THE OLD COUNTY
The tiny Italian village of Boveglio sits nestled high in the hills of Tuscany just about 15 miles to the Northeast of the beautiful walled city of Lucca. In the nineteenth century most of the residents there made their living growing olives and chestnuts. The chestnuts would be ground into a fine flour which was then used to make the bread and pasta that sustained them. It was in this pastoral medieval town that Giacinto Giorgi and Daria Ferrari would raise a family.
In 1977, when the mini-series “Roots” took America by storm, thousands of people adopted a new hobby called genealogy. And Maria Buchignani Taeuffer was one of them. One of her first steps was to interview some of the oldest members of her family that she could find. This precious snippet of conversation with her aunt, Louise Giorgi DalColletto, was recorded sometime in the late 1970s and allows us to hear the voice of our beloved Aunt Louise/Nonna one more time…
My mother was born Maria Columbia Buchignani. Her parents were Vittorio Alberto Buchignani and Eva Veronica Giorgi.
Growing up in Healdsburg, California I remember spending a lot of time visiting with my mother’s cousins on her Giorgi side. But there were also numerous families in town and the surrounding area named Buchignani, and we never socialized with any of them. My mother’s explanation was that “We’re not related to them.” By the 1990s there were 39 Buchignani families in Sonoma County. There were 160 in California. But, of course, we were not related to any of them.
Sleuth4Family 