Terri Colpi and Carlo Pirozzi have contributed to curating a new archive exhibition, ‘Family Portrait: The Scots Italians 1890 – 1940’, which opens on 1st December 2015 at National Records of Scotland (NRS) in Edinburgh.  Created by NRS in partnership with the Italian Consulate General of Italy in Scotland, the exhibition features a hidden archive of Italians living in Scotland in the years before the Second World War. Terri Colpi was Historical Advisor to the exhibition and the opening includes the launch of her new book Italians’ Count in Scotland: The 1933 Census.  Additionally, the exhibition introduces a documentary project by Lorenzo Colantoni and Riccardo Venturi showing photographs of contemporary Scots Italians.

In particular, for this exhibition Pirozzi has created a map of Italian settlement in Scotland in partnership with NRS and Map Collections of the National Library of Scotland. The map shows where Italians lived or worked in Scotland during the 1930s. It also indicates the top four provinces from which Italians arrived in Scotland. The names and addresses are based on a combination of the 1933 Census of Italians as featured in the exhibition and the Scottish entries in the 1936 edition of the Guida Generale degli Italiani in Gran Bretagna (General Guide to Italians in Great Britain, published in London). Some additional information has been added from Kelly’s Directory 1928.

An interactive version of this map will be online on the TML site soon.