Remembering the dead, post-mortem photography; the Rosi memorial, Kensal Green Cemetery

 

It doesn’t matter how much time you spend in a particular cemetery, there is always something that you haven’t seen, that you have somehow missed or overlooked. Sometimes these overlooked things are quite astonishing and, to make it worse, are hiding in plain sight.  In a post on Instagram The Architecture of Death (excellent pictures, check him out) posted a photo of a photo, a post-mortem photograph of a baby in a coffin, which sits on a memorial in Kensal Green Cemetery. Although the practice of photographing the recently dead was relatively common in the mid 19th century, post-mortem photos in cemeteries are extremely rare; I certainly don’t recall ever having seen one before, not in the UK.  But this isn’t a hangover from Victorian times, this photo was taken in the late 1920’s and was only placed on a grave in the 1970’s.

The post-mortem photo is on the grave of Giovanni and Almira Rosa who, according to the inscription on the grave, were born in Grondola, a hamlet (current population 102) near the town of Pontremoli in Tuscany in 1893 and 1900. There are no English marriage records for Giovanni Rosi and Almira Fenocchi and so they must have married in Italy, shortly before they emigrated to London. They aren’t on the 1921 census and there is no English record for their eldest daughter Divina who was born in 1921. Their second daughter Elia was born in England, in 1923, so the Rosi’s arrived in the UK between 1922. Their third daughter Lida was born in 1925 and then, probably to Giovanni’s delight, he and Almira finally had a son, Nilo, the following year. Devastatingly Nilo died the following year at the age of just 11 months. The picture taken of the dead infant was possibly the only photograph the family had of him. He was buried, almost certainly in a common grave, in St Mary’s Catholic Cemetery in Kensal Green.

Giovanni and Almira went on to open a café at 98 Wardour Street in the 1930’s. As his daughters grew up they helped their parents in the café – their occupation is given as café assistants in the 1939 Register. When Italy entered the Second World War Giovanni was interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man. He was lucky, there were three Rosi’s (Guglielmo, Lodovico and Luigi) from Grondola, Pontremoli on the Arandora Star in 1940, bound for an internment camp in Canada, when it was sunk by a German U-boat with the loss of 805 passengers and crew. 486 Italian internees died (and, ironically, 175 German prisoners of war) including Guglielmo and Luigi Rosi who, given the tiny size of Grondola, were very likely related to Giovanni. While Giovanni was interned, Almira and her daughters kept the café going in wartime London.

Giovanni died in 1960 and was initially buried elsewhere, perhaps St Mary’s. When Almira died in December 1971 the family purchased two adjacent roadside plots in Kensal Green. Almira was buried first, on the 13th December 1971 and then, on the 8th July 1972, after being exhumed, Giovanni was brought to the cemetery and reburied with his wife. The memorial will date from 1972 and shows Saint Anthony of Padua holding the infant Jesus. There are photographs of Giovanni and Almira on the headstone and the three daughters took the decision to commemorate their brother Nilo, including his details and the only photo they had of him, at the bottom of the headstone. The Rosi’s unmarried daughter Elia was buried in the adjacent plot in 2016.