AMY EXERCISE

A) Document an object that tells a story about your cultural or family history. You can choose to document it visually via photography, drawing, video or audio.
B) Document the same object in writing. It can be an anecdote, (family) memory, historical research or a combination of all.

LA CASINA

As an object, I choose the coffee cup that belonged to my family restaurant.
Most of my family history is bounded to the restaurant. La Casina as a restaurant started in 1925 and it is a historical restaurant for the city of Viareggio and most of is fame is connected to my family that owned the restaurant for more than 60 years.

The restaurant belonged to my mom's family for more than 60 years at the time we sold it, the coffee cup is one of the few items we manage to keep as a memory, most of what was inside the restaurant has been sold or lost.
All my childhood memory are connected to the restaurant, there is where I spent most of the time after school since my mom was working and my dad was working abroad.
It's where I celebrated most of my birthdays and my sister's and my cousin's. Where I learned to walk and where I would do my homework. At Christmas and New year me and my cousins, we would wait in the attic above the restaurant for our family to be done with work, so we could celebrate.

Our lives depended on the restaurant business, it was my grandfather and his two brothers that owned it. When one of the two brothers died, his children wanted to sell the restaurant and divide the company. Our family and the other uncle's family were living on the family business and the sudden selling proposal created major distress and division within the family.
Eventually, the children sued the rest of the family and the restaurant had to close down, leaving my family broke financially and emotionally.
The most affected by the selling were the women of my family. My mom and aunt had worked there since they were 14 and my grandma since she married my grandpa because it was a family business the managing was left to the men, meaning that there was no such thing as a legal salary and insurance for the women. When the restaurant was sold, all the work that my mom, aunt, and grandma have done was worthless.
It has been 10 years since we sold it and my grandma has not passed in front of the restaurant ever since.

La Casina in 1925, the picture is from my dining room at my parent's house

The Object - Coffee Cup

Screenshot from the video of my 1st birthday at the restaurant. In the picture my grandma teaching me how to walk.

My grandfather and the decoration during Carnival.

Me and my sister's matching tattoo of the coffee cup's design.