Naming names in a small town

What are the chances of driving into a small town in southern Italy and, within two minutes of parking the car, meeting someone with your same last name?

I really hadn't stopped to think about it until we decided to spend Sunday, our last day in Molise, driving to the town where my husband's grandfather was born.

Pescolanciano is a hill town of about 1,000 residents a few miles over a mountain from Civitanova. It used to be a 45-minute drive, but with new tunnels dug since Tom's grandparents lived there, it took only seven minutes.

Pescolanciano has an ancient castle and drawbridge, and a tratturo, a grassy path that shepherds once used to herd sheep and cattle between the highlands of Abruzzo and Molise, south to Apulia, for the winter. But few foreigners visit, so we attracted some attention when we parked our van in the square and started walking down the main street, looking for the house where Tom's grandfather lived as a boy.

Women poked their heads out of upstairs windows. A group of men outside the bar quit talking and stared. Luciano Pellegrino stopped kicking a soccer ball around with his 13-year-old son.

"Why are you here?" he asked. I was surprised to hear English, and I explained that Tom's grandfather, Joseph Auciello, was born here. Unlike in Civitanova, where we have cousins, we knew no one in Pescolanciano.

"My mother-in-law's name is Auciello," he said. Just then, a woman came out of a food shop across the street to see what was going on. He introduced her as Ana Auciello, 70, whose grandfather was named Joseph.

We did a few age and date calculations and quickly figured out that the grandfathers could not have been the same people, but we were excited to think about the possibility that perhaps the two had been related in some way.

We chatted with Ana awhile, looked around at the cured meats and fresh cheese in her store, and took pictures. Then Luciano offered to show us the way to the local cemetery, where the gravestones were marked with photos of the people buried there. There were dozens of stones marked "Auciello," and several of the pictures resembled some of Tom's relatives in Ohio.

Back home in Seattle, I e-mailed Luciano the photos of Ana. He seemed as excited as we were to have made the connection.

Then I did a search on a Molise Web site (http://molise.indettaglio.it). It turned up some information on the 10 most common surnames of people living in Pescolanciano. There were Padulas and Caldaraos and Del Mattos and even Pellegrinos. But no Auciellos.

I scrolled further down the list. Then I found it. According to the search, there are only 11 Auciellos left.

What were the chances? Not good, most likely, had it not been for Luciano, who was kind enough to interrupt his soccer game to ask after a group of strangers wandering around town.

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