have survived from the nineteenth century, and they never appear as items in a trousseau (Gandolfo 1997, p. 145-153 & 179-197). Over the chemise a one piece dress was worn, with sleeves, and reaching down to the ankles. The aprons were another essential item in a woman’s wardrobe, used not only for work but also for decoration. The king-sized sheets would have been made of home produced hemp, spun by hand and woven on a domestic loom in strips about 90 centimetres wide. Three such strips (tre teli) were then sewn together to make a single sheet 270 centimetres wide. Sheets this large would have been used on a bed which contained not only the parents but also the smaller children, sleeping head to toe. The stockings of home-spun cotton and the shoes were mainly for sundays. A woman’s feet were bare except in the winter, when clogs were used. The colours of the dresses listed above are remarkably bright, perhaps because of the bride’s youth. Married women usually wore dark dresses and covered their heads with a black scarf, inspiring one observer to write that ‘it seemed the rural population was in permanent mourning’ (Grazioli 1958, p. 106). The appearance of a fur-coat amongst the items of clothing in the trousseau is surprising, for although they were commonly possessed by townswomen in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they have hitherto never been recorded among the clothes of a farmer’s wife in Italy. Although the trousseau was usually of minor importance to the dowry there were occasional exceptions. Giuseppa Varetto, who married Stefano's brother Giovanni Battista Gavuzzo, then resident in Turin, had only a trousseau. It was provided by her mother, even though her father was still alive, and includes jewellery, a walnut bed with mattresses and bedding, six walnut chairs, a bureau, a table, porcelain and cutlery, six pictures, a lot of clothes, and seventy-five black glass bottles (TI 1838). Black glass bottles were used in the nineteenth century for making fizzy lemonade. The most valuable item listed consisted of three woollen scarves, together worth 75 lire. The total value of the trousseau was 771 lire, equivalent to about 4000 euros today. Giovanni Battista raised a mortgage of 1300 lire on the share of the farm at Urbignano he had inherited (TI 1837), perhaps to buy an apartment. The loan was to be paid back within two years at 5% interest. The time for marriage was January and February (Fig. 18). The months before and after were unsuitable for religious reasons. Marriage celebrations (though not the actual sacrament) were prohibited during the period extending from the first sunday in Advent until Epiphany (6 January), and also during Lent. During summer and autumn there was, apparently, too much work to do in the fields to think about getting married. Marriages contracted in months other than January and February were with men not engaged in agriculture, for example artisans, or town dwellers. The concentration of marriages in the winter months is the probable explanation for the peak in births twelve to fifteen months later, shown in Figure 18. The period from marriage to conception in Monticello and Santa Vittoria was 3-5 months, to which has to be added nine months for the gestation of the first child. The newly married couple took up residence with the husband's parents. The arrival of the bride at the farmhouse was accompanied by a particular ritual. A friend would go to the door of the house and shout Mare, seurti fora, chè mi l'ài portave 'na fia, meaning ‘Mother, come out; I am bringing you a daughter!’ The mother-in-law would then appear on the threshold, smile at the girl, invite her to enter, assure her she would be indeed loved as a daughter, and then kiss her. This was called the kiss of Juda, for the new wife was destined to play a subservient role in the extended family, at least until her mother-in-law died (Milano 1973, p. 89). In seventeenth century Santa Vittoria the data in Appendix 3 show that the average duration of a Gavuzzo marriage before the death of a spouse was only 10 years. In consequence, each man, on average, married twice. So, of course, did the women, half of whom were widows with children from their previous marriage. These second (or even third) marriages were almost always contracted only a few months after the previous spouse's death, probably for motives of pure convenience. The ratio of wives to husbands for Santa Vittoria in the seventeenth century was, as already mentioned, 2.0. The ratio for couples in Monticello and Santa Vittoria, during the eighteenth century, obtained from the data in Appendix 4, was 1.75. The ratio declining to 1.5 in the first half of the nineteenth century, and to 1.1 in the second half. These figures simply reflect the progressively longer life span of men and women.
