Listed below are links that will take you to websites with more information about Calatafimi and Italian Ancestry.

The Annotico Report

Wikipedia - Calatafimi

Trapani -Sicilia

Italian Family Genealogy

Italian Gen

Italian Genealogy Online

My Italian Family

Italian Ancestry

History of Southern Sicily

Jennifer Petrino - USA Researcher

Giovanni Montanti - Our Sicilian Researcher

Brooklyn Genealogy

The Best Cannoli in Sicily

We went to the Eurobar in Dattillo - it truly is the best cannoli we have ever had!!  If in Sicily, you must go!

Recommended Books for Reading

Blood Washes Blood by Frank Viviano.  In a land steeped in family tradition, the rootless Viviano (a foreign correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle) looks to uncover a family secret: how his great-great-grandfather, a man mysteriously known as "the Monk," was gunned down at a crossroads in rural Sicily more than a century earlier, the victim of an ordered hit. In search of answers, Viviano travels to his ancestral village of Terrasini. He soon discovers that when it comes to the island's history, there are always two competing versions of the truth: "one lies in the official past, the other in the folk memory and its poetic reincarnation in fable." Viviano's conclusions seem both well reasoned and enticing, as do the results of his inquiry into the story of his great-great-grandfather a search that comes to a particularly satisfying surprise ending. And while, in its purest form, the book is a solid piece of storytelling and reporting, its greatest strength may be that while it begins as a personal search, it ultimately reveals the history of a people.

Unto the Daughters by Karen Tintori.  Tintori's poignant memoir of the recent discovery of her great-aunt's murder deeply underscores her Sicilian culture's troubling subjugation of its women. Tintori (recounts how in 1993 her aunt and mother reluctantly told her of an obliterated name from her great-grandfather's passport to America. Gradually Tintori discovers the fate of the missing youngest daughter, Francesca, by working backward in time to when the Costa family first made its way to Detroit from Corleone, Sicily, in 1914. Although her sister Josie made a successful love match, Francesca pined for the barber's son, but was forcibly engaged at 16 to a scion of the Mafiosi in order to better her family's fortunes. Francesca eloped, to the family's dishonor, and was probably murdered (shackled, dismembered and thrown in the waters of Belle Isle) by her brothers when she dared to return. Because of her family's wall of silence, Tintori finds no sense of catharsis here, only a harrowing tale of sorrow and shame. 

SSt

Streets of Calatafimi

Ancient Convent across the street from the Mother Church.

Baptismal where many Gerardi ancestors were baptized in the Mother Church in Calatafimi.