Meet Orso
Your Family Line, Out of the Records Themselves.
Every Italian family story began somewhere.
Maybe you know the comune. Maybe you only know a province, a surname, something your grandparents used to say, or the name of a place written on the back of an old photograph.
That's where Orso comes in.
Tell him what you know, and a researcher goes looking — not only for the town, but for the family itself, generation by generation, in the registers that recorded them at the time.
Who Is Orso?
Orso was created to represent something at the heart of Castellesi: the journey back to where your family story began.
For many Italian Americans, that journey starts with fragments — a town name remembered by a grandparent, a province written on an old document, a family surname, a photograph or a story passed from one generation to the next.
Orso follows those clues. He travels through the comuni, cities and regions of Italy, discovering the places behind the names and the stories carried from them across generations.
That's why you may see Orso representing Napoli one day, Avellino another, or traveling through Molise, Sicilia or Calabria. He doesn't belong to one place. He represents the journey to yours.
Have Orso do the digging
Ask Orso Research Search
A researcher working in the Italian civil records, tracing your ancestor's family line back through three generations.
Not assembled from someone else's family tree. Built from the records themselves — which is why, for now, a person does it rather than a machine.
A written report on your ancestor's Italian family line, with the record number and the archive or comune holding every document — not a tree, a trail you can walk yourself. Where your ancestor married in Italy and the records allow, their spouse's line is included as well.
One search covers one emigrant ancestor and three generations of their Italian line — your ancestor, their parents and their grandparents, each attached to the act that records them. Carrying the line deeper is an extended search.
A real report, in full — free to read and to download. It shows the gaps as plainly as the findings, which is how every report is written.
The report is delivered within seven days. If a register did not survive, or does not cover the year, that is still a completed search — you receive the report of what was examined and what was ruled out.
The report gives the citation for every document, not the document itself. If you would like the certified copies, we request them at $250 per act plus the comune's own fee — asked by PEC, Italy's certified email, and we tell you that fee for your comune when the report is handed over rather than leaving you to find out afterwards. We ask for the copia integrale, the full transcription, and request both the digitally signed copy and the stamped paper original by post. Italian comuni have up to six months by law to answer; that clock is theirs, not ours.
If you need an act for a citizenship application, confirm your consulate's current requirements first — consulates set their own rules about which form they accept and how recently it must have been issued.
Why Orso?
A Tree Is a Conclusion. A Record Is a Document.
Most of what is online about Italian families is a tree — someone's conclusion, copied. Copy it fifty times and it begins to look like agreement, but there is still one source behind it, and it was never a document.
A search result gives you three fields: born, parents, town. That is an index entry. The act itself gives you the street they lived on, the father's trade, the hour of birth, the witnesses and their ages, and the marriage added in the margin twenty years later.
And a tree has one slot for a mother. A parish did not. When a man married twice, a tree shows a contradiction between two sets of parents — the register shows a second marriage act and two sets of children, half-siblings rather than an error.
That happened in our own family, and the two birth acts are reproduced in full on the page below.
Free to use
Start With the Town.
Find Your Comune is free and open to everyone. Type a town name, or click the region on the map, and see the province, the region and the archive that holds its records.
It is the right place to begin — and knowing the comune makes a full search faster, not unnecessary. The records still have to be read.
Orso's travels
Follow Orso Through Italy.
Orso's journey takes him through the comuni, cities and regions of Italy — each with its own history, character and story.
The Orso d'Italia collection follows him along the way, celebrating the places that generations of Italian families have called home.
Napoli Orso Sweatshirt
$55.00
Roma Orso Sweatshirt
$55.00
Sicilia Orso Sweatshirt
$55.00
Milano Orso Sweatshirt
$55.00
Not Sure What to Get Them?
Tell Orso where their family comes from — or whatever you know — and we'll help you find something that connects them to their roots.