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Nobili Napoletani – Naples Nobility

Nobili Napoletani – Naples Nobility

January 30, 2023

Torre Piromallo - Once the summer home of my 3rd Great Grand Parents

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Nobili Napoletani

Nobili Napoletani is a great website that is dedicated to the Noble Families of Naples. In addition, it provides some links to other good websites for Neapolitan and Italian research in general. To be fair, finding your name on this site does not guarantee that you descend from that family or a branch of that family. A lot of hard research needs to be done to confirm.

Unlike researching family in the US on let’s say ancestry.com, researching in Italy is much harder, but not impossible, The best place to start is the antenati site, which gives birth, death and marriage records starting around 1806. While not every person is on there yet, more and more are added every month. The site is in Italian, but they do have some pages that you can click the flag and get an English translation, or you can use this google link. They google translations are not the best, but you will get the picture.

Even if you are not sure about your family being noble, the Nobili Napoletani is a great site for anyone researching the History of Naples. Some things that stood out was the information about the seats one Naples. Basically, these families ran the many sections of the city. We will be doing another post soon about another great website that lists more noble families of Italy. During the Spanish reign over Naples, because there was a shortage of Spanish nobles, they began to marry into Italian families. In many cases, names were changed to look and sound more Italian. One example of this is Pope Alexander IV, the Borgia Pope. His name in Spanish would be Borja. His daughter, Lucrezia Borgia, had an affair with one of my GGGGG Grandfather’s. Francesco Gonzga.

If you are not sure, need some help or have a road block that you can not resolve, you can always call on a professional for help. I used Bella Italia Genealogy. Alex and his team are based in Campania are excellent and very reasonable. You can find his link and others here.

Nobili Napoletani page shots of my two main families Caracciolo and Piromallo.