Six years ago, I took possession of two large boxes which contained the papers of Antonio Nicola Pisano (1894-1979), my maternal grandfather. He came to America from Gasperina, a mountain village overlooking the Ionian Sea in Catanzaro, Calabria, Italy. He was sixteen years of age, and settled initially in the Queen Village neighborhood of Philadelphia. The portrait on the left was taken about 1915. Antonio was a writer of poems and plays in Italian. He started a theater troupe called the Filodramatic Circle Gasperinese active between the First and Second World Wars in the neighborhood of 7th and Christian Streets. He was a storyteller and my babysitter. Among my earliest memories were sitting beneath this photo of his parents, Giuseppe and Maria Innocenza Voci Pisano. Here he taught me the value of family history, and stressed the importance of remembering our ancestors. Thus, he passed on his interest and passion to me; leaving me with the task of having his story remembered.
Posts Tagged ‘family photographs’
January 8th, 2010
Antonio’s Anthology
December 18th, 2009
Home Movies and Philadelphia History
In 1923, the Eastman Kodak Company began marketing its Cine-Kodak movie camera and 16mm film, and just as the Kodak Brownie camera had opened the world to a flood of snapshots, 16mm movie film and later the cheaper 8mm and Super 8 formats, brought the world of moviemaking out of the theaters and into people’s homes.
Home movies are often thought of in terms of their technical limitations—the unsteady cameras and the overexposed films—and limited in their subject matter. These are often overstated, since over the years there have been incredibly talented home movie makers who have filmed almost every imaginable event, but what home movies do best (or at least most often) is capture peoples’ travels, celebrations, and daily lives. Because of this, scenes that never would have been shot by newsreel cameramen or professional cinematographers were captured on film, and we now can view scenes of Philadelphia life that we wouldn’t be able to see in any other way.
