A READER in Italy writes:

Your post on what happened to unwanted babies in Italy was very personal for me. I am actually a descendant of one of those babies, born centuries ago somewhere in Sicily. The surname Di Dio (of God) was often given to those babies left in convents in Sicily, and I think that it may have been used to a lesser extent in some other parts of southern Italy as well.

Esposito is one of the most common surnames in and around Naples. Di Dio is not nearly as common, but after decades of emigration from Sicily and the rest of southern Italy, there are people all over Italy and all over the world that have this name. (My family’s last name was changed in the United States decades ago.) We owe our existence to the dedication and compassion of Catholic nuns and of course to our ancestors, those women and girls who, despite living in a material poverty and misery that none of us can really imagine anymore, carried their pregnancies to term and gave their children, if nothing else, a chance to grow up and have families and descendants of their own.

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