Creation of Bonuccelli nel Mondo Associations (Italian and American Versions)

I recently spent the month of February 2004 in Italy, shooting pictures of the Viareggian and Venetian Carnevales and scheming on the Bonuccelli project. In the middle of the month was organized a dinner at Cafe Margherita along the Viareggio beach strip, an official banquet to reunite various branches of the Italian Bonuccelli family. About 30 Bonuccelli were in attendance representing around 10 different branches of the Bonuccelli family, of which there are approximately 20 branches in total. The goal was primarily to connect disparate parts of the family to the overarching family tree, but more importantly to establish an Association of Tuscan Bonuccelli in order to galvanize the goals and research of the group. And one of the major directives of this new Italian Association of Bonuccelli nel Mondo (which means Bonuccelli in the World) is to organize a reunion of all Bonuccelli from throughout the world in the town of Camaiore in summer 2005.

Around the massive rectangular banquet table was passed the microphone, and each Bonuccelli spoke a few words explaining his or her interest in or connection to the project at hand. And amazingly, a television camera was even present to capture the night's events for a 1/2 hour special on TV Nuoviorrizonti a few days following, shot by a certain Alvaro Bonuccelli!

((Click on the mini-TV screen above to play a 5 minute movie culled from this same program - it's in Italian but highly entertaining ;) A few comments about downloading the movie and getting it to play: the film is saved as a Quicktime movie, as a 9MB .mov file. If you have DSL or cablemodem, it should take about 3 minutes to download and play - so click on the link and just wait a few minutes. A new window will open and the movie will play once fully loaded. If you have dialup service it will unfortunately take about 40 minutes to download - might not be worth it ;) You can also simply right-click on the TV icon and select "Save as Target" and choose to save the film as a file in a folder on your computer, so you can play it instantly any time in the future. If your computer does not have the Quicktime Player or Quicktime Plugin, you can download it here.

And so, to augment the efforts of the Italian group but to represent all us "foreigners," we've set up also in America an Association of Bonuccelli nel Mondo. Although based in the USA, this association will be for all members of the Bonuccelli family who live outside Italy, in any corner of the globe. It will support the genealogy project, the website, and the existing goals of the project, but a large corollary aim will be to garner eventual help to partially fund whomever wants to return to Camaiore in summer 2005 for this World Reunion of Bonuccelli. As of now we're loosely planning a week or two of Italian cooking classes, language classes, photo expositions, the family reunion, a potential archealogical dig at Montecastrese castle, etc...it should be a fantastic event. When plans start to solidify I will be sure to notify you all...but let me know if it's something you might be interested in! It would be a perfect excuse to finally take that trip to Tuscany, no?