Carlo Arco was born Giancarlo Lavi in 1952 in Turin, Italy, where he was abandoned. For the first five years of his life, he lived in a religious institution. At six years old, he was flown alone to the United States where he was adopted by an American family. Arco grew up knowing very little about his birth family.
But when his health began to deteriorate following a stroke, he embarked on an exhaustive search with the help of his wife Debra to find his biological relatives. The search was successful: after taking a MyHeritage DNA test, he found over 50 family members in Italy—including a sibling—he never knew existed before his death November 2022.
