The Delphic maxim Γνῶθι σεαυτόν (gnōthi seauton), Latinized as "Nosce Te Ipsum" ("Know Yourself"), was inscribed at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi and later became the cornerstone of Western philosophy. This principle transcends cultures and religions, appearing in diverse traditions as the pathway to wisdom, union with God, liberation, or harmony with nature. In this essay, we explore how self-knowledge has been understood across major religions and philosophies, including Greek philosophy, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Indigenous traditions. We also examine the role of ancestry and memory in knowing oneself.
The Study of Ancestry
Self-knowledge is not only personal but ancestral. Ancient traditions, from Greek hero cults to African tribal lineages, teach that we are shaped by those before us. To know oneself requires memory of the ancestors, for they are threads in the tapestry of identity. Thus, self-knowledge is both introspection and remembrance.
Greek Philosophy
Socrates taught that "the unexamined life is not worth living." By turning inward through dialectic, the philosopher uncovers the divine element within the soul. Plotinus, in his "Enneads", describes the ascent of the soul from self-knowledge to union with the One. In this sense, to know oneself is to know one’s divine origin and the order of the cosmos.
As if Socrates himself were speaking: "Come, friend, enter into dialogue with yourself, for within you lies a fragment of the divine reason. To neglect it is to remain ignorant of both yourself and the gods."
Christianity
Saint Augustine wrote in his "Confessions": "I have become a question to myself." He argued that self-knowledge leads to knowledge of God, since the human soul is created in the "imago Dei". Mystics such as Meister Eckhart and Teresa of Ávila described prayer and contemplation as descending inward, where God dwells in the depths of the soul.
As if Augustine were addressing us: "Brothers and sisters, know yourselves, for within your heart lies the image of the Creator. To ignore your soul is to close your eyes to God."
Judaism
Jewish mysticism teaches that the soul carries sparks of divine light ("nitzotzot"). To know oneself is to recognize these sparks and engage in "tikkun olam", the repair of the world. Hasidic masters emphasized that self-awareness, humility, and joy awaken one’s divine essence.
As if a Rabbi were calling: "Child of Israel, search your heart, for the divine spark dwells within you. In knowing yourself, you awaken God’s presence in the world."
Islam (Sufism)
The Sufi tradition preserves the saying: "He who knows himself knows his Lord." Rumi’s poetry and Al-Ghazali’s writings describe the purification of the ego ("nafs") to reveal the heart as a mirror reflecting God. Through self-knowledge, the believer discovers that all existence points back to the Creator.
As if Rumi himself were speaking: "Come, enter our circle. Within your own heart lies the mirror of the Beloved. Polish it with remembrance, and you will see His face."
Hinduism
The Upanishads declare: "Atman is Brahman". The deepest self is not separate from ultimate reality. Through meditation, yoga, and self-inquiry, one realizes this truth and attains liberation ("moksha").
As if the sage Yajnavalkya were speaking: "Come, seeker, turn within. The Self you search for is none other than Brahman. To know yourself is to know the universe."
Buddhism
Buddhism emphasizes "anatman" (non-self): the self is not a permanent entity but a flux of impermanent phenomena. Yet, paradoxically, by deeply investigating the self, one realizes its emptiness and attains Nirvana. Dōgen wrote: "To study the self is to forget the self; to forget the self is to be enlightened by all things."
As if the Buddha were addressing us: "Monks, know the self not as a thing but as a river. In seeing its impermanence, you awaken to the deathless."
Taoism
Laozi in the "Tao Te Ching" teaches: "Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom." Self-knowledge allows one to harmonize with the Tao, the natural order of the universe. Zhuangzi further emphasized that true self-knowledge dissolves rigid distinctions and flows with nature.
As if Laozi were speaking: "Come, wanderer, cease striving. Sit quietly and know yourself. In doing so, you will flow with the Tao, as water with the stream."
