How old records, handwritten letters and a court case revealed an extraordinary story involving Contessa Giustina De Nicastro that my family carried for generations.
I started Castellesi because of my connection to Italy and to the individual towns our families came from, but somewhere along the way it began to mean something more to me. The older I get, the more I realize how easily our family histories can disappear. We remember that our grandparents came from Italy. We may remember the town, or sometimes only the province. We remember pieces of stories told around the dinner table. But with every generation, another name can disappear, another photograph can become a picture of people nobody can identify, and something that was once common knowledge within a family can become little more than a fragment.
That realization is one of the reasons I've spent so much time researching my own family. I expected to find birth certificates, marriage records, passenger lists, names and dates. I did not expect to find a Contessa, disputed identities, unusual birth registrations, handwritten letters, money quietly passed through a priest, a scandal inside a palace, and an attempt to take a family claim before the Italian courts. This isn't a story I discovered in a history book. It's my family.
At the center of the story is Contessa Giustina De Nicastro, wife of Conte Domenico Gentile, and two members of my family, Ernesto and Marianna Aitelli. Ernesto and Marianna maintained that the parents recorded on their official documents were not their biological parents and that they were actually the unacknowledged children of Contessa Giustina De Nicastro and Conte Domenico Gentile. More than a century later, I cannot tell you that they proved it, but I can tell you that they tried, and remarkably, many of the documents behind their story survived.
The official version of their story begins with Raffaele Aitelli and Grazia Maiorino. A surviving civil registration for Marianna states that Grazia appeared before officials in Naples and reported that Marianna had been born on November 6, 1867. Grazia identified the child as being from her legitimate union with Raffaele Aitelli, who was described in the record as an “Artista Comico” — an actor. What makes the registration unusual is that Marianna was already more than eleven years old when her birth was recorded, and the document itself refers to a ruling from the civil court in Naples authorizing the registration. A separate death record confirms that Raffaele lived in Naples, died there in June 1873, and was the husband of Grazia Maiorino. On paper, the story seemed settled, but Ernesto and Marianna believed that paper trail concealed something else.
Ernesto's records were complicated as well. According to the later legal documents, he had originally been recorded as having been born in Naples on October 20, 1869 under the name Gregorio Speranza. Twelve years later, Grazia Maiorino petitioned the authorities to amend the record. The surname Speranza was changed to Aitelli, and the child was recorded as Gregorio Ernesto Immaculato Grazio Aitelli, son of Raffaele Aitelli and Grazia Maiorino. The Naples court subsequently ordered the correction. Marianna's history was different but equally unusual. The later legal filing states that she had originally been recorded as Marianna Gufo, born in Bitonto on November 6, 1867. Years later, Grazia sought to have her registered in Naples as Marianna Aitelli, daughter of herself and Raffaele. Ernesto and Marianna eventually pointed to these unusual histories as part of their argument that the official records did not tell the complete story.
Their claim led directly to Contessa Giustina De Nicastro. Giustina and Conte Domenico Gentile had legitimate children of their marriage who lived as members of the family in the palace in Bitonto. According to the history preserved within my family, Marianna was also kept close to the Contessa and spent considerable time around the palace despite not being publicly acknowledged as one of Giustina's children. One important part of that relationship is supported directly by the surviving legal record: Marianna had been raised and educated at the Contessa's expense. Years later, in 1892, Giustina entered into a private agreement providing Marianna with 1,000 lire for her immediate needs, along with continuing financial assistance toward the mortgage on her home.
According to the story that survived within my family, the secret eventually came into the open inside the palace itself. Marianna became involved in an argument with Giustina's legitimate children and, during that confrontation, insisted that she was the same as they were—that she, too, was Giustina's daughter. According to the family account, the confrontation exposed what until then had remained largely within the household. The scandal had consequences, and Giustina was eventually sent away from Bitonto with one of her sons and went to Rome. I don't have a surviving court transcript of that argument inside the palace, so I cannot present every detail of it as something proven by a document. It is part of the history passed down through my family. What I do have are the documents showing that the unusual relationship between Giustina, Marianna and Ernesto continued well beyond the palace.
Marianna wasn't the only one receiving Giustina's attention. So was Ernesto, and some of the most personal evidence survives through Padre Raffaele da Paterno, a priest who became an important figure in Ernesto's life. Padre Raffaele was not simply a stranger who happened to deliver a message. Ernesto would later work with him at the church in Pompei for years. In the surviving documents surrounding Ernesto and Marianna's claim, Padre Raffaele repeatedly appears as an intermediary between Ernesto and Contessa Giustina De Nicastro, with correspondence and money passing through him.
One surviving exchange from 1892 is particularly remarkable. At the time, Giustina herself was experiencing serious financial difficulties. In a surviving letter, she described going four days without money in the house for food. Her cook had been forced to use her own money, the house had not been paid for, and members of the household staff had gone months without their wages. Yet even while struggling herself, Giustina found a way to help Ernesto. She borrowed 100 lire from a friend and set aside 20 lire from that money so that Ernesto would at least have something to eat.
