Matthew Larcinese is a medievalist, archivist, and museologist who has been conducting archival research in Europe for more than 20 years. He is currently a doctoral candidate, focusing on the history of the Middle Ages and the Church, as well as museum anthropology. He has a master's degree in Museum Studies, Heritage, and Interpretation from the Univeristy of Leicester. His current projects include curating archives, relics, and antiquities in central Italy and transcribing 13th and 16th-century texts.d 16th-century texts. (Digestum Scripturarum Coelestinae Congregationis, II, II,30/1, Notaio Claudio Paglione, 1580-1609, Gessopalena, and Parrocchia di S. Valentino Martire Battezzati, 1598-1652) from Italian and Latin to English.
Matthew has been working in Italy for over 20 years. He is specifically involved with the prosopography of the town where his family came from, Gessopalena, Abruzzo and has traced 35 families in this town back to the 1500s.
He found his family's land using 16th-century notary documents. He purchased 15 acres of land they've owned for 500 years but hopes to acquire more. The land has old homes built by his family in the early 1800s, where he works on olive trees and terrain.
The specific lines of his family were significantly involved with the Benedictine Monastic Order (including the Cistercian, and Celestine Orders branches of the Benedictines) and part of the clerical class and magistrates, di Blasio, and de Berardo.
While the Benedictines had a presence in this area of Abruzzo since the 9th century (Monte Cassino in Frosinone), the Celestine Order (a 13th-century branch of the Benedictines) constructed another monastery in the town where Matthew’s family surname originated, and where branches of his family were affiliated, and records over eight priests in the early 1600s. His last exploration in Italy uncovered the Cistercian monastery destroyed by the local population in the mid-14th century. While he was able to recover the location and material culture of the monastery (pottery, architectural remains) the area itself will need an archaeological dig to fully study the culture in this area.
Matthew has explored 700-year-old monasteries in Abruzzo and parallel the structure with documents that detail their specific construction. He spends his time in Italy tracing the documents and locating monasteries that have been demolished and forgotten for centuries. Crawling through the ancient rooms and reconstructing the culture of ancient faiths and religions has been his passion. Along with recovering his family land and monastic orders, Matthew has rediscovered several Jewish quarters and ghettos in Abruzzo.
Ludovica Pimpinella, 30 years, Rome, Italy.
Official Italian translator, theatre, and art lover. For years she has been engaged in equal opportunities and antiviolence culture. Ludovica states, “Rome means everything to me. I could never live without the fascination and magnificence of the eternal city.”
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