Long-lived and short-lived families.

The first attempt at this ran into an obvious trap: family lines with a lot of descendants who emigrated to Chicago looked dramatically longer-lived than everyone else — the "Rich" line (the Chicago-Americanized branch of Riccio) topped the list at a 73-year average, well clear of anyone else. But that's not a family trait. Most of that line lived their adult lives in 20th-century America with modern medicine and sanitation, not 18th- or 19th-century Sassano. Comparing that fairly against families who stayed in Italy for centuries isn't measuring genetics — it's measuring which families happened to catch a later, healthier era.

So the numbers below exclude anyone with a Chicago or Illinois connection entirely, comparing only people who lived and died in and around Sassano itself, and only counting adults — deaths at 15 or older, since infant and child mortality reflects a different set of causes than adult longevity does. Only surnames with at least 20 qualifying adult deaths are included, so a family of three isn't skewing the picture.

Against a baseline adult average of 58.7 years (median 62), the longest-lived line remains Miele at a 72.4-year average, backed by 30 qualifying adults. Delisa, Martucci, Pizzi, and Caporrino hold the next four spots. Stavola sits sixth at 64.8, folding in a branch of the family recorded as "di Stavola" in some records — the same line under an older form of the surname, not a separate one, now combined into a single 249-person figure. The shortest-lived is Curcio, at a 49.5-year average; Baialardo, Truglio, Gruccio, and Vasquez follow close behind, all still under 53 years — Vasquez entering the bottom five for the first time, edging out Barbella by a fraction of a year (53.0 to 53.04). The gap between the top and bottom of the list sits at just under 23 years — a reminder that these rankings, especially near the bottom, can still move as the tree grows.