Padre Raffaele forwarded the money. His surviving note to Ernesto, written from Castellammare di Stabia, begins affectionately with “Dearest Ernesto.” He tells Ernesto that the 20 lire had arrived, urges him to have patience and fortitude, asks after the people around him, and says that after his stay in Castellammare he would return to Naples and planned to stop and see Ernesto before the end of the month. Knowing that Ernesto's relationship with Padre Raffaele continued afterward makes that letter particularly meaningful to me. This wasn't simply money passing anonymously from a Contessa through a priest. These were people whose lives remained connected, and more than 130 years later I can still read their words.
The 20 lire wasn't an isolated payment. Ernesto and Marianna produced additional correspondence they believed demonstrated that Giustina repeatedly helped Ernesto financially. One document referred to another payment of 10 lire, while another described an additional 80 lire being sent to him. Most significantly, their later petition argued that Giustina felt a moral obligation to help Ernesto. To Ernesto and Marianna, these weren't the actions of a distant benefactor. They believed they were the actions of a mother who could not publicly acknowledge her children.
One of the most personal details in the surviving legal record involves Ernesto's own daughter. He named her Giustina. According to the petition, when Contessa Giustina De Nicastro learned that Ernesto had named his daughter after her, her eyes filled with tears. More than a century later, I can't know exactly what those tears meant. Ernesto apparently believed he did. That's one of the difficulties with family history: documents can sometimes tell us what happened, but they can't always tell us what was in someone's heart.
Whatever relationship existed between Giustina and Ernesto eventually became strained. The surviving records refer to Ernesto considering legal action. Correspondence involving Padre Raffaele shows him cautioning Ernesto about proceeding and warning that doing so could provoke the Contessa's anger, while at the same time making clear that he would not prevent Ernesto from pursuing the matter. Years later, Ernesto received an even more direct message from Pasquale Daccadio, who wrote that he had received instructions from Rome telling Ernesto that the Contessa could do no more than she already had and that he should stop writing to her because she would no longer read his letters. Even then, according to the later filing, the connection apparently wasn't completely severed.
According to my family's research, Contessa Giustina De Nicastro died in Rome in 1906. With her death, whatever questions Ernesto and Marianna might once have been able to ask Giustina directly could no longer be answered by her. Later in 1906, they pursued the matter legally against the Gentile family and estate. Their claim was unambiguous: they maintained that they were the unacknowledged children of Contessa Giustina De Nicastro and Conte Domenico Gentile. That point is enormously important to me because this isn't a story invented by descendants generations later. Ernesto and Marianna themselves were making the claim and believed it strongly enough to pursue it through the Italian legal system.
The legal proceedings did not ultimately establish that Ernesto and Marianna were Giustina's biological children. The surviving decision concerning their attempt to pursue the claim concluded that the documentation they presented was insufficient to allow the proposed action to proceed. That does not prove their claim was false, but it does not prove it was true either. I could make this a much more sensational story by declaring that I've discovered that members of my family were the secret children of an Italian Count and Contessa, but I won't do that. The evidence doesn't allow me to present biological parentage as an established fact. What I can say is that Ernesto and Marianna believed it, they made the claim themselves, they produced documents and correspondence to support it, and many of those documents survived.
What happened to the historical record afterward has become another important part of this story for me personally. I have spent considerable time and money trying to locate additional records in Bitonto that might finally answer some of these questions. Historians and researchers have searched on my behalf, and I have pursued records, locations and pieces of the story that I hoped might still exist more than a century later. Instead of finding all of the missing pieces, I encountered something I didn't expect.
According to historians and researchers who have assisted with my search in Bitonto, their assessment is that portions of the historical record connected to Contessa Giustina De Nicastro were deliberately erased. I cannot tell you who removed those records, exactly when it happened, or why it was done. But after the time, effort and money I've spent trying to locate records that researchers believe should have existed, their absence has become part of my search and part of this story.
What makes that even more remarkable is that Contessa Giustina De Nicastro has not completely disappeared from Bitonto. Physical traces connected to her remain, including structures bearing her name. Her personalized tomb also survives, although today priests are buried there rather than the woman whose name and history led me to it. There is something haunting about finding someone's name still written into the physical landscape of a place while discovering that so much of the paper history surrounding that person has vanished.
But not everything disappeared. The letters survived. The cards survived. The unusual and delayed birth registrations survived. Padre Raffaele da Paterno's correspondence survived. The evidence of Giustina's financial support survived. And the legal records showing that Ernesto and Marianna themselves claimed to be the unacknowledged children of Contessa Giustina De Nicastro and Conte Domenico Gentile survived. Those documents do not scientifically prove biological parentage, but they establish something extremely important to me: the controversy existed at the time, the relationships behind it were real, and this was not simply a story created by later generations of my family.
After all of this research, I am still left with questions. Was Contessa Giustina De Nicastro really their mother? Why was Marianna's birth registered so late? Why had Ernesto originally been recorded under another name? Why did Giustina pay for Marianna's upbringing and education and continue supporting her as an adult? Why did she repeatedly provide money to Ernesto, even while experiencing serious financial problems herself? Why did she reportedly cry when she learned that Ernesto had named his daughter Giustina? What really happened inside the palace in Bitonto, and what happened to the records that might have helped answer these questions?
