About
Dominick Boiano
From Gallo Matese. He wrote the book so the town would have a longer table than a census.
Dominick Boiano’s people are of Gallo Matese — Ru Uàllë — the mountain comune in Campania that sits on the Molise line with a lake at its feet. The name is not a small one on that hill. Boiano is first a place: Bojano in Molise, the old gastaldate, and in Gallo the Signori di Bojano left an eighteenth-century palazzo in limestone that still stands empty. Title and surname are not the same paper. Both are a kind of prominence: a district people bothered to name, rooms people still look up at, a doorbell in the Bronx that other Gallesi recognize.
He wrote GALLO MATESE: The Mountain Town That Never Really Left so that name — and the town that taught it how to sit at a table — would have a longer room than a census. The town kept arriving in kitchens that were not in Italy: a Sunday that still knew 13 June, a chair nobody moved.
The book is not a brochure and this site is not a store. Both exist so Gallesi, descendants, and curious travelers have a place to put the names, the recipes, the feast, the leaving, and the return — without turning the hill into a museum or a pitch.
If you have a correction, a photograph, or a family story, bring it to Contact. If you want the longer walk, the book is on its own page.
The book