We receive many e-mails asking help to locate ancestors’ hometowns.
We see that in many cases, reading Italian words from manuscripted old documents could be difficult and that people from abroad are not able to spell exactly the name of their ancestor’s Italian town.

In other cases even if the name is correct, it seems almost impossible to find the town on the maps or on Internet search engines. The reason is simple: more than 2500 Italian villages changed their names in some way over the course of last 150 years (from the Italian Unification on) and more than 2000 municipalities were totally suppressed. It means that it can be very difficult to locate exactly more than 4500 old villages today. To help you in your researches, we added this new feature to ItalianSide.com. We hope it could be useful for all of you!

The Old Italian Towns and Villages database
and the Italian Towns and Cities database are two powerful tools to discover more about your Italian roots!