Soldato is the Italian for soldier, and it is the first title of the family. The word has a better story than most people guess. It begins not with a sword but with a coin, and in a Sicilian family it has always meant something simpler: the one who shows up.
It begins with a coin
Early in the fourth century the emperor Constantine struck a new gold coin, the solidus, the solid one. It held its weight for centuries, and the name wore down in Italian into the soldo. A soldo was a coin, and in the plural it still is the everyday Italian word for money: soldi. Someone taken on for pay was assoldato, and the one who took the soldo and stood where he was needed became a soldato. English soldier comes from the same coin, by way of the French.
The one who shows up
In the family the word lost its uniform long ago. Every family has a soldato. They drive the grandmother to Mass, carry the trestle tables out for the feast and back in again afterwards, turn up with a toolbox before anyone has finished explaining what broke, and are first through the door when the news is bad. Nobody makes a speech about them. Everybody counts on them, and the whole family would run very differently without them.
Every feast needs its soldati
You can see them at any Sicilian feast day. On the fifteenth of August in Messina the towering Vara of the Assumption is hauled through the streets on ropes by hundreds of barefoot devotees. In Catania each February the devoti of Saint Agatha, dressed in white, pull her silver fercolo through the city on long cords, through the night and into the next day. Nobody watching knows their names. The saint does not move without them.
A first seat at the table
In a big family the newest at the table sits furthest from the head, and moves up with the years: from the children's end, to the middle, toward the Capo and, one day, the Don. Soldato is that first seat. It is the title for the one who has just arrived in the family, a son in law or a new godchild, and just as much for the one who has been carrying the tables for thirty years and has never once been thanked for it.
What it means on your certificate
A Soldato certificate names the bearer Soldato [name] della Famiglia, receives them into the honorific embrace of the family and is sealed with the family rose. It is a commemorative title, given for the pleasure and the story of it, and the Soldato Pack is the first title of the family: the certificate as a PDF in minutes, with a dedicated plot of Sicilian land in that name.