The Archive
The starting point of this project was the discovery of my Italian grandfather's WWII archive and the love correspondence between my grandparents at that time.
I started asking myself many questions about the unspoken facts around my grandfather's experience in Albania from 1940 to 1944, and the consequences of the forced silence due to the interruption of all communication between Albania and Italy, for more than a year, after the armistice of 1943.
I gathered all the family documents and scanned everythnig I could find.
The most astonishing discovery was the small handwritten notebook, in which my grandfather had diligently listed places, events, and people he met day by day, from September 8 until his way back home, on foot, in 1945.
No one in my family was aware of its existence, and those notes finally shed light on a period about which no information was available because my grandfather had never wanted to talk about it.
The Photo Archive
My grandfather’s photo archive consists of shots of Italian soldiers in their informal activities, military exercises, gatherings, and plenty of civilians, taken with an Hasselblad camera. Apart from the fascist propaganda images produced by the Istituto Luce, documents from the 1940s are actually rare - like the collection of the Italian photographer Giuseppe Massani. In many photos my grandpa has documented weddings and celebrations or daily life in Jorguçat, Sotira and Delvinë. I do not know who the people on the pictures are, but I hope that by disseminating these photos a story will emerge.
The Notebook
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