It’s the 1950s and it all starts very far from here. It is in Sweden that Ornella and Nicola Viscardi met each other and, after only six months, in 1955, they married. It is here that they work and live peacefully with their respective families, after leaving Italy where work was ‘scarce’.
We met them together at the Urban District of Commerce to learn about their history and that of their business.
Already during the years in Sweden, Nicola had clear ideas: ‘If we want to start a family, we have to go back to Italy.’
Ornella didn’t agree too much but decided to follow her husband and with him, in 1957, she opened the first photography shop in Bergamo in the Boccaleone neighbourhood.
Photography was a passion born over the years in Sweden, where Nicola – an electronic expert – followed the photographer who took pictures of the electrical substations.
“My husband was someone who went in hard! He attached himself to the photographer and learned – says Ornella, widening her dark eyes – he watched and understood. He knew how to do everything.’
The first years in Bergamo were not easy. Ornella – who, a little nostalgic for family and life in Sweden, invented the name Skandia ‘with a K’ for the shop. She worked full time with her husband and when they start taking photos at weddings, she was like a ‘little girl’, carrying three cameras and three flashes on her shoulders. “But only he took the photos. I tried but then he corrected me and I got frustrated and said to him ‘listen Nicola, do it yourself!”
Nicola was stubborn and meticulous. If he took twenty-five photos, he’d print twenty-five. He shot without ever making mistakes.
In addition to weddings, funerals and the deceased (in the shop in Borgo Palazzo was his extraordinary photographic archive) and where he dedicated hours to retouching the films so that in their final photo all the men were the same, in suit and tie.
At eighty-five years of age Ornella is energetic and sunny, she only darkens a little when she remembers the first years in Bergamo. “It was tiring. In Sweden, we had everything. Here, nothing.’
Fortunately, Nicola always tried to solve every problem. He said ‘I’m going to bed. I’ll sleep on it and tomorrow I’ll have the solution.’
When they moved to Borgo Palazzo things start to get better. The first shop assistants arrived and replaced Ornella so that she could devote herself more to her two sons Giovanni and Roberto. While the former was calm and generous, the latter was an earthquake that never stood still. At the end of the day, the ladies who looked after him for a few hours called, exhausted, ‘Come and get him!’
The boys grew up well and both studied optics under the loving threat of their father – ‘If you don’t study, you won’t even wash the floors here.’
And when Roberto hesitated about continuing, Nicola secretly enrolled him in the admission test in Milan. During dinner, he told him this news which, despite the kind form, sounded like an order. ‘I allowed myself to enrol you to specialise in contact lenses.’
In the tests, Roberto finished among the top ranks.
Ornella is a little moved when remembering this father (Nicola Viscardi passed away in 2012) who spent hours thinking with his children and who said ‘If they listen to even a word of what I said, I can call myself a lucky father.’
And these children have been able to carry out his work with competence and professionalism, adding the optical area to photography since 1970 and consolidating all areas of business.
For several years, also Ornella and Nicola’s first grandson, named after his grandfather, has worked with them. According to the grandmother “he is generous like his dad Giovanni, he has the seriousness and sense of duty of my husband, but like uncle Robi he always has something new to invent and he’s always on the go!’
Giulia, Ornella’s granddaughter, who was by her, holding her hand throughout the interview, smiles and adds gently: ‘The great thing about grandmother is that she is always happy!’
‘The Lord must have loved me,’ concludes Mrs. Skandia.