The trip of a lifetime!
Ciao Marcello,
Thank you, we arrived home with nothing more than the usual inconvenience of a trans-Atlantic flight.😁
We were very please with the trip. The drivers (especially Francesco) were fantastic, always on time, always helpful, always courteous and always ready to offer advice when asked. The tour guides were all great, very knowledgeable, very engaging and eager to do whatever they could to make the trip a success.
This is especially true for our guide in Cisternino, Lucia, we wanted to do genealogy research in Cisternino and she was very helpful talking to the priest for us at the church were my grandfather was baptized. The priest said he would look in their records and provide any information that he could. We haven't heard from him yet but we are hopeful. The next day we went to the main cemetery where we thought we might find records of my grandfather's grandfather's grave, we spoke to the grounds keeper (in our limited Italian) and he directed us to the municipal office in Cisternino because he said they have the records of grave locations. We went to that office and although no one there spoke English with our limited Italian my son and I were able to communicate with them and they were very helpful looking through their records and finding my grandfather's grandfather's birth and death certificates. Because he was buried in the old cemetery in Cisternino (which Lucia told us would be the case) which was closed down soon after WW1 they do not have a record of his grave now. The staff at the municipal office was very enthusiastic to help and we are very please with the information that we received. In fact, we learned that he died while living on via Regina Margherita in Cisternino and although we don't know the number we were able to walk on the (very short) street and certainly saw the house. We were also able to determine that a number of names on the WW1 / WW2 monument in town are our relatives. Our goal was to find a concrete connection to the region and we were able to do that, we are very pleased.
The accommodations were very nice and we enjoyed them all very much. All of the owners / workers were very friendly and helpful and the beautiful pools at the massarias were particularly nice to cool off in at the end of days in the heat.
We would like to thank you for listening to what we wanted of this trip and coordinating what we consider to be the trip of a lifetime.
Greg - United States (July 2023)