The farmhouses A typical farmhouse was built on two floors. The ground floor had a kitchen, wine store and possibly a bedroom, while on the first floor were more bedrooms. The first floor bedrooms were linked by an external balcony, which forms quite the most characteristic feature of Piedmontese farmhouses. Next to the dwelling was the byre, with the hay loft above. The buildings were usually arranged in a south-facing row. In villages the dwelling houses backed onto the road, and faced onto a courtyard with a separate byre and hay loft on the far side, an arrangement still to be seen in the older parts of Santa Vittoria and Monticello. Observers used to city life invariably commented on the stinking piles of cow dung near the byres, ‘which emit unhealthy and unpleasant gasses, only bearable from long familiarity’ (Inchiesta Agraria 1883, vol. 8, p. 639). There was never any bathroom. The toilet was a hole in the ground screened by a hut of wood and straw. Neither would there have been a water tap in the kitchen. Santa Vittoria got its first public water supply in 1948, prior to which the water was brought in pitchers from a well or spring by the women, or drawn by hand from a rain-water cistern. The washing of bed linen and clothes therefore posed a problem. The sheets were sprinkled with wood ashes and doused in boiling water. Then they were taken to be rinsed at a public washing point, either on an ox cart, or balanced on women’s heads. In Santa Vittoria and Monticello this meant going down hill to a spring, and then bringing them up again. All this may seem rather primitive, but the Italian farm house in which the authors live was just like this before 1973 when it was still occupied by a share-cropper (mezzadro) and his family. The washing point was 300 metres from the house and about 30 metres lower. The difficulty of washing clothes may explain why it was not done with great frequency. In the area of Santa Vittoria in the 1880s bed linen (actually hemp) was washed once a month at most. Men’s shirts were changed once a week, but the women’s chemises less frequently––in Roddi (next to Santa Vittoria) only once a month (Panizza 1890, p. 130). A consequence of the overall lack of personal hygiene was the common occurrence of skin diseases due to lice and to the parasitic mite Sarcoptes scabiei (scabies). An illustration of the widespread diffusion of lice throughout Europe in former times is provided by the well-known poem To a louse, on seeing one on a lady’s bonnet at church by the Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-1796). The farmhouses were unheated. However, the cattle kept the byres relatively warm and the families used them as sitting rooms during the bitterly cold winters. Their occupation during these retreats has been described thus:
During day-time when snow covers the fields, and in the evenings, they repair implements, or play at cards, or at morra, or tell, read or listen to ancient tales and anecdotes. The women spin thread from a distaff of combed hemp, either for family use or for others, or they patch clothes, always listening attentively to any accounts of nocturnal sightings of the souls from purgatory, or the Will-o’-the-wisp, witchcraft and falling stars, all signs of misfortune.[10]
The farmhouses were evidently little more than shelters, a fact confirmed by their value. A rural farmhouse in 1750 was worth about 250 lire, equivalent to about 1800 euros today. This was half the value of a hectare of farm land, and similar to the annual living cost for a typical family (Prato 1908, p. 421 & 196; see also Table 5 below). A country farmhouse today is worth about ten times that of a hectare of agricultural land or the annual cost of a family.
Farming
The small farms were
owned by families aiming at mere subsistence, and were conducted using
methods which hardly changed over the period 1600-1900. In 1750 the
predominant land use on the hill slopes near Alba was vineyards (24% of the
total area). The vines were frequently trained on wooden pergolas about 3
metres high, supported at intervals by carefully pruned living trees. The
pergolas were separated by strips of land about 4 metres wide, cultivated
for cereals. The system, called alteno, was more productive than land
cultivated exclusively for cereals or for vines, but labour intensive. It
was extensively used on family farms where labour costs were non-existent.
Arable land, on the gentler slopes, formed 29% of the area, producing oats,
wheat, rye and the recently introduced maize. The only fertilizer used was
dung and consequently cereal yields were only a tenth of those obtained
today. The next most important land use was woodland (24%). It produced vine
poles, cut every eight or nine years, underwood cut for firewood every three
years, and dry leaves for animal bedding. Permanent meadow (prato),
mainly near the Tanaro and along the Mellea where irrigation was possible,
covered 14% of the area (Prato 1908, p. 62). Table 4. Land owned by the Gavuzzo families of Santa Vittoria in 1809 (hectares) ________________________________________________________________ Name House Garden Pasture Vines Mixed Arable Woodland Total ___________________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________ Source: Napoleonic cadastral maps dated 1809 (scale 1: 2500) and the accompanying Matrice (TM 1809a & 1809b). The expression fu means “son of the late”. Pasture includes pré and pâtur in the original matrice. Mixed refers to hautin, or in Piedmontese, alteno. Areas have been rounded to the nearest 100 square metres. The average lot size (excluding gardens) is 0.2 hectares.
Table 4 shows the Gavuzzo land holdings in Santa Vittoria in 1809, recorded in the Napoleonic land register. From Table 4 it is clear that land use by Gavuzzo families in 1809 was typical of the Alba area. A comparison of Table 4 with the genealogy in Appendix 4 shows that the heads of all Gavuzzo families in Santa Vittoria were land owners, even if the amounts of land were often insufficient to make the families self supporting. The 1770 and 1837 land registers for Monticello reveal a similar situation. The 1809 register has not survived. The largest Gavuzzo farm in Santa Vittoria was 8 hectares. Farms larger than this generally belonged to lawyers, pharmacists, or wholesale merchants in nearby towns and villages, for example the lawyer Sebastiano Mantelli, husband of Anna Cecilia Gavuzzo in Roddi (see Chapter III and Appendix 2, III.2). Figure 19 shows the distribution of fields belonging to the Gavuzzo families of Santa Vittoria in 1809. The fields were tiny, averaging 0.2 hectares (about 50 m square), and widely scattered. They had all been bought by the various families during the previous century, as and when they came up for sale. Those dedicated to vines posed no great problem. A man could walk to the field with a pruning knife and a spade and do all that was needed for a field of average size in 10 days per year. The harvested grapes could be carried away in baskets by donkeys. The cereal crops were, of course, harvested by hand, using sickles or scythes. Cultivation of the arable land would have been more problematic, for the plough and harrows had to be taken to the field on a wooden sledge, dragged by the draught-oxen. The late nineteenth century Inchiesta Agraria provides abundant data on farming methods in the area around Alba at that time The great majority of all farms were occupied and worked by their owners. The average farm size was about 2 hectares (Fantino 1883, p. 264). Most owners had a cow, a calf and an ox, about half had a few sheep, a third had a donkey and a pig, and one in ten had a goat. Land use was similar to that for 1750: vineyards 31%, arable 22%, woodland 26%, meadow 14% (Fantino 1883, p. 198). Annual net yields per hectare were 30 lire from cereals, 231 lire from alteno, 370 lire from irrigated meadow and 50 lire from woodland (Fantino 1883, p. 252-255). These figures indicate that a farm size of about 6 hectares would be needed to support a family with annual expenditure like that in Table 6. Such a farm would have needed only one man to work it (Fantino 1883, p. 279). Bearing in mind that the average farm was considerably smaller than than 6 hectares, it is clear that the children would have had to contribute to the household budget by working for others, either as agricultural labourers or in nearby towns. A chilling description of this kind of peasant life on a farm near Santa Vittoria is provided by Beppe Fenoglio’s novel La malora, published in 1954. Table 5. Annual cost of living (in lire) for a rural Piedmontese family about 1750 ____________________________________________________________________________________________
Data source: Prato 1908, p. 459. The family is assumed to consist of 4.83 individuals.. A litre of cereal weighs about 0.7 kg.
