The story of the 1908 Messina-Reggio Earthquake, the deadliest in European history, is a story that very few students of Sicilian or Calabrian family history fail to discover at some point. In the course of a few seconds, in the bitter darkness of a winter's pre-dawn, nearly 100,000 lives were lost, and those that were spared would be forever altered. Yet for me, the interest comes from an unusual direction. It is not through my Sicilian lines that my connection with this disaster was found, but through my Laziale lines. It was one of those things you discover when you least expect it.
Family historians know the phenomenon well.
And suddenly, after all these years, a brand new story comes rolling out, one you've never heard before in spite of the many opportunities for it to have been told in the past. My Sezzese Grandfather, Arcangelo Arduini, was serving in the Royal Italian Army when the earthquake occurred, and his unit was deployed to Sicily after the quake to help in the relief effort. I had never heard this story before, in fact had no idea that my grandfather had been in the service at all before emmigrating. Grandma wanted to make sure that Dad knew his late father would have approved of the marriage, in spite of the north-south bigotry they were all used to. My Grandfather, Arcangelo Arduini, with his son, John.