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. 💛🌠
For ninety years these photographs have been in this frame. It hung for decades on a farmhouse wall. Parents, aunts, uncles, siblings, cousins… my Bisnonna Cesca lovingly placing their photos all together after she got to Australia in 1934, while they remained in Italy, or went to America, Canada or other parts of Australia.
I found this lovely photo of Nanna Francesca’s Sydney cousins and friends tucked in with a letter sent to her in Brisbane in the 1950s. The way news was shared of a new baby and baptism celebration back when it wasn’t common to hop on plane (and who could afford to take time off from work anyway).
“Ricordo del 26 July 1950 sulla spiaggia di Palmi – Memory of 26 July 1950 on the beach of Palmi…”
Bisnonna Francesca… a companion post to the previous on Bisnonno Domenico. Likewise, I didn’t get to meet her yet each photo has a little to reveal and brings the past somewhat closer in that moment. A rare photo, circa 1930 (bottom right) shows Francesca in Palmi, Calabria with her mother, Soccorsa, the baker and her daughter (Nanna Francesca). The three who lived together for years after Domenico was in Australia. And then (top left), just Francesca and her daughter, soon to leave to join him in 1934. She and her mother had worked hard to help raise the ship fares, determined as she was to be reunited.
In his work clothes (top left), one knee patched, behind him his Applethorpe orchards on land he’d hand-cleared, long before he could afford the horse.
Zoë Boccabella 