Indigenous Traditions
In Indigenous traditions, self-knowledge is inseparable from ancestry, land, and community. Vision quests, shamanic journeys, and ancestral remembrance guide individuals to discover their place within the cosmos. Knowing oneself means knowing the ancestors and the harmony of nature.
As if an elder were speaking: "Child, remember where you come from. The bones of your ancestors are your roots, and the wind is your breath. In knowing them, you come to know yourself and the Great Spirit."
Conclusion
From Delphi to the Upanishads, from Augustine to Rumi, from Laozi to Indigenous elders, the call resounds: Know yourself. Whether through discovering the divine spark, realizing union with God, transcending the ego, or harmonizing with the cosmos, the path of self-knowledge unites philosophy and religion across time. In knowing ourselves, we glimpse God, nature, and the mystery of being.
References
Plato, Apology, 38a.
Plotinus, Enneads I.6.
Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book X.
Meister Eckhart, Sermons.
Rumi, Masnavi.
Al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness.
Upanishads, Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7.
Dōgen, Genjo Koan.
Laozi, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 33.
Zhuangzi, Inner Chapters.
Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.
By connecting with our ancestors, we connect with the most primitive form of the idea of our spirituality and of the continuity of the cycle of life.
In the summer of 774, in the months after Charlemagne destroyed the Lombard kingdom of Italy, the Duke of Benevento granted a monastery a stretch of land in the valley of the river Biferno, together with the people who worked it. Among them he listed the baccarii — the cowherds. In the next clause he granted the cattle as well, and his scribe wrote them baccas.
That spelling is the subject of this study. Baccarius and vaccarius are one word; baccas and vaccas are one word; and Baccaro and Vaccaro, Baccari and Vaccari, are one surname.1 The charter does not name my family, and could not have: hereditary surnames did not yet exist in southern Italy in 774. What it does is fix the trade from which the name is made to a date and a place — the Gastaldate of the Biferno — in the same hills where the family is then documented continuously from 1495 onward.
Seven centuries separate those two facts, and this study does not pretend to bridge them. What follows argues something narrower: that the trade named in a Lombard charter of 774 and the trade my family lived by in Capracotta and Bonefro are the same trade, in the same landscape, under a pastoral system that outlasted by a thousand years the duchy that issued the charter. It also sets out, as plainly as I can, what the evidence does not support.
THE POLITICAL CHARTER OF 774
The date is not incidental, and neither is the beneficiary. In June 774 Charlemagne took Pavia and deposed Desiderius, last Lombard king of the Kingdom of Italy — and the father-in-law of Arechis II of Benevento, whose daughter Adelperga he had married around 757. Benevento was left as the only Lombard polity still standing. Arechis answered by abandoning the title of duke for that of princeps and by issuing laws in his own name, a prerogative until then reserved to Lombard kings.
Santa Sofia was the instrument of that claim. Arechis had founded it around 760, dedicating it to Holy Wisdom after the Hagia Sophia of Constantinople, and after 774 it became the national church of the Lombards who had taken refuge in the south — the dynastic and ideological centre of an independent Lombard Benevento. A grant of lands and dependants to Santa Sofia in that year is therefore a political act in the strict sense: the endowment of that centre in the year the principality declared itself. Adelperga, for her part, was taught by Paul the Deacon, the principal historian of the Lombards, who lived at Benevento at the end of the eighth century and wrote his history at her request.
This matters for what follows. The charter is a deliberate, high-status document of state, not a routine estate memorandum — which is why its Biferno holdings, and the people attached to them, were itemised with care. Arechis granted Santa Sofia property in the district known as the Gastaldate of the Biferno2 and at the Carbonarium de Osculo:3
"...et per Carbonarium de Osculo usque in finem de novo Frontino; de alia vero parte per viam publicam usque fluvium Calabium; deinde usque in terminum quod dicitur alatre. Et concessi eidem sanctae Sophie Monasterio Baccarios casas numero hec sunt. Casa que regitur per Maurissonem cum uxore et filiis et omnibus sibi pertinentibus. Casa que regitur per Francoaldum cum uxore et filiis et omnibus sibi pertinentibus. Casa que regitur per Cusolum cum uxore et filiis et omnibus sibi pertinentibus. Casa que regitur per Ferrandum cum germanibus et uxoribus filiis et omnia eorum. Casa que regitur per Scalzonem cum uxore et filiis suis et omnibus sibi pertinentibus
...
