Here's the fun part. Ok, so here's a photo album with no names and next to no information for context. So the first place to begin is the captions.
I began transcribing all of them, over 110 by the way, and took photos of every page of the album. The more I spent time on this, the more embedded these words and pictures became for me, except that, well, I don't speak Italian. Translating has been ongoing - thank you Google Translate!...and surprisingly, my college Italian started coming back to me. Up until now, I only knew how to say 'newspaper', but now I can put together more complex phrases like....
Here are pictures of my notes, and the highlighted translations. Some of them are rather clunky, but will eventually run them by my friend who's from Rome. She'll smooth them out, no doubt. But the point of this for me is to see how much information it yields, and right at the outset, I can see there are several names of hotels. And there are two group photos aboard the steamships - both the Ausonia, going to Egypt, and the Esperia, returning to Genoa. Will post more info as I go....
