Historical background

Campora is a small village in the south of Italy located in the area of the National Park of  "Cilento and Vallo di Diano". 
Its geographical position is very inaccessible; indeed, the village is placed on top of a hill overlooking the valley of Trenico at 528 mt above sea level. The hill is almost completely surrounded by a deep gorge of karstic origin.
In accordance with historical data, the first considerable nucleus of the population appeared around the 11^th century and was of Greek and Lucanian origin.
Despite different dominations affecting the village after its foundation, none of these invasions influenced the composition of the population. 
In 1656 the plague, already wide spread in the North of Italy, reached in the Cilento area and halved the population with the result that only 140 individuals survived.
These historical events and the adverse geographical position meant that the Campora population experienced isolation from its foundation until the end of World War II.
On the basis of the demographic information (available for the last 4 centuries), we were able to estimate that until the 19^th century the rate of endogamic marriages was above 80% and that it gradually decreased only at the beginning of the 20^th century.

The Genealogy

By consulting the Registry Office and the Parish archives we collected genealogical data concerning births, marriages, deaths and the composition of the households of approximately 11,000 individuals who have constituted the population of Campora since 1550.
This information has enabled us to reconstruct the pedigree of the 700 people that to date have taken part in the project. This pedigree consists of 3,103 individuals, distributed over 17 generations, the current one included.

Genetics

The evidence of the historical and geographical isolation of the Campora population was proved by a genetic analysis  (Colonna et al. 2007). 
On the basis of genealogical data we could estimate the number of paternal and maternal founders lines (46) of  the living population. To establish if these lines were really independent from each other, we used genetic markers. Thanks to the study of  hypervariable region of mtDNA and some markers of the Y chromosome it was possible to prove that some lines found come from common ancestors.
The results show that almost 63% of the living population come from 17 female and 20 male lines demonstrating that the population is characterized by a reduced genetic pool. 
The analysis of several markers spanning the entire genome has shown that the population experienced a bottleneck, confirming that the living population of Campora derives from the individuals who survived the plague of 1656.