In just a few days time I will come to realize that I have traveled not just across the vast Atlantic Ocean but, somehow in some mysterious way, transported through a time warp as well. All within a twenty-four hour time span I have left a twentieth century land of modern skyscrapers and advanced technological marvels and my-take-for-granted middle class worldly comforts to a far different land, one that I could not before even begin to conjure in my most unrestrained imagination. It would seem as if I somehow had stepped back in cosmic time and dimension to a much earlier period, to that of...

The family surname is derived from the Italian first name Paladino. The first recorded Paladino was a medieval knight and the nephew to the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne, 742-814 AD. Many romantic fables are told of Charlemagne and his paladins. The most famous of the paladins was Roland, the favorite nephew of Charlemagne. It is Roland, the Italian, bestowed by Charlemagne with the name Paladin, who may be our famous ancestral noble Cavaliere that all Palladino's and modern-day Pauldine's are descended.