About Us

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Medievalist, archivist, and museologist Matthew Larcinese has been conducting archival research in Europe for over 19 years.  He is a doctoral candidate at the University of Leicester in England with his Ph.D. focus on History (Middle Ages and Church), and Museum ethnography.  He holds a master's degree in Museum Studies, Heritage, and Interpretation.  Currently, his projects include curating archives, relics, and antiquities in central Italy and is transcribing 13th and 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 19 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 also found the land and terrain his family has owned since the 1500s using 16th-century notary documents. Over the last decade, he has purchased 15 acres of land his family owned for the last 500 years, albeit just a fraction of what they originally acquired in the 15th and 16th centuries, he hopes to acquire more in the coming years. On these lands are old homes his family built in the early 1800s where he enjoys working on the 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. 

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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 Benedictine's) 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.”