Necnon et in Gastaldato Bifernensi concessimus Cortisanos, hi sunt Johannem et Walterium cum uxoribus et filiis suis, et omnibus sibi pertinenti: seu et unam sororem Indari. Hos autem cum integra portione eorum sancte Sophie Monasterio concessimus possidendum. Item et in eodem Gastaldato concessimus Baccarios; hi sunt, Grauso cum uxore et filiis; sed et noras et nepotes ejus, et omnia eis pertinentia: necnon et Sindonem cum uxore et filiis suis. Seu et Baccas in integrum qui fuerunt servi Rimichis et de Germano eius carpentarii nostri..."4
Baccarios stands in exactly the construction occupied two lines above by Cortisanos: a category of dependent workers, followed by hi sunt — "these are" — and then the people themselves. The people are named Grauso and Sindo.5
The formula predates the charter. Du Cange's Glossarium defines vaccarius as "qui vaccarum curam habet in praediis rusticis" — one who has charge of the cows on a rural estate — and cites the testament of the abbess St Irmina, of the year 698:6
"Omnia ista cum adjacentiis eorum, una cum pastoribus, Vaccariis, porcariis, brevicariis cum gregibus eorum..."
The same construction, seventy-six years earlier and in another realm: an estate transferred together with the people who tended its animals, itemised by trade — shepherds, cowherds, swineherds, herdsmen. Arechis's chancery was writing a standard form.
But the scribe's spelling is the finding. In the same sentence he writes Baccas for vaccas. The alternation between b and v is documented in the manuscript itself, in this identical word — which is exactly the relationship binding Baccaro to Vaccaro and Baccari to Vaccari. The charter of 774 therefore attests, with a date and a place, that the trade from which the surname derives was being practised in the Gastaldate of the Biferno.
That is not an ancestor. It is something rarer: the anchoring of a surname to a specific trade in a specific landscape, with a date attached.
THE LOMBARD BACKGROUND
A word on how Arechis's chancery came to be writing Latin charters in the mountains of the south at all. The Lombards settled in Pannonia in the sixth century, receiving the province from the Emperor Justinian around 546 in exchange for military service, and there mixed with other Germanic peoples and with Roman-Byzantine and local populations.7 In 568 Alboin, son of Audoin,8 led them from Pannonia across the Julian Alps into Friuli, founding his kingdom at Cividale and beginning centuries of Lombard rule over the peninsula.9
Three years later Zotto founded the Duchy of Benevento, carrying that rule into the centre and south. Zotto and the dukes and princes who followed him were originally Lombards of Friuli; the Friulian dynasty held Benevento until 1050, and the principality itself survived until 1077 — nearly three centuries after the northern kingdom had fallen.10
This is the world the charter comes from, and it is worth knowing for that reason.
THE FAMILY IN THE RECORD
Civil, ecclesiastical and historical records place the family in the region of the Biferno continuously from the fifteenth century to the present day, the name by then written Baccari. These records concentrate in two towns of Molise, close to the territory formerly known as the Gastaldate of the Biferno: Capracotta, high in the Apennines, and Bonefro, where the medieval Palazzo Baccari stands.11 The largest single expression of the family's presence was the estate of Giuseppe M. Baccari, handed down across several generations and extending from the Biferno to the Fortore; part of it was expropriated under the land reform of the 1950s, and he died in 1975.
