Rainbolt resol una foto de fa 40 anys: era Porticello

Happy International Women's Day to this international woman. This is either Greece or Yemen. I'm never sure [music] which and neither is she. #mom. She posted this 8 years ago. 6 years later, she messaged me and asked if I could help her find it. But at the time she asked, [music] I didn't see it. And she's always wanted to know where her mom traveled. Her message followed with, she has Alzheimer's now, so I can't ask her. A couple months after she sent me that DM that unfortunately I didn't see, she sent me this. I wanted to try asking about this picture of my mom. She died in February about a month after I asked you this question. Would love to know where she is in this iconic [music]

picture of her. So I found the exact location. Here's how. So she actually always thought that this photo was taken in either Greece or Yemen, but it's actually neither. So with really old photos, the most important thing to do is to colorize them because it makes it a lot easier to get details from the photo itself. And this location is actually super interesting, but also super easy to find. So what exactly do we see in this photo? We have a couple cars here that are shown. We have a building here that looks pretty distinct. We have what seems to be like a top of a boat right here. And we also have a breakwater {slash} harbor {slash} marina with an L-shape in the distance

here with only coast and water behind with an inclined road which what looks to be a T-intersection behind her backpack here. We also have shadows here with the sun that seems to be pretty high. So we can approximate that this image was taken around 12:00 p.m. And at 12:00 p.m. the sun is facing south, which means that this coastline that we're looking at right here is actually probably east. And so that's just step one is to catalog every single thing that we can use. So when she first said it was Greece or Yemen, obviously it's not Yemen. I thought it could have been Greece with the wooden pole here, but something felt off especially with this building right here. And so I actually

worked on this exact challenge with an Italian OSINT friend by the name of Agent Perry. And he's Italian and he suggested that the plates on this car could have been old Italian plates. And when using this website that actually catalogs Italian plates back to the 1900s. So, we can scroll down here and see a black and white plate here that highly resembles the black and white plate shown on the car here, which pretty much confirms to me that this is going to be Italy, especially with the building and vegetation here that does actually feel quite Italian. You're probably thinking, "Well, you can just go and look at every single harbor or marina in Italy and find it, right?" I guess technically you could, but there's

over 500 marinas and harbors on Italy's coast, but that really didn't sound like much fun to just scan countlessly hours in the hopes that this is Italy and you just stumble across the exact harbor. So, this is what we did. We put this photo into Photoshop, and I've done this before. We can do control L, get the levels of the photo. I'm going to zoom in to the license plate on this car, and then we can mess with the levels here just to make it slightly more readable here. And you're probably wondering, "Why are we zooming the license plate?" But the first two letters on the license plates actually give you the province that the car was registered to. And using Wikipedia source here of all the

province codes dating back to 1927, we have a list of every single possible combination that this could be. Using the coastline, the vegetation, the architecture, where it was the most likely place he traveled in the '80s to backpack around Italy, we can presume that the pixels shown right here are going to be a P. You see the outline there. Then we have a point here, point here that forms the shape of an A, giving us PA. We look back at the province codes and we can see that PA is Palermo, which would really make sense for the location of this photo. Could there be a little bit of some confirmation bias potentially, but that is the assumption I was going under. So,

then what I did next was I used Overpass Turbo and made this code that would only show me harbors, marinas, and ports in Palermo. And this is all using OpenStreetMap data that just from the looking at it briefly had pretty consistent data across Sicily. So, I can run this code here, and we can see that it will come back with blue dots on the map that show me harbors in Palermo. And we see that actually all of them are east facing, so the shadow it really help here because you couldn't really rule any out based off the shadow. If you're still going with the assumption that we're going to be in Palermo, at this point all you have to do then is

you're looking for an L-shaped breakwater that has a road that lines up with an incline on that road. And we can see here that in Palermo actually, there's no road that would line up because it's too flat and there's no direct view from the coast on any of these roads nearby because there's also a two-lane road and too much distance between for the roads or ports over here in Palermo to ever make sense. I didn't mention this, but I I actually going through vintage postcards uh to see if there's any obvious coastlines that made sense from these old postcards, but that was a quick dead end. I quickly ruled out all of these ports in Palermo city and moved over east a bit to Porticello.

We can see that has a little bit more of a small town vibe here that resembles the photo, but if you switch to satellite here, we can see that there is along the footpath right here, which is shown in the photo, we also have an empty lot with trees and grass, which is also shown in this photo with a breakwater. So, when I came across this, I was pretty confident. I clicked in the location that also has boats lined up with the breakwater and hoped for the best. And at first, I was very confused on what I was looking at and couldn't tell if this was the same location. But if we go down the road, switch it to August 2010 coverage, which

is still about 30 years after the photo was taken, I was pretty confident I found the exact location 40 years later. But in order for me to be able to send this location to the follower in good faith, I had to 100% confirm it, which is not an easy thing to do 40 years later. But this is how I did it. And the building is going to be the most crucial thing to be able to confirm. Not only do we have these right here that line up, you can see I'm color coding the lines here facing out architecturally into the building, we also have these painted striped lines on the side of the building that we can see here. The railings obviously look the same. And

just like triple confirming, we can see that there's so many architectural things that do indeed line up all across the image, including this overhang that we can see right here. And as a little bit of a cherry on top, we also have a roof right here. And if I remove this image, we can see the exact same angle of a roof in the background right there. But, like I said, with the overgrown trees on the other side of the road, I was obviously 99.9% sure that this is going to be the right location. But, I wanted to be 100% sure because a lot of the image has changed over the past 40 years, including the sidewalk and the bushes on the side of the road here. I

wanted to be sure. And like I mentioned, I was working on this investigation with my OSINT friend Agent Perry that does live in Italy. And he took it upon himself to find a couple of local numbers in the area and called them. One of those numbers was the hotel across the street. He sent them the photo and asked them if this is the same location 40 years later. And the owner of the hotel across the street replied, "That's it."