MYSTERY COUPLE FOUND ON ROLL OF OLD FILM

For nearly 70 years, an unfinished roll of film that documented a couple’s escapades in Switzerland and Italy was hidden away in a brass container, forgotten as it changed hands.

The roll fell into the possession of William Fagan, a film collector from Dublin, in 2015 when it arrived in a box with a Leica camera from 1935.

In August, Fagan began to develop the film.

“The result was a revelation,” Fagan wrote in a blog post in September.

The 22 exposed frames of the possible 36 were taken by a gifted photographer, Fagan said. He believes they were taken in 1951 or 1952.

The collection prominently features a woman, often shown with a dachshund. One photo shows a man who appears about 10 years older than the woman, Fagan said.

The photos document the couple’s travels in a BMW convertible around Lake Como near the border of Italy and Switzerland, including a stop in Bellagio in the Lombardy region of Italy.

The last photo is a portrait of the woman on a bench in Lenno, Italy, Fagan said.

He said he believes they were possibly from Austria, Bavaria or the German-speaking part of Switzerland.

Readers have jumped into the blog post’s comments section to identify familiar locations.

In one photo, the woman is shown walking the dog. The signs on the street are in Italian. One person suggested that the photo was taken in Bellagio in northern Italy on Via Giuseppe Garibaldi and that she was walking toward the Basilica di San Giacomo.

In another, the car is parked in front of a building whose signs led Fagan to identify it as La Veduta on the Julier Pass in Switzerland.

A former executive for BMW, as well as others, identified the car as a BMW 315 model. Others pointed out it was registered in 1948 in Munich, Fagan said.

Other photos show a steamer on Lake Como, which Fagan identified as one taken out of service in 1952 and reconstructed in 1956, dating the photos to the early 1950s.

Fagan published the photos in the hopes that someone will recognize their subjects.

WILLIAM FAGAN VIA NYT A woman with a dog in a photo that was recently developed.