At Capracotta the family produced two prominent churchmen, the brothers Francesco and Nunzio Baccari. Nunzio was Bishop of Boiano from 1718 and Vicegerent of Rome from 1721; Francesco was appointed Bishop of Telese in 1722. A medieval palace at Capracotta is still known as Palazzo Baccari-Mosca.
Registers record members of the family at Benevento from around 1700,12 following a decline in their standing in the Biferno region. In 1871 another prominent member was born there: Eduardo Baccari, a career military medical officer — commissioned in the Regio Esercito in 1894, transferring to the Regia Marina in 1896 and reaching the rank of lieutenant colonel — who moved into colonial administration, serving as chief of staff to the colonial minister, director general of the Colonial Ministry, and briefly Governor of Cyrenaica from October to December 1922. He died in Rome in 1952.
The name is attested in other regions too — chiefly the Veneto,13 Lombardy,14 Lazio15 and Apulia16 — though no genealogy yet connects those groups to the Molise line. More recently, through the depressions and wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many emigrated to the Americas.
ONE TRADE, ONE LANDSCAPE
Here is what can be argued, and it is a good deal more than it first appears. The trade named in Arechis's charter and the trade the family lived by are the same trade, in the same landscape, under a system that outlasted the duchy that issued the charter by a thousand years.
The droving roads of the Biferno are older than any institution that ever taxed them. An inscription near Termoli dates to the sixth century BC; a boundary stone on the Centurelle–Montesecco route to the first century BC; and a customs list of 1533 names "lo tratturo de Trigno et Piferno" outright.17 The Regia Dogana della Mena delle Pecore, founded at Lucera in 1447, moved to Foggia in 1468 and abolished only in 1806, did not create this system — it formalised and taxed one already ancient.
Capracotta, at 1,421 metres, is among the highest inhabited ground in the Apennines and is summer pasture by vocation; its herds set out each season from the sanctuary of the Madonna di Loreto. The Baccari drew their wealth from precisely this transhumance, and held the office of sindaco generale of the Dogana from father to son across three generations — Filippo, Giacomo Antonio (elected 1669), and a second Filippo.
Two qualifications are owed. Arechis granted cattle, whereas the economy the family prospered on was emphatically a sheep economy; a surname fixes an occupation at the moment it becomes hereditary and then stops following its changes, but the difference should be stated rather than smoothed over. And the same trade in the same place is not descent. It is a real historical finding. It is not a line of fathers.
WHAT THE Y-DNA CANNOT SHOW
Direct paternal Y-DNA testing18 across several branches of Beneventan families — Baccaro and Baccari — returned haplogroups R-M198 (R1a1a) and R-M269 (R1b1a1b).19
R-M269 is the most widespread haplogroup in western Europe and is very common in Italy; it distinguishes nothing. R-M198 is uncommon in Italy and is an interesting datum in itself, but a haplogroup has a time depth of millennia, is shared by millions of unrelated men, and cannot place an ancestor in a particular sixth-century migration, nor separate Lombards from Goths, Gepids, Avars or far later settlement.
There is also an internal difficulty that has to be acknowledged. R1a and R1b diverged tens of thousands of years ago. Finding both among branches of the same surname does not indicate a common origin — it indicates that those branches do not share a direct paternal line, and that the surname has at least two independent origins. Which is exactly what one expects of an occupational surname, arising repeatedly wherever the occupation existed.
Nor does the comparison with the Lombard-period cemetery at Szólád close the gap. The authors of the principal study of those burials are explicit: whether the people buried there identified as Longobards "is therefore impossible to assess", and there is no evidence that the groups in motion were genetically homogeneous.20, 21
Y-DNA does remain good at one thing, and it is a thing worth doing: establishing whether two living men share a common paternal ancestor. Testing a documented Bonefro descendant against a Capracotta line and a Velletri line would answer a question the surviving coats of arms only hint at.
THE QUESTION THAT REMAINS
Seven centuries stand unwitnessed between the charter and the first Baccari of Capracotta — 774 to 1495. But the document that opens that gap may also help to close it.
