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.

One of the first residents of South Philadelphia to own a 16mm camera was Dominic Lombardi, the oldest son of Joseph Lombardi, an Italian immigrant who had arrived in Philadelphia in 1896. The elder Lombardi first worked at a bakery, then became a ditch digger, then a brick layer, and eventually started the Joseph Lombardi and Sons’ construction company. By the 1920s, Joseph Lombardi was a millionaire and one of the wealthiest people in Philadelphia. Lombardi loved both Italian culture and movies, and in the 1930s he built the Dante Theater on South Broad Street, which brought some of the first Italian movies into the United States. Lombardi also maintained close ties with his ancestral home in Fornelli, Italy, and he brought his children back to his homeland for long visits every four years.

Dominic Lombardi began shooting home movies in the late 1920s and continued until after the Second World War. His films include scenes of trips back to Italy via the “Rex” and the “Roma”, Italy’s two biggest steamships; travels around Italy, idyllic scenery, and even shots of Mussolini’s youth camps. He also filmed his family at their home on the 1600 block of South Broad Street and at their summer home on the Jersey Shore, as well as Lombardi & Sons’ construction projects. After Dominic gave up filmmaking, his younger brother Robert got an 8mm camera of his own and continued filming family events in Italy, South Philadelphia and Bala Cynwyd, where he lived with his wife and their eight children.

Robert Lombardi’s films are in the process of being transferred to digital video by his daughter Dolores, who has become the family’s archivist and historian.  The excerpts of her father’s home movies that Dolores has posted on PhilaPlace are typical in that they mainly focus on happy events such as weddings, parties, trips, and spaghetti dinners, but as a result they show us a colorful and unvarnished (if occasionally out-of-focus) look at life growing up as a second-generation immigrant family in South Philadelphia.

Aunt Christina, Lombardi family home, 1627 South Broad Street

Lombardi & Sons, 1311 South Broad Street

Rudy Volpe

Spaghetti dinner at the Lombardi family home, 1627 South Broad Street

Departure for Italy