Italian Villages: How To Find Your Ancestral Home Town – p 1

If you are looking to trace your Italian ancestry, one of the most exciting steps is locating the old Italian villages where your ancestors once lived. This can be a daunting task, but with a little research and patience, you can uncover the history of your family and the village they once called home.

Want to know how to locate your ancestors’ old Italian village?

The Italian villages of your ancestors can be easily found using the following searchable list of current Italian comuni. In summary, Italy has many distinct political subdivisions known as regioni, province, comuni and frazioni. To clarify, you can think of a region as a US state and think of a province as a county, or parish. And then think of every square inch of Italy as being located in one comune or another. These are similar to US “municipalities” or “townships”. Frazioni instead are detached areas which belong to a comune.

Current Number of Italian villages

At the present time, there are 7,918 comuni in Italy, although the number varies often. It’s important to realize that very often comuni merge together, and in similar fashion they may split and form new distinct comuni. If you need to see a list of Comuni which don’t exist anymore, check out this other post.

Conclusion

From a genealogical perspective, knowing the town where your ancestors came from is of the utmost importance. Each comune has a Town Hall, which is the institution you need to contact to get a birth certificate, death certificate, marriage license, etc. So, if you want to know how to locate your ancestors’ old Italian village, use the search box below. Just type in the name of the village and see if it appears. If it does, you are lucky as the same Comune still exists today. If not, see part 2 of this post.