Marie Coleman in her article on Joseph Patrick Nannetti in the Dictionary of Irish Biography claims that his father was Giacomo Nannetti, sculptor and modeller, of 6 Great Brunswick Street.

Tempting though this assumption is – Giacomo from Lucca in Italy had a flourishing business as a statuary manufacturer with branches in Dublin, Belfast and Glasgow - it turns out to be wrong. As genealogical sources and other documentary evidence show, Nannetti’s father was in fact Giacomo’s Italian-born nephew Giuseppe (Joseph),¹ who married Bridget Dempsey on 15 March 1850 in St. Andrew’s, Westland Row. Their first son, Joseph Patrick, the later MP and Lord Mayor of Dublin, was born on 19 March 1851. After Giacomo’s death in the autumn of 1853 Joseph Patrick’s father Giuseppe was entrusted with liquidating the business in Glasgow where Giacomo had spent the last five years of his life. Giuseppe had run the Dublin business for his uncle Giacomo before this. Unfortunately, Giuseppe himself died only two years later in 1855, and the business was wound up by 1859.

Considering that Bloom was born eleven years after the death of Nannetti’s father his memory of Giuseppe hawking about religious statues is entirely fictional.

Harald Beck