The Fate of Innocents Infant abandonment and the foundling wheel in 19th-century Italy.

W hile exploring my family roots in Pacentro, a medieval vil lage in Abruzzo, Italy, I learned that my maternal grandfather had been abandoned by his mother on a doorstep in a piazza. Stigmatized as an infant, my grandfather never shared with his children any infor-mation about his childhood, but genealogical research uncovered documents describing how on July 9, 1881, he was found by a police officer and taken to the vil-lage midwife, who bathed and swaddled him. Based on the place where he was found, the magistrate named him Leone Gradini (the Lion of the Steps). The follow-ing day he was baptized in the local church and taken to a foundling home in the city of Sulmona. Nothing more was known about his parentage. For centuries, foundling homes, last resorts for un-wanted infants like my grandfather, were repositories for secrets and mistakes; but they were also sources o