Living costs Table 5 shows the living costs of an average rural Piedmontese family in 1750. The family is supposed to consist of a married couple and two or three dependents––children or the elderly. The most evident difference from a present-day family budget is the importance of expenditure on food. Housing and heating costs were negligible because, as explained above, the houses were of simple construction and unheated. The only tax evident in Table 5 is that on salt, levied by the Piedmontese state. However, there would also have been a municipal land tax. In 1727 Stefano Gavuzzo was paying a land tax of about 0.2 lire per hectare in Santa Vittoria. This is a small figure compared with the average income arising from a hectare of agricultural land (see above). By 1880 the tax had risen to around 10 lire per hectare (Fantino 1883, p. 268), perhaps 10-20% of the likely net income from a hectare. This was an onerous tax for a subsistence farmer, for most of the farm produce was consumed by the family, rather than being turned into cash. Families had no substantial savings and social security was virtually non-existent. In emergencies one had to look to one’s relations for help. In 1734, after a long period of peaceful prosperity, about 5% of the population of Alba Province is estimated to have been made up of beggars. In 1743, after several years of crop failure, nearly 40% of families in the Langhe (the area immediately south of Santa Vittoria) were totally dependent on charity (Prato 1908, p. 330-331). They had mortgaged all their land and could find no work. Those who bought the land were men with incomes from non-agricultural sources, like lawyers, but also priests. There are several transfers of land to the parish priest of Roddi, Stefano Giacinto Gavuzzo, in settlement of debts at about this time (CAI 1734 & 1737). The charity available to the destitute was meagre, however, for the money available to the Church and the confraternities in the province of Alba in 1750 was equivalent to only 0.5 lire per head of the population, enough to support one person for three or four days (Prato 1908, p. 335). The economic situation improved after 1743 but it was to be a very long time before anything like prosperity returned to this area. Table 5 shows that the total cost of living for the hypothetical family described above, in the year 1750, comes to 247 lire. This is equivalent now to about 1800 euros, or 1 euro per person per day. Table 6 shows the annual living expenses of a rural family a hundred and thirty years later, in 1879. The family is supposed to consist of two parents and four children, one of whom is still at school. The father was a skilled farm hand (prataiuolo) with an income of 550 lire, while the three working children, aged from 12 to 18 years, contributed 454 lire. The family’s total income was 1258 lire. The expenditure per person per day (0.55 lire) equates to 1.8 euros now, indicating a near doubling of living standard since 1750. The main difference from the 1750 budget lies in the expenditure on food, which has decreased from 90% to 60% of the total outgoings. The small excess of income over expenditure (103 lire) is supposed to be enough to cover exceptional items such as bed linen, baptismal celebrations, dowries, etc. While there is no doubt that the family was better off than its eighteenth century counterpart, it is salutary to note the mayor of Santa Vittoria lamenting in a letter to the prefect of the province in 1877 that 300 out of the municipal population of 1300 were too poor to pay for any medical attention (Stacchini 1999, p. 127).
Table 6. Annual cost of living (in lire) for a rural Piedmontese family in 1879 __________________________________________________________________________________________ Vegetable products:
454
__________________________________________________________________________________________ Data source: Inchiesta Agraria 1883, p. 586. The family is assumed to consist of 6 individuals.
An income of 1.8 euros a day may not seem much, but World Bank data show that in the year 2001 about 2.7 billion people (nearly half the world population) lived on a similar amount, or less. In the nineteenth century those Gavuzzo families which had enough land to reliably reach this standard of living described themselves in the parish registers as ‘well-off’ (benestante). The reader should not deduce from the above discussion that family life in Piedmont in former centuries was particularly harsh. Far from it. Social conditions over the same period in the rural parts of western Europe were everywhere very similar.
