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. Eighty-eight percent of everyone in that line has a Chicago or Illinois record, meaning most of them 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 (disease, sanitation, childbirth complications) than adult longevity does, and mixing the two muddies both signals. 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 59.8 years (median 63), the longest-lived line is di Stefano at a 66.6-year average — followed closely by Martucci, Stavola, Caporrino, and De Lisa. The shortest-lived is Battista at 49.2 years, with Baialardo, di Lorenzo, Gruccio, and Petriello close behind. That's a real 17-year gap between the top and bottom of the list, which is large enough to be worth noting, though with a caveat: at this sample size, a handful of families dying young or old in a particular decade of disease, famine, or simply bad recordkeeping can shift a surname's average meaningfully. This is a first pass worth treating as a lead, not a verdict.