Piedimonte Etneo

Piedimonte Etneo means the foot of the mountain, and it is exactly that: a comune of the province of Catania standing on the north-eastern slope of Etna, above Fiumefreddo and the Alcantara valley, looking out at the Ionian Sea. The neighbouring towns in this archive — Mascali, Giarre, Linguaglossa's side of the mountain — are all within a few kilometres.

Living on Etna is a recurring administrative fact, not a metaphor. In 1928 the eruption that destroyed the town of Mascali — the only town Etna has swallowed whole in modern times — happened eight years after Sebastiano Mazza was born here, and the archive records Mascali as a birthplace for people in this family.

For most of this archive's life the Sicilian side was a single town, and the family tree still says so: it puts Maria Nicotra at Piedimonte Etneo, where her husband was born. Four consecutive documents, read in September 2026, take her and her father somewhere else — and the towns are all within eight kilometres of each other, down the same coast road.

• Piedimonte Etneo — the Mazza, back to Mariano Mazza and Maria Catalano, both alive and working there in April 1871. Also where Venera Cassaniti was born in 1848, and where she and Giovanni Nicotra married on 7 October 1872.
• Mascali — where Giovanni Nicotra was living in 1872, and where Maria Nicotra was born on 8 December 1875, at half past nine in the evening, in contrada Sopra Pietrafitta. Her birth act was found here after fourteen consecutive Piedimonte birth indexes had been read without her, because a wife went to her husband's comune and the children were registered there.
• Giarre — where the 1872 publication certificate says Giovanni Nicotra himself was nato. Eleven Giarre birth years, 1838 to 1848, have been read end to end, main runs and appendices, and they do not hold him. For a day this archive let that stand for the town and wrote that Giarre's only Nicotra was a Dottor Don. Then its first year was opened: 1820 holds two untitled Nicotra households, and one of the fathers is a Rosario. The decade was wrong, not the town.
• Riposto — the lower town, which has registered separately from Giarre since 1821. Twenty-three Riposto years are now read, births and marriages, and Giovanni is in none of them. What Riposto gave instead is the shape of the answer: its 1844 marriage Tavola holds a Nicotra born at Giarre who married here and registered his children here.

None of that was in the family's export, and none of it changes who Michael Rocco Mazza's grandparents were. It changes where his great-grandmother was born, and it adds three comuni and about two thousand volumes to what this archive has to read. Her own birth act is reproduced on the Mascali page. The Nicotra line → · What has been read →

The family tree used to hold two Mazza kindreds that touched nowhere: the line down to Sebastiano, and a separate island of a hundred and ten Piedimonte Mazza — Mariano, Leonardo, Orazio, Umberto, Giuseppa, Serena, Graziella and the rest — with parents, children, marriages and cousins of their own, and not one record joining them.

Five records closed it. The export carried Salvatore Mazza's undated father Rosario twice: once as a stub, once as «Rosario Mazza b. 1850 of Piedimonte Etneo» at the head of the island. Nati 1873 atto 3 names Salvatore's father «Rosario Mazza di Mariano», 28, and his mother Leonarda Bonanno; marriage proclamations of 1898, 1902 and 1910 give Rosario's age again — 53, 55, 65 — and name three more sons. The island's Rosario has exactly those sons by a wife called Leonarda. One man.

So 116 of the 122 Mazza in this archive now sit in one connected tree, and 6 do not. The join is not an automatic merge — the automatic rules refused it, correctly, after an earlier build fused four undated Rosario Mazza on the name alone. It is declared, in documented-joins.tsv, with its citation and with what would overturn it. An automatic merge is a rule; a documented join is an argument, and an argument has to be published so it can be attacked.

Why this section was wrong until 23 September. It selected its people by component number — comp === 2 — and component numbers move. When the join merged the island into the main tree, comp === 2 came to mean seven Mazzitelli of New York, and this page tabled them under a heading about the Mazza of Piedimonte Etneo while its prose named Mariano, Leonardo and Orazio. Nothing was lost and no record was wrong; a page simply went on describing a question after the archive had answered it. The open questions →