Food and drink Tables 5 and 6 show clearly the predominance of a vegetarian diet, confirmed by the following description of a day in the life of a prosperous small-holder living near Alba at the end of the nineteenth century: In the morning, except during winter, he works for two or three hours before seven o’clock, and then has a light breakfast of bread and cheese, with peppers or celery or chicory in olive oil, and half a litre of light wine. This breakfast lasts half an hour. At eleven he finds lunch readyæa huge round plate of polenta, as yellow as gold and steaming like a volcano, or alternatively a soup of macaroni or rice and vegetables, cooked with lard, except that on days of abstinence olive oil takes the place of lard. The men sit around the table in the kitchen while the women serve them and eat, the children sit on the edge of the fireplace or on the doorstep, eating greedily from a plate on their knees. If polenta is the dish, the women prepare a sauce for it, and what a sauce! Our country women all come from the same school of cooking, and all their sauces are based on olive oil, garlic and anchovies. Sometimes a kind of sheep cheese is eaten with the polenta, and on days of abstinence salted fish or, rarely, eggs. With one or two glasses of the usual light wine, lunch is over. The farmer rises, wipes clean his lips with the apron or with his hands and, satisfied, returns to work, digesting the two or three big slices of polenta he has in his belly. There is no question of indigestion, and after just three hours he returns to have his afternoon snack of bread, cheese and salad. This snack lasts half an hour and, like breakfast, is taken in the shade of a tree. Finally, at dusk, he finishes work and returns home to find his dinner ready. If there was polenta for lunch, there is soup for dinner, and vice versa. After dinner he goes to bed, apart from a self-indulgent few who sit and smoke a pipe. [11]
The bitter leaves of the wild chicory were, and still are, collected by the women from the meadows and cooked. Like certain other vegetables they were often conserved in oil. The light wine (vinello) was made fom the crushed grapes left over after pressing. These grapes are nowadays thrown away, but in the past they were fermented with water. However, their sugar content was too low for fermentation to obtain an alcohol content over 6%, only about half that of normal wine. The reference to the men sitting round the table is literally true; the women would never sit with the men while they were eating (cf. Sarti 2004, p. 195). The heart of the kitchen was the huge fireplace, in which cooking was done in iron pots hung from a chain over a small fire. The hearth was raised above the kitchen floor, forming a convenient seat for children. The days of abstinence required by the Church were, of course, Fridays. The flight from the land The rural environment prior to 1900 was a kind of cultural prison. The situation in Pollenzo, which adjoins Santa Vittoria, was typical; ‘Almost half of the inhabitants are owners of small plots of land who, following exactly in the footsteps of their fathers, cultivate them and keep them as they were when they received them’ (Casalis 1847, vol. 15, p. 517). By ‘inhabitants’ is meant, of course, men––the fathers who owned the land, and the sons who were waiting to inherit it. In short, the son of a farmer was destined to be a farmer, and nothing else. The wealthier families might have been able to send their sons to university, but few did. A possible exception is provided by the Gavuzzo family in Santa Vittoria, which was already prosperous in the fifteenth century. Alexander Gavuzzo, a law graduate, was a municipal councillor in 1613, and his son Benedetto, another law graduate, was a notary and magistrate. How the Gavuzzo family in Roddi achieved their educational status is still a mystery. The genealogy in Appendix 2 shows that all the men, with one exception, were university graduates, priests, or army officers for at least five generations, from 1650 until about 1860 when the male line of the family died out. The family owned no more land than the Gavuzzos of Santa Vittoria or Monticello in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; their relative success came from education and its transmission from father to son. The best way of escaping the constraints of rural life was to go and live in a town. The prospect of emigration to a town, together with the effects of elementary education and military service, profoundly altered attitudes of mind in rural Piedmont in the second half of the nineteenth century, putting an end to an episode of agrarian history which had lasted since the Middle Ages, but leaving some observers with a sense of unease. We conclude this Chapter with the following comment, written by a contributor to the Inchiesta Agraria of 1883:
The age-old, proverbial resignation of the peasant to unremitting labour and to the delusions of the rural life, the affection for the family, the deference to the head of the household and the landlord, the attachment to the birthplace, the almost fatalistic spirit of the countryman who in everyday events saw nothing but an inevitable, almost supernatural predestination, has now given way to to an irresistible restlessness, an urge to abandon the family farm, change life-style or home, emigrate abroad, or seek a better future, thereby producing friction between family members, arguments with the landlord, the bad faith now so common in agricultural contracts, and lastly, mutual mistrust between land owners and their employees.[12]
The progressive
geographical dispersion of the Gavuzzo family from its origin in Roddi, in
northern Italy, is shown graphically in
Figure 20. For the first
five centuries family members lived and married within a range of only a few
kilometres. The first significant migration was in the eighteenth century,
and it was only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that
national boundaries were frequently crossed. The cause of the migration is
believed to be predominantly the attraction of urban life. In Chapter II we showed that the surname Gavuzzo, now concentrated in south-eastern Piedmont, was originally adopted as a family name in Roddi. Roddi is a rural municipality about 40 kilometres south of Turin, in northern Italy. The year of adoption is uncertain. However, the transformation of personal names into surnames in Piedmont occurred between 1200 and 1300, and so we assume that Gavuzzo was adopted as a family name during that period. The subsequent history of the family is summarized in Fig, 20. Figure 20 shows time on the vertical axis and distance from Roddi on the horizontal axis. Distance is plotted on a logarithmic scale. The presence of a Gavuzzo family or families at a named locality is shown by the vertical bars, the width of which reflects the number of families. The term family here means a husband and his wife. It is clear from the figure that no significant migration of families occurred before the eighteenth century. For some five hundred years the surname did not spread beyond the confines of Roddi, Santa Vittoria and Monticello, municipalities together only a few kilometres across (see Fig. 3). The first important migration occurred about 1730 when Girolamo Gavuzzo left Monticello for Cinzano, near Turin. The motive was economic; he was employed by the Marquis of Cinzano in the administration of his property and by 1770 was his bailiff. Later emigrants made their way to towns such as Alba, Carmagnola and above all, Turin. It was usual for the men to emigrate first, leaving their wives and children behind on the farm. The following old lullaby, once popular in the area of Monticello, had therefore to be altered (Milano 1973, p. 31).