Maybe there are innocent explanations for every one of those things. Maybe together they tell another story. I don't know, and strangely, I've become comfortable saying that. Preserving family history isn't about making a story better than the evidence allows. It's about preserving what we actually know, acknowledging what our families remembered, following the evidence wherever it leads, and being honest about what we may never
What makes all of this especially meaningful to me is that these aren't simply interesting people I discovered while researching nineteenth-century Italy. They are part of my family. Their lives became part of the Aitelli family story that continued through southern Italy, through Nocera Inferiore, through the generations that eventually came to America, and ultimately to me. When I started researching all of this, Ernesto, Marianna, Raffaele, Grazia, Giustina and Padre Raffaele were names. Now I have their records and their letters. I can read Giustina's words. I can read Padre Raffaele writing “Dearest Ernesto.” I can see the unusual changes made to the birth records, and I can read the arguments Ernesto and Marianna made when they tried to have their claim recognized.
Researching this has changed the way I think about heritage. Our heritage isn't only the Italian flag, the food we grew up eating, or saying that our family came from Italy. It's the people—their towns, their names, their struggles, their decisions, their secrets, their mistakes, their journeys, and sometimes even the questions they left behind. Somewhere along the way, researching all of this stopped feeling like genealogy to me. It became remembrance.
That's increasingly what I want Castellesi to be. Not simply a product line, but a place where Italian Americans can exchange information, preserve family histories, share photographs and documents, remember the individual comuni our families came from, and leave something behind for the generations that follow us. If parts of my family's history really were deliberately erased, that has only made me more determined to preserve what remains. Someone kept these letters. Someone saved these cards. Someone preserved these documents. More than a century later, they reached me, and now I'm preserving them for whoever comes after me.
I may never know with certainty whether Contessa Giustina De Nicastro was the biological mother of Ernesto and Marianna Aitelli. But their story didn't disappear. Their letters survived, their names survived, and more than a century later, someone in their family is still saying them. That may be the most important thing I've learned from all of this: our family stories are worth keeping. This is one of mine, and now I'd love to hear yours.
Here is Ernesto and Marianna's Story in thie own words (translated)
Ernesto & Marianna Aitelli
Extract from the Original Court Record
The applicants Ernesto and Marianna Aitelli intend to bring a civil action against Vincenzo Gentile, Giustina Giulia, Giovanna and Lucrezia, in order to be recognized as natural children of the late Countess Giustina DeNicastro, who died in Rome on January 1, 1906, born during her marriage to the late Count Domenico Gentile, who died in Bitonto on October 7, 1883.
Ernesto Aitelli was born in Naples on October 20, 1869, and was recorded in the civil registry as Gregorio Speranza, of unknown parents. Twelve years later, Grazia Maiorino petitioned the Civil Court of Naples to have the surname Speranza changed to Aitelli, and the name Gregorio changed to Gregorio Ernesto Immaculato Grazio Aitelli, son of the late Raffaele Aitelli and Grazia Maiorino.
Marianna Aitelli was born in Bitonto on November 6, 1867, and was recorded in the civil registry as Marianna Gufo. In 1879, Grazia Maiorino petitioned the Civil Court of Naples to have Marianna recorded as her daughter and as the daughter of the late Raffaele Aitelli.
The applicants allege that both birth records were falsified and that they are in fact the natural children of Countess Giustina DeNicastro. They claim that the falsifications were carried out to conceal their true parentage.
On June 10, 1892, Countess Giustina DeNicastro entered into a private agreement with Marianna Aitelli, granting her the sum of 1,000 lire for her immediate needs, as well as a monthly payment of 10 lire toward the mortgage on her home. Marianna had been raised and educated at the Countess's expense.
The applicants also produced documents concerning Ernesto. One document states that Countess Giustina DeNicastro felt morally obliged to assist him and had sent him 20 lire through Raffaele da Paterno. Another letter concerned an additional payment of 80 lire.
When the Countess learned that Ernesto had named one of his daughters Giustina, after her, her eyes filled with tears.
The applicants declared themselves ready to prove through written evidence and witnesses that they are the natural children of the late Countess Giustina DeNicastro and that the defendants are obliged to acknowledge their status.
On April 21, 1907, the Commission resolved that the documents presented did not provide sufficient proof to justify the proposed lawsuit and rejected the application for legal aid.
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La Famiglia È La Patria Del Cuore.
Family is the homeland of the heart.
About the Author
Marc Aitelli is the founder of Castellesi, an Italian-American heritage brand inspired by the towns, traditions, and family stories that connect generations. His family roots trace to Nocera Inferiore in the province of Salerno and Castel Baronia in the province of Avellino, and he remains close with family in both communities today. Through Castellesi, Marc shares photographs, documents and stories preserved by his family while working to build something larger than a product line—a place where Italian Americans can exchange information, preserve their histories, and help ensure the stories of the people and places that came before us aren't forgotten.
