Whose Town? Luca Scappaticcio

Whose Town? was an educational resource built on the heritage collections of the City of Edinburgh. It was developed by Edinburgh City Libraries in partnership with Edinburgh Museums and Galleries and Edinburgh City Archives. The resource was launched in 2011 and unfortunately is no longer available in its original format, however, we have created exhibitions here on Capital Collections to provide schools with access to even more material and to allow a wider audience access to the fascinating stories told in Whose Town?

We are also working on recreating the life stories as digital trails on Our Town Stories.

Whose Town? looks at Edinburgh from 1850 - 1959 to discover the city's past through the lives of the people who lived there. We have used people who lived in Victorian times, at the beginning of the twentieth century, during the Second World War and in the Fifties. There are fourteen lives to discover as well as exhibitions about each of the four eras.

Luca Scappaticcio came to Edinburgh at the turn of the century. He probably came as an economic migrant from Cassino in southern Italy, where life in the predominantly rural south was harsh. He married his wife Anastasia, who was from the same area, in Edinburgh in 1907. He learned his "trade" working as a pastry chef in what is now called the Balmoral Hotel. He saved enough money to rent a shop in Musselburgh in 1908 and opened an ice cream parlour. In the beginning, Luca and Anastasia had to walk from their home in the centre of Edinburgh to Musselburgh and back every day. Their hard work paid off though and the business prospered. Today Luca's family continue to run shops in Musselburgh and Morningside under the name S.Luca of Musselburgh. This exhibition contains images of Luca, his family and his business and places he would have known such as the Balmoral Hotel.

Find out more about life in Edinburgh at the turn of the twentieth century.

Whose town? was supported by funding from The Heritage Lottery Fund.

The Italo-Scottish Research Cluster of Italian Department at the Edinburgh University are researching Italian migration in Scotland and have produced an online archive to preserve historical documentation relating to one of Scotland's largest immigrant communities over the last 130 years.