About Us

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Matthew de Larcinese is a medievalist, historian, and museologist living in the Detroit area of Michigan. While at the Doctoral College at the University of Leicester’s Medieval History and Museum Studies programs in England, he focused on the relevance of religious objects in 21st-century museums. While initiated by his position in the churches in central Italy, the study of the relic culture of the Catholic Church parallels the religious object and iconography from many world religions: Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, African spirituality, Egyptian dynasties, Slavic Paganism, Nordic religions, as well as the culture of Indigenous religions of the Americas. Matthew has been working in Italy for over 20 years. He is specifically involved with the prosopography of the town where his family came from in Abruzzo and has traced 30 families back to the 1500s. 

Using Y-DNA analysis and consulting with geneticists and genetic genealogists, he has been using archives, genetics, material culture, and tracing ancient inscriptions found on old tombs and castle walls to recover an ancient Jewish lineage in the area. While touring lesser-known Jewish quarters in small towns, he also endeavored to bring this smaller Jewish area into the light by establishing open-air museums that can add to tourism. In working with family histories, he has been able to recover not only his lineage but by using notary documents found in numerous state archives in Abruzzo and Napoli. He discovered the land and terrain his family has owned since the 1500s. Over the last decade, he has purchased 16 acres of land his family has owned for 600 years, albeit just a fraction of what they originally acquired in the 13th-17th centuries. The exploration of Abruzzo led him to the monastery of Monte Cassino, where he is currently researching and reading documents demonstrating the Benedictine influence on his early family and the acquisitions made directly to the land he currently holds. This land, the “areas of the monasteries” is the basic premise of his place name--“from the area of the monasteries” His specific family lines were also significantly aligned with the Cistercian and Celestine Orders, branches of the monastic Benedictine Order.

The Benedictines (and the branches, Cistercian and Celestines)  were influential in the village and several monasteries in the town where Matthew’s family originated.  His last exploration in Italy uncovered the Cistercian/Celestine monastery destroyed by the local population in the mid-14th century. While he recovered the location and material culture of the monastery (pottery, architectural remains), the area itself will need an archaeological dig to study the daily life in this area. This monastery/church (owned and headed by the Vatican) was also believed to be where his oldest direct and oldest lineage there from the 14th century,  Guglielmo de Berardo (of the Arcinese), who was a priest--an artist and author of the liturgical missals, Missale Romanuman illuminated book found in the Vatican Library. This missal was used in the chapel of San Giulia in Saint Peter’s in Rome. 

Matthew has explored 700-year-old monasteries in Abruzzo and parallel the structure with documents that detail their specific construction. He has participated in archaeological digs in Ostia Antica,  the Roman Forum in Rome, where he helped recover early medieval gravesites. When he is not in Veneto working on jewelry, he spends his time in Italy tracing the documents and locating monasteries that have been demolished and forgotten for centuries. Crawling through the ancient rooms and reconstructing the culture of ancient faiths and religions has been his passion. Along with recovering his family land and monastic orders, Matthew has rediscovered several Jewish quarters and ghettos in small towns in Abruzzo. 

While working on Y-DNA analysis, he better understands the origins of the families he has been finding in the documents. He then matches them up with Jewish conversos who may have lived in these Jewish quarters (some over 1,000 years old). His long-term goal is to create an open-air museum interface with the towns where their quarters and ghettos are found to bring attention to and highlight a culture that has been forgotten for over 400 years. 

He has incorporated a worldview and multi-disciplinary approach to world faiths as he relates some of them to his ancestry. While exploring his Italian heritage, he has also explored Jewish gravesites at his family's town in Poland, just north of Krakow. He is currently working on his family's Western Slavic and Baltic Tribe (Samogitian) lineages, hoping to make more connections to the Baltic Sea in 2022 and 2024. 

Please get in touch with us at: matthew@motorcitymonk.com