The Chronicon Sanctae Sophiae is not an isolated charter. It is the monastery's entire cartulary, compiled around 1119, and Santa Sofia held its Biferno properties long after Arechis was gone. The question to put to it is narrow, and answerable: do baccarii recur in those holdings between the ninth and twelfth centuries, and in which charter does the word stop denoting a trade and begin denoting a person?
That transition — from Iohannes baccarius, John the cowherd, to Iohannes Baccarius, John Baccari — is the exact point at which a surname is born, and it is visible in the language of the charters themselves. The manuscript is digitised and freely readable; a critical edition exists. Nobody, as far as I can establish, has yet looked. That is the work still to be done.
REFERENCES
Albino, Pasquale, Biografie e ritratti degli uomini illustri della provincia di Molise, Campobasso: 1861–1865.
Allison, Penelope, A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds, Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2011.
Alt, Kurt W. et al., "Lombards on the Move — an Integrative Study of the Migration Period Cemetery at Szólád, Hungary", PLoS ONE 9(11): e110793, 4 November 2014, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0110793.
Amorim, Carlos E. G. et al., "Understanding 6th-century barbarian social organization and migration through paleogenomics", Nature Communications 9, 3547, 2018.
Ancestry.com, surname Baccari, 2021.
Antenati, "Archivio di Stato di Benevento", Gli Archivi per la Ricerca Anagrafica, 2021.
Arechis II, charter of 774, manuscript Vat. lat. 4939, a. 1119.
Arecchi, Alberto, Nomi longobardi, Pavia: Liutprand, 1998.
Baccaro, Renato, "Elenco delle nascite dei componenti della famiglia Baccari a Benevento secondo Curia e Comune di Benevento (1575–1908)", data collected online in June 2021.
Bauco, Tommaso, Compendio della storia Veliterna, vol. 1, Rome: Tipografia Mugnoz, 1841.
Beltrano, Ottavio, Breve descrizione del regno di Napoli, Naples: 1644.
Borgia, Stefano, Memorie istoriche della pontificia città di Benevento, Rome: 1763.
Bozza, Francesco, L'antistoria nell'area del medio Biferno, Libri di Storia vol. 1, 2014.
Bozza, Francesco, Limosano: questioni di storia, ricostruzioni ed approfondimenti, Campobasso: 2008.
Brentano, Robert, Rome Before Avignon: A Social History of Thirteenth-Century Rome, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1991.
Campanelli, Luigi, Il territorio di Capracotta, Ferentino: 1931.
Catholic-Hierarchy, episcopal records for Nunzio Baccari (Boiano, 1718) and Francesco Baccari (Telese, 1722).
Ciarlieglio, Maria Natalina, I feudi nel Contado di Molise, Campobasso: Palladino Editore, 2013.
Di Cicco, Pasquale, Il Molise e la transumanza, Iannone, 1997.
Di Crollalanza, Giovan Battista, Dizionario storico-blasonico delle famiglie nobili e notabili italiane, Bologna: A. Forni, 1965.
Di Rienzo, Francesco, "La famiglia Baccari di Capracotta", Associazione Amici di Capracotta, 2020.
Du Cange et al., Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis, Niort: L. Favre, 1883–87, t. 8, col. 225a, s.v. Vaccarius.
Falco, Michele, "Sant'Elena e la leggenda della vera croce", STMU, 2017.
Fragnito, Alessio; Grella, Vincenzo Antonio, "Zottone, il primo duca di Benevento", 2020.
Gasparri, Stefano; Simoni, Fiorella; Berto, Luigi Andrea, Antologia delle fonti altomedievali, Reti Medievali, 2021.
Casalis, Goffredo, Dizionario geografico-storico-statistico-commerciale degli stati di S. M. il Re di Sardegna, vol. 29, Turin: 1834, p. 343.
