History

Gioi is a small village located in the inland area of Cilento belonging to the National Park of "Cilento and Vallo di Diano". 
It stands on a hill at 700 meters above sea level below the serra mountain chain in the Media valley of Alento and overlooks two gullies which lead to plain of “Selva dei Santi”.

The historical background gives evidence that there have been several invasions  in the area of Gioi: of the Lombards, Byzantines, Arabs and Saracens (in the 7^th -10^th  centuries).
Around the 11^th century, as in the entire Cilento area,  Gioi was settled  by  Greek-Byzantine and Latin monks from whom the current village is believed to derive.
In the Norman period, the village of Gioi was considered  a centre of  defence and  administration of justice. In the second half of the 15^th century, with the Aragonese, commercial and craft activities had a great importance; in fact, in that period, Gioi was very famous for its “Fair” that gave prominence to the village.
Gioi’s prestige and commercial wealth decreased in the 18^th century with the arrival of the plague and instead the population turned to farm work that unfortunately led to a life of hardship.
In the second of the 18^th century, the persistence of  disadvantageous weather conditions brought about a long period of scarcity and, finally, the famine of 1764 with a high mortality rate.
There were a great number of endogamic marriages in this period until the 19^th century when the persistence of misery and poverty brought about a strong wave of emigration.

The Genealogy

We collected almost 21,000 genealogical data, looking in the Registry Office and the Parish archives, for the last four centuries both for Gioi and Cardile.
A detailed analysis of the demographic and genetic structure of these two populations was described in Colonna et al. (2009). In this article, the authors showed that the two populations had a common origin, as reported also in the genealogical data. In the first part of the 18^th century  their separation began which is now complete.
Using the genealogical data,  it was possible to link the 1,437 individuals took part in the project (529 from Cardile and 908 from Gioi), in a unique pedigree of 5,355 individuals, that spans 350 years (15-17 generations).