Since papa was no longer in the wood (bosch), but in Turin, the rhyme became:
The main motive for emigration is, and always has been, the expectation of economic advantage. For the most part this advantage is to be found in the towns. The likelihood of finding work in a town depends on its size, so that in the Middle Ages when towns were very small their attractiveness was slight and most families remained in the country, engaged in agriculture. The progressive urbanization of Piedmont from the eighteenth century onwards, however, completely changed the situation. The social impact of urbanization in Piedmont can hardly be overestimated. In 1571 Turin, the principal town of the dukedom, had a population of only 14000 (Levi 1985, Table 1), while Piedmont as a whole had 900000 inhabitants (Beloch 1995, p. 4). By 1800 the population of the city had reached 80000, while Piedmont had doubled in size to two million (Melano 1961, p. 204). Today, the metropolitan area of Turin has some two million inhabitants while Piedmont has four and a half million. Nearly half the entire population of Piedmont is now centered on the city of Turin. The attractiveness of Turin to immigrants is clearly shown by the 1802 census of the city, which gives the inhabitants’ birthplaces (Lamberti 2002). The majority of those over the age of 25 years were born outside the city, mostly in municipalities nearby. In fact, the percentage of any municipal population which emigrated to Turin during the period immediately preceding the census turns out to be a logarithmic function of distance from the city. In other words, the city drew people to it rather like a magnet. Other Piedmontese towns have had a similar history of accelerating growth. Alba, for example, had only a few thousand inhabitants in the Middle Ages and even in 1833 had only 8000 (Casalis 1833, vol. 1, p. 130). Today the population of Alba is 30000.
Expressed
mathematically, the growth of urban centres in Piedmont over recent
centuries has been exponential, whether expressed absolutely or as a
percentage of the Piedmontese population. The maximum distance travelled by
individual family members in search of permanent work also increases
exponentially with time. It appears, therefore that the geographical
dispersion of the Gavuzzo lineage can be directly attributed to the
migration of individual families towards the towns and cities of Piedmont,
and ultimately to cities further afield. Much the same pattern of emigration
and dispersion can be expected for all Piedmontese families which
exist today, and indeed all European families, for the social history of
Piedmont is typical of the continent.
[1] P[rim]o. lenzuoli quatro, con una copertina nova di tella novena, piu faudal.. mediocri biodi, è tre bianchi di raitolla, uno gialdo di rainolla, uno di lino novo, più camiscie n[umer]o otto mediocre, due di lino nove, una di se.. piu fazzolletti n[umer]o sei tre mediocri, et tre novi, un fazzoletto doppio, piu fazzolletti n[umer]o sette di tella novena, et tre di tella di marzaro mediocri, piu serviette n[umer]o cinq[ue] mediocri, tre frenette di tella di marzaro mediocre piu sugamani n[umer]o due novi, più vesti tre una di saglietta grissa novo l’altra camissetta di panno grissa nova, et altra veste di cadisso griss mediocre, con un busto di panno novo, più scarpe paira n[umer]o tre, una di bianche nove, et altre negre nove, calsetti paira n[umer]o due, un paira stametto novi, et altra paira mediocri, puì un ponzone d’arg[en]to, piu granate gire n[umer]o otto, dentro quatro giri si trova dorini trenta, due capeline sottilli, piu leametti [=liametin] n[umer]o sette, pui tovaglie due con.. lavori, pui busti di tella novena con due giri coragli rotti, scuffie due di tella marzaro, con un strapontino, con una crocetta d’argento et anello da’ sposa (CAI 1666b, fol. 824v). [2] Un giorno cadde così tanta pioggia che le strade della Villa, i viottoli di terra battuta scaraventarono al Borgo molto fango. Il fango entrò anche nelle case. Finito di piovere gli abitanti del Borgo si radunarono in piazza e decisero di andare a protestare alla Villa perchè si provvedesse a fare qualcosa. S’inerpicarono nella “paciarina” dei sentieri e ad un tratto udirono delle risate: erano gli abitanti della Villa che li schernivano. “Paciariné...!” dicevano dall’alto della loro privilegiata posizione. I poveri abitanti del Borgo già arrabbiati in precedenza incominciarono a scagliare dei sassi e poi, visto che dovevano a loro volta insultarli con un termine che raggiungesse l’identico loro scopo l’identificazione con l’ambiente dissero in coro: “Fasorté....!”. Dopo tutto il giorno di continua “botte e risposta” i Paciariné si sedettero nella “paciarina” e i Fasorté nei filari dei fagioli. Poi tutti e due si guardarono un po’ vergognosi, mentra una donna che abitava a mezza montà, a Libignano, disse ad un tratto: “Paciariné o Fasorté siete tutti dello stesso paese avrete fame e sete ed è quasi notte”. Per qualche minuto tutti rimasero a guardarsi in silenzio poi, il coro esplose in un’unica grande risata. La donna che aveva una grande casa, li accolse tutti e i Paciariné ed i Fasorté finirono la risata mangiando e bevando in allegra compagnia (Lunardon 1997, p. 100-102). [3] Nota delle Vestimenta, lingeria, e denari dati da Gerolamo Gavuzzo a sua figlia Lucia in occasione del Matrimonio seguito tra detta Lucia, e Gioani Battista Salerio della città di Fosano: una Veste, cioè Ovata di Droghettino, e Falde di Calamandra, altra veste di Gamelotto di Francia, ed un Cottino di grisetta in lana, altra, cioè ovata di Mocajà, e cottino di Gamelotto rigato, altra, cioè ovata di Bandera di Francia, e cottino di Flanella, altra veste di Grisetta in seta, ed un ovata d’ambrosiera, una pelizza come nuova, camiggie di rista fina quindici, scozali di rista dodici, Fassoletti di rista dieci, Fassoletti di Monsolina quattro, scozali di indiena due, e due di Mossolina, calzetti parte di bombace, e parte di filo sette paja, scozzie sei di Mossolina di diverse sorte, un mantile, e sei salviette di rista, un Baulle nuovo che serve per coffano di valore lire nove, e lire cinquanta Piemonte in contanti...