Archdiocese of Benevento, parish registers: Registro delle Collezioni, 1575–1908.
Italy, Ministero della Cultura, Beni Culturali, Antenati, 2021.
Marcellinus, Ammianus, Excerpta Valesiana, books 27–31, trans. J. C. Rolfe, Loeb Classical Library vol. III, Harvard University Press, 1939, p. 470.
Masciotta, Giambattista, Il Molise dalle origini ai nostri giorni, vols. I, III and IV, Campobasso: 1958.
Nobili Napoletani, "Famiglia Baccari", 2021.
Pamjav, Horolma; Fehér, Tibor; Németh, Endre; Pádár, Zsolt, "Brief communication: new Y-chromosome binary markers improve phylogenetic resolution within haplogroup R1a1", American Journal of Physical Anthropology 149(4): 611–615, 2012, doi:10.1002/ajpa.22167.
Paul the Deacon, History of the Lombards, trans. William Dudley Foulke, ed. Edward Peters, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.
Piccolino, Giulia, "Il Congo, l'Italia e Leopoldo II del Belgio, parte II: la missione di Eduardo Baccari (1903–1908)", Accademia Nazionale di Scienze, Lettere e Arti di Modena, 2007.
Regia Dogana della Mena delle Pecore: founded Lucera 1447, seated at Foggia from 1468, extended to Abruzzo 1532, abolished 21 May 1806.
Rossi, Giovanni, Catalogo de' vescovi di Telese, Naples: Stamperia della Società Tipografica, 1827, p. 183.
Rossini, Ettore, L'origine dei cognomi italiani. Storia ed etimologia, Melegnano, 2014.
Testamentum S. Irminae Abbatissae, a. 698, in Martène, Amplissima Collectio, t. 1, col. 9.
Tria, Giovanni Andrea, Memorie storiche civili ed ecclesiastiche della città e diocesi di Larino, Rome: 1744.
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[1] Although my own surname is written Baccaro, my paternal great-grandfather was Baccari, as were several of my uncles, cousins and other ancestors in my paternal branch. For convenience I use Baccaro throughout when referring to recent family records. Related forms include Baccario, Baccarios, del Baccaro, de Baccariis, Baccharius, Baccarini, Vaccarios, Vaccario, Vaccari and Vaccaro.
[2] In the medieval system a gastaldate was an administrative district governed by a representative of the royal or ducal court, exercising authority on its behalf. The central part of the Gastaldate of the Biferno lay near the church of Sant'Angelo Altissimo [https://goo.gl/maps/tmQL2jHs9TZpqn7e9], about 100 km from Benevento, in present-day Molise. The Biferno rises in the Apennines and reaches the Adriatic.
[3] Present-day Ascoli Satriano, in the province of Foggia, Apulia.
[4] Manuscript "Chronicon Sanctae Sophiae", Vat. lat. 4939 (a. 1119), f. 34r, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana [https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.lat.4939/0079]
[5] Grauso is a Lombard name in common use at Pavia and Brescia, and the cortisani granted in the same passage — Johannes and Walterius — likewise bear Germanic names. This tells us that the dependants granted in the Biferno bore Lombard names. It does not tell us that a surname Baccari existed, nor that those dependants were ancestors of the family. Cf. Alberto Arecchi, Nomi longobardi, Pavia: Liutprand, 1998.
[6] Du Cange et al., Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis, Niort: L. Favre, 1883–87, t. 8, col. 225a, s.v. Vaccarius: "Qui Vaccarum curam habet in praediis rusticis: Gall. Vacher", citing the Testamentum S. Irminae Abbatissae of 698 [http://ducange.enc.sorbonne.fr/VACCARIUS].
[7] In the migration from Pannonia to Friuli the Lombards were joined by Saxons, Heruli, Gepids, Bulgars, Thuringians and Ostrogoths.
[8] Audoin was previously king of the Lombards in Pannonia.
