These photos, along with letters and documents, were found in the rubble from Italy’s 2009 Abruzzo earthquake. Some I came across a few weeks later when I went to see the damage in Fossa and our family house. Some were found by others, years later, and sent to me.
It’s quite poignant and kind of curious to have them back in Australia decades after they’d been sent to relatives in Italy by Nanna Francesca. Photos she enclosed in letters with their latest news from the other side of the world.
Last time, I shared with you photographs of relatives in Italy that Bisnonna Cesca lovingly placed in a frame after she got to Australia in 1934. It was suggested to me that perhaps those people in the old photos received pictures of me, ‘a young girl born in Australia they’d never get to meet’. Yes, this is true! Nanna Francesca sent photos of us all to relatives in Abruzzo, Calabria, and America too (including a cousin then living at our Fossa family house).
Seeing these photos again, I can almost hear Nanna Francesca saying to me, ‘Stand over there. I want to send this photo to Italy,’ as she got out her camera with the ‘ice-cube’ flashbulbs on top.
Just seeing that yellow dress she’d told me to put on for a photo brings back to me how the ‘heavy’ material felt different. She’d bought it on their first trip back to Italy in 1975 and while the dress came back to Australia, it returned to Italy in a photo with me in it, to show the relatives she’d been with when she bought it.
(I see too that the photos we’d often have ‘in front of the daisy bush’ at her and Nonno Anni’s began at least a decade before I was born!)
I wonder what those relatives in Italy or America thought upon receiving such photos over the years. Unfamiliar faces of new family members born on the other side of the world. Or Great-Granny Maddalena, Nonno Anni and Nanna Francesca’s faces growing older to when they’d left Italy. (That one of Nonno Anni with the kangaroo!)
Nanna Francesca wasn’t one to send back photos ‘to show off their success or wealth in a new country’ like it’s said some migrants did. Hers were more ‘everyday’ photos. Of birthdays at home, or my first day of school. Photos taken in the days when overseas phone calls and travel didn’t occur as much, instead keeping extended family and close friends connected by paper, as fragile and as strong as that can be. 💛🌠
Twelve years on from the Abruzzo earthquake and the past is still as much a part of the present. Thinking of all those lost, driven away, who stayed, the many still unable to return to their homes and all whose lives it changed. With love con affetto agli Abruzzese. Forte e gentile. From the other side of the world, you are still thought of. 💛
If you have any link to Abruzzo, I warn that this footage may be hard to watch as those filming go right into the most intimate parts of homes, which may just happen to be yours or of someone you know. That said, the young men filming have done so with respect, have only entered houses where the doors were already open and have concealed the name and whereabouts of the village. (Considering my own family’s house is one of those looted since the earthquake, I appreciate this.) By the end, they also appear to be overwhelmed by all they’ve seen.
On the anniversary of the 2009 Abruzzo earthquake today, I’m thinking of the 309 people who lost their lives and the many thousands who continue to reside in temporary housing seven years on.
Zoë Boccabella 