(TI 1782a). [4] in Memoria | degli ottimi nostri genitori | che ci insegnarono dio virtù lavoro | e amor fraterno | dedico questo libro | a te o Margherita mia buona sorella | che sola sai di quali veglie sia frutto | che sola partecipi ai miei dolori | ed alle mie gioie sorridi (Gavuzzi 1891, p. iii). [5] Si è cosi ben distinto l’avvocato Stefano Gavuzzo con prova di sapere, prudenza, integrità, esattezza, ed altri virtuose sue qualità, che veniamo investiti a dargli un effettivo contrassegno del gradimento, che si è presso noi meritato, col promuoverlo alla carica di Senatore in detto senato, e siamo persuasi che sarà per sostenerlo con lode sua, e soddisfazione nostra...(Genta 1983, p. 238). [6] Sulle vantaggiose informazioni, che abbiamo avute delle virtuose qualità, che concorrono nella persona dell’Avvocato Francesco Antonio Gavuzzi, e per dare anche al Presidente di lui padre una nuova dimostrazione del singolare gradimento, con cui rimiriamo la lunga, e lodevolissima servitù da lui prestata, ci siamo di buon grado disposti a destinare il preaccennato Avvocato suo figlio ad uno de’vacanti posti di Sostituito Archivista Camerale... (Galli 1798, vol. 1, p. 702). [7] Di lui si raccontano curiosi anecdoti; fra’quali, d’esser stato colto da una compagnia di maschere in piazza Savoia, mentre si recava in giovedì grasso vestito colla toga, come allora practicavasi dai magistrati e dagli avvocati, allorchè si recavano all’udienza, e d’aver dovuto con esse ballare. Dal quel fatto ne avvenne che nei successivi anni fu tolta l’udienza nel suddetto giorno. Altro anecdoto è quello che tenesse il violino sotto il letto, che traeva fuori e suonava, allorchè la brontolona sua moglie Teresa Cocchis gli recava noia (Dionisotti 1881, vol. 2, p. 345). [8] Dotato egli di uno spirito vivace, ed inclinato alla lepidezza anzi che nò, dotto in varie scienze, filarmonico eziandio, e posto in dignità cospicua nel foro, chiamò a contribuzione le sue cognizioni scientifiche, le pratiche, e i termini del foro, del teatro, e della musica in un coi vocaboli, e i modi di dire, del vernacolo Piemontese, per far nascere all’improvviso la barzelletta, e lo scherzo, e così mettere graziosamente in canzona le sconvenevolezze, ed anco forse qualche individuo de’tempi suoi, accoppiando idee piacevolmente stravaganti in guisa del tutto originale (Gavuzzi 1809, p. ix). [9] Ventiquattro camiggie nuove, e quattro altre usitate, due lenzuoli nuovi di tre tele caduno, sei mantelette, quattro veli per portar in capo due nuove, e due usitate ma tre brodate ed una semplice, quattro scuffie risse tre nuove ed una usitata, un bando di tullo per portar alle feste, due scuffie da notte di percallo, sei fassoletti da collo da setta tre doppi e tre semplice, nove fassoletti da colo da lavoro, sei fasoletti da naso, dodici veste intiere cioe tre di percallo in colore, una di mossolina bianca brodata, altra di nanchino rossa, altra di sempiterna rossa e nera, altra di doppio blue, due di cottone rosso e bleu, e tre di bombace in colore usitato, nove scossali da festa, ed altri nove da lavoro, nove paja di calzetti di bombace nuovi, ed altri cinque paja usitati, tre paja scarpe cioe due di vetorni ed un pajo di marochino, una pelizza nuova, una camisetta di panno verde nuova, ed in fine una guardarobba con sua chiave e serratura (CCI 1837). [10] Di giorno quando la neve copre le campagne ed alle veglie, dessi preparono alcuni attrezzi, o giuocano alle carte, alla morra, o raccontano o leggono o ascoltano fanfaluche e storielle da medio evo. Le femmine filano sempre colla cannochia la canapa pettinata per conto altrui o per uso della famiglia, o rappezzano gli abiti, prestando grandissima attenzione a quanto si dice sulle notturne apparizioni delle animi purganti, sui fuochi fatui, sulle stegonerie e sulle comete, indizi di sventura (Inchiesta Agraria 1883, vol. 8, p. 640). [11] Nel mattino, eccetto l’inverno, lavora due o tre ore prima delle 7, allorchè fa una piccola colazione di pane e formaggio, con peperoni o sedani o radici all’olio e mezzo litro di vinello: la colazione dura una mezz’ora. Alle 11 trova per pranzo un gran piatto rotondo di polenta, gialla come oro e fumante come un vulcano, o anche una “minestra” di maccheroni o riso e verdura, cucinata con lardo, tranne nei giorni di magro che l’olio prende il luogo del lardo. Gli uomini in cucina seggono attorno la tavola, le donne servono e mangiano, i bambini appollaiati sul camino o sulla soglia della porta, mangiano avidamente con la scodella sopra le ginocchia. Se il piatto è la polenta, le donne preparano una salsa, e che salsa! Le nostre contadine tutte provengono dalla medesima scuola di cucina, e tutte le loro salse sono a base di olio, aglio e acciughe. Qualche volta colla polenta mangiano una specie di formaggio pecorino, e nei giorni di magro pesce salato e di rado uova. Con uno o due bicchieri del solito vinello, il pranzo è terminato. Il contadino si leva, forbisce le labbra col grembiule o colle mani e, soddisfatto, va di nuovo a lavorare e a digerire le due o tre grosse fette di polenta che ha in corpo. Non è mai disturbato da indigestioni, e appena dopo tre ore ritorna a mangiare la sua “merenda”, di pane e formaggio e insalata. La “merenda”, come la colazione, dura una mezz’ora, e come quella vien fatta all’ombra di un albero. Finalmente, sull’imbrunire lascia il lavoro e torna a casa, dove trova pronta la cena. Se ha mangiato a pranzo la polenta, a cena mangia la minestra, e vice versa. Dopo cena, va a letto, tranne pochi dissipati che seggono a fumare la pipa (King & Okey 1904, p. 210-211). [12] L’antica proverbiale rassegnazione del contadino agli stenti ed ai disinganni della vita campestre; l’affezione alla famiglia, la subordinazione al capo di casa ed al padrone; l’affetto al luogo nativo; il genio quasi fatalista del campagnuolo che negli eventi della sua esistenza non iscorgeva che una ineluttabile predestinazione di ordine soprannaturale, cedetteroo ormai il luogo ad una irresistibile irrequietezza ed alla smania di secessione dalla casa paterna, di cambiamento di stato e di domicilio, di emigrazione all’estero, di un migliore avvenire; indi gli alterchi in famiglia, le dispute coi padroni, la mala fede dominante sovrana nei contratti agricoli, ed in fine la mutua diffidenza fra possessori e lavoratori (Inchiesta Agraria 1883, vol. 8, p. 620).
