In the last month, Spurtle has stumbled across a really excellent website detailing the Edinburgh roots of interconnected Italian families in Greenside and Picardy Place from their arrival here in the mid-19th century.
The site has been compiled by Helen Quilletti Stanton, and represents a remarkable feat in retracing her ancestors' footsteps in a style which is both easy to follow and interesting to read.
It includes a great deal of detailed local reminiscence – fascinating social history and not the maudlin, rose-coloured spectacles stuff, thank goodness – which will appeal to a far wider audience than that for which it was originally intended.
We recommend you start at www.quilletti.com/places/greenside-edinburgh/ and then ramble. Much of the Tuscan background is every bit as interesting as our own local history.
Yesterday's poverty-stricken slums are now, thankfully, no more (demolished in the early 1960s), and very little remains of the old buildings. However, a wander about the quiet backstreets of the Omni Centre still evokes something of the scale of the place for the teeming community that once lived, loved, and died here, squeezed between Calton Hill and the towering tenements above.
[img_assist|nid=2635|title=|desc=|link=node|align=none|width=640|height=640]