[9] The migration is documented by Paul the Deacon. Alboin was killed at Verona in 572, where the kingdom's military administration was seated. In Venetian dialect the term bacaro means a kind of tavern; its origin is uncertain and no connection to the surname has been established.
[10] Zotto and the later dukes and princes of Benevento were originally Lombards of Friuli and descendants of the first rulers of the Kingdom of Italy. The Friulian dynasty died out at Benevento in 1050.
[11] Palazzo Baccari, Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali [https://catalogo.beniculturali.it/detail/ArchitecturalOrLandscapeHeritage/1400107775] [http://www.sigecweb.beniculturali.it/images/fullsize/ICCD1027346/ICCD11750241_BonefroDA107775.pdf]. The hereditary succession of the lands can be checked against the Catasto Onciario of the localities.
[12] Including records in the direct line of my paternal ancestors.
[13] At eighteenth-century Lendinara the family is represented by three brothers, sons of Bellino Baccari, commemorated after their deaths in the naming of Via Fratelli Baccari. All three entered the priesthood and two were also notable architects. Francesco Antonio (b. 1747), of the Congregation of St Vincent de Paul in Rome, began his career at sixteen; he became Provicar in 1817, Vicar General of Missions in 1821 and Apostolic Commissary in 1828, declining the office of Assistant General in Italy a year later. Giacomo (1756–1822) followed him in both vocations, designing the church of S. Barnaba di Saguedo, work at the cathedral of Adria, and the Cappella del Bagno at the sanctuary of Pilastrello; his neoclassical manner is most evident at San Biagio. He was long rector of the sanctuary. Gaetano (b. 1752), the third brother, was concerned solely with the religious life; on 23 August 1787 the commune realised his ambition of opening a public library, and in July 1981 the Biblioteca "Gaetano Baccari" at Lendinara was named for him. No genealogical connection to the Molise line has been established.
[14] In the comune of Lodi there is a place called "Cascina Baccario".
[15] From the sixteenth century the family is also present at Velletri. The earliest public act is that of Vespasiano Baccari, a notary there, who married Cinthia Vitozza de Sermognano at Castel Rubello near Orvieto. He had two sons, Paolo and Tiburzio. Tiburzio drafted and authenticated the "Statuto di Albano", held in the state archives of Rome, and was auditor to the duchies of Parma and Piacenza and to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese.
[16] Members of the family moved to Apulia, where they served as administrators of the Regia Dogana.
[17] An inscription near Termoli of the sixth century BC and a boundary stone of the first century BC on the Centurelle–Montesecco route attest the antiquity of the network; the customs list of 1533 names "lo tratturo de Trigno et Piferno", corresponding to the modern Ateleta–Biferno and Biferno–Sant'Andrea routes.
[18] Y-DNA testing traces the direct paternal line and reflects ancient generations, the Y chromosome having a very low mutation rate.
[19] Germany, Poland and Russia show the highest incidence of R-M198 (R1a1a), above 10% of Y-DNA tests taken there, followed by England, Norway, Sweden and Scotland at above 5%, while those tested in Italy carrying R-M198 represent roughly 1%. (FamilyTreeDNA: https://www.familytreedna.com/public/y-dna-haplotree/R;name=R-M198.) Results for R-M269 are broadly similar in structure: https://www.familytreedna.com/public/y-dna-haplotree/R;name=R-M269. Frequency distributions of this kind describe populations, not lineages, and cannot establish descent for any individual family.
[20] The Lombards settled in present-day Hungary, in Pannonia. Archaeologists have uncovered cemeteries in the Szólád area in which men and women were buried together as families, a practice unusual among Germanic peoples of the period. Both Germanic and Roman genetic material is found in Lombard-period graves there.
[21] Amorim et al., 2018: "Whether these people identified as Longobard or any other particular barbarian people is therefore impossible to assess"; and "if we are seeing evidence of movements of barbarians, there is no evidence that these were genetically homogenous groups of people."