Kinds of men listed: A = all, CC = councillors & representatives (credenziari), T = tenants, L = land owners
1349 Bra Catasto 652 L Gullino 1994
1449b S. Vittoria Registro del catasto - L SVC 1449 ___________________________________________________________________________________________ No Medieval name lists for Verduno have yet been located. Surnames like Gavuzzo do not appear in any of the lists in the above Table before 1449. A ‘Guillelmus Gauaius’ in the Pollenzo lists for 1198, and 1208 (recorded, however, by Bollea in the Italianized form ‘Guglielmo Gavaro’) is unlikely to be a Gavuzzo. According to Förstermann (1900, col. 621) the very similar name ‘Gauius’ has its root in the Gothic word gavi, meaning land, whereas Gavuzzo stems from the Germanic root gauta.
The following genealogy describes the descendants of the lawyer Franceschino Gavuzzo in Roddi, including those born in Turin after 1745. It is mainly based on documents in the Archivio di Stato di Torino, the Archivio di Stato di Cuneo, and the Archivio Storico Comunale della città di Torino, together with the results of a preliminary search in the parish registers of Roddi. We are grateful to Don Franco Angelo, parish priest at Roddi, for permission to view the volumes in his care. Years searched; births 1589-1601, [1602-1644], 1644-1657, [1658-1680], 1680-1714, 1773-1833; marriages [1656-1697], 1698-1837; deaths 1596-1602, [1603-1615], 1616-1629, [1630-1690], 1690-1837. Dates in square brackets indicate records lacking or unreadible due to decay. The parish records of births and deaths for Roddi are unfortunately fragmentary, and some of those for the seventeenth century now unreadible, etched through by the acid ink used at that time. Consequently, births 1715-1773 have been taken from a list in the Molinari Collection (AM 1894). We are indebted to Gervasio Cambiano for invaluable material relating to Vinovo. Archival sources are indicated in round brackets. For details see the List of Manuscript Sources. The code number given to each person in the genealogy which follows shows their generation in Roman numerals and their position within the generation in Arabic numerals. All Gavuzzo names in the genealogy are indexed at the end. Abbreviations: b. = born, bap. = baptized, bur. = buried, c. = about, fl. = alive, fol. = folio, L = conscription list, m. = married, # = number, unm. = unmarried.
Generation I Franceschino Gavuzzo, son of messer Sebastiano, m. (1) Beatrice, daughter of messer Giacomo Musso of Roddi. She d. c.1641 (CAI 1641a); m. (2) Marchetta, daughter of Ottavio Garesio of Verduno. Francheschino d. in July 1671 in Roddi (CAI 1671). He and his second wife had five children, I.1–I.5. § Franceschino came from a family of lawyers, individually distinguished by the title messere. He also appears in documents with the title nobile or nobilissimo, but only once as nodaro, or notary (CAI 1653). Franceschino was a municipal councillor in Roddi in 1644 (CAI 1644). His father messer Sebastiano is mentioned rarely in the notarial archive for Roddi (CAI 1668). His grandfather, also called Franceschino (CAI 1636a & 1636c), was a municipal councillor in 1587, and died 10 February 1598 in Roddi. His uncle, the ducal notary messer Stefano Gavuzzo, was alive in December 1646 (CAI 1646b) but dead by 1649 (CAI 1649a). Since Stefano had no surviving children he nominated Franceschino, his nephew, as his heir (CAI 1645). Franceschino’s will, written 31 May 1656 (CAI 1691a), long before he died, names names only three childrenæhis heirs Stefano and Ottavio, and a daughter Giovanna Maria, who was to receive from his heirs a dowry of 350 lire when she married or entered a religious order. A similar dowry was to be provided for any daughter yet to be born. Other daughters may already have married. Franceschino requested his heirs to commission a painting of the saints Fabiano & Sebastiano to be put in the chapel of that name, over which his uncle Sefano had established a right of patronage (juspatronatus). The chapel, though not mentioned by Mussi (1979, p. 58-59), gives its name to a locality (see II.1, below). The dowy of Franceschino’s first wife was 400 lire (CAI 1641a), the same as that of his second wife (CAI 1668). Franceschino’s house, in which the will was written, is stated to have been in the contrada di Piazza, which corresponds to the central square of Roddi, bounded by the castle, the parish church and the town hall, now called Piazza Umberto I. To satisfy tax claims, Franceschino was obliged to sell the house in 1669 for 110 lire (CAI 1669).
