Family Strategies and Transregional Mobility: The de Piro in Eighteenth-Century Malta and Sicily

Abstract

This article analyses the formation of transregional families through a case study on the attempts by a Maltese nobleman, Giovanni Pio de Piro, to establish his household in the Kingdom of Sicily in the eighteenth century and what the consequences were for his heirs. Drawing on recent perspectives on transregional and transnational families, this paper considers the evolution of inheritance and marriage strategies directed towards migration in the broader context of eighteenth-century Malta and Sicily. In doing so it discusses how those features of kinship most commonly associated with the ‘rootedness’ of noble households were also adapted towards transregional mobility.