Generation II
Generation III The children of Girolamo Francesco Gavuzzo (II.1) & Paola Maria Sineo
Generation IV The children of Stefano Gavuzzo (III.5) & Teresa Cochis
The children of Ottavio Gavuzzo (III.9)
Generation V The son of Patrizio Gavuzzi (IV.2) & Marianna Persico
The son of Ferdinando Gavuzzi (IV.6) & Teresa Azimonti
The children of Ferdinando Gavuzzi (IV.6) & Delfina Fassio
The daughter of Teodoro Gavuzzi (IV.8) & Angela Vittone V.10 Teresa Cristina Elisabetta Gavuzzi, b. 24 July 1814 in Turin.
The children of Stefano Gavuzzi (IV.13) & Giuseppa Belli
The children of Amedeo Gavuzzi (IV.25) & Rosa Valfré
The genealogy below is based mainly on the parish registers of Santa Vittoria and Pollenzo. Years searched: Santa Vittoria (Alba diocese), births 1600-1700, marriages 1612-1700, deaths 1589-1690; Pollenzo (Alba diocese), baptisms 1625-1646, [1647-1651], 1652-1680, [1681-1685], 1686-1705, marriages 1651-1680, [1681-1683], 1684-1685, [1686-1695], 1696-1711, [1712-1714], 1715-1728, deaths 1653-1684, [1685-1686],1687-1688, [1689-1691], 1692-1705. The Pollenzo registers are incomplete, hence the lacune shown in square brackets. The registers at Santa Vittoria and Pollenzo (S. Vittore) were kindly made available to the authors by Don Ezio Pasquero and Don Agostino Garabello, the respective parish priests. All exactly dated births and deaths in this appendix occurred in Santa Vittoria unless otherwise stated. Approximate birth dates are based on age at death. Alessandro, Simone and Girolamo are believed to have been brothers (see Chapter IV), and so they are regarded as belonging to generation I. In addition to their three families there are two others in the S. Vittoria and Pollenzo registers who are probably related, viz. Giovanni Battista Ghiuzzo, father of four children born between 1630 and 1640, and Paolo de Gheuzi, father of two children born between 1640 and 1644. The godmother of the first of Paolo’s children was Antonina, wife of Antonio Gheuzo of S. Vittoria Abbreviations: b. = born, bap. = baptized, c. = about, m. = married, S. = Saint.
Generation II The children of Alessandro Gheuzo (I.1) & Caterina––
The children of Simone Gauzzo (I.2) & Beatissima––
The son of Jeronime Ghuzo (I.3) & Margarita
Generation III The daughter of Giovanni Filippo Guezzo (II.1) & Giacomina Bertola III.1 Anna Maria Gheuzzo, b. 22 Feb. 1623, m. 2 Dec. 1645, in S. Vittoria, Antonio Bæ
The children of Benedetto Gheuzo (III.3) & Agnese III.2 Anna de Gheuzi, bap. 14 Feb. 1627 at Pollenzo
The children of Benedetto Gheuzo (III.3) & Anna Maria
The children of Giovanni Vincenzo Gheuzo (II.5) & Giovanna Cristino
The children of Sebastiano Gheuzo (II.8) & Anna Capello
The children of Sebastiano Gheuzo (II.8) & Lucia Buriala
This genealogy deals with the Gavuzzo descendants of Stefano in Monticello d’Alba. Surname spellings are those given at birth, marriage, death or other contemporary documents, in that order of preference. The names (but not the surnames) were usually Latinized from 1667 until 1832. The data used to construct the genealogy come mainly from the registers of births, marriages and deaths in parish archives. The years searched are noted in the paragraph below. Missing registers are indicated in square brackets. The parishes in Turin, however, are too numerous to be a useful source of genealogical information. Instead we used the indexed data for the city in the Archivio Comunale della Città di Torino. Additional data sources in the text (in brackets) are given in the lists of manuscript and published references at the end of this volume. Note that generation VII in the genealogy, which includes those born before 1875, is the last that can be regarded as complete. Later generations are too dispersed to be easily researched, a problem compounded by the difficulty of accessing the Italian State vital records in some municipalities. Alba (Alba diocese), births 1830-1840; Asti (civil records), births 1866-1905; Caramagna (Torino diocese), births 1823-1843, deaths 1823-1869; Carmagnola (Torino diocese): births, marriages and deaths 1823-1867; Cinzano (Torino diocese), births 1730-1845, marriages 1750-1845, deaths 1753-1845; Montechiaro d’Asti (Asti diocese), births 1840-1874, marriages 1840-1855, deaths 1855-1874; Monticello (Alba diocese), births 1599-1745, [1746-1752], 1753-1875, marriages 1660-1875, deaths 1630-1644 & 1698-1875; Pollenzo (Alba diocese), baptisms 1625-1646, [1647-1651], 1652-1680, [1680-1685], 1686-1705, marriages 1651-1680, [1681-1683], 1684-1685, [1686-1695], 1696-1711, [1712-1714], 1715-1728, deaths 1653-1684, [1685-1686], 1687-1688, [1689-1691], 1692-1705; Racconigi (Torino diocese), births 1821-1837, marriages 1823-1854, d | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||