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Vanessa Bryant took her girls on a family vacation to Italy. To keep their dad’s memories alive, the businesswoman and philanthropist visited Reggio Calabria, a coastal city in southern Italy where Kobe Bryant spent some of his childhood.
“Visited Reggio Calabria, a city my husband lived in when he was about 8 years old. ❤️,” Vanessa wrote on Instagram alongside snapshots from their trip.
As reported by the New York Post, the late NBA player lived in Italy for seven years before following his dad’s footsteps and becoming a basketball legend himself. After Joe “Jellybean” Bryant played for the Philadelphia 76ers, the San Diego Clippers and the Houston Rockets, he accepted an offer to play for Sebastani Rieti.
In this town is where Kobe learned how to play basketball and speak Italian fluently. “I knew it was going to be different, that the culture was different,” Kobe said. “The first time we went in our house and turned on the TV, there was an Italian cartoon, and me and my sisters were rolling. We were dying. It was on in Italian but they had the same cartoon in America. It was the same exact cartoon, but it had just had Italian words. “It was weird, man. We were tripping, man.”
In June, Vanessa Bryant and her three daughters Natalia, 18, Bianka Bella, 4, and Capri Kobe, traveled to Philadelphia to visit Kobe Bryant’s childhood home in the United States during Father’s Day.
Bryant shared a carousel, including a new photo of the foursome, a throwback photo of Kobe as a teen, and her red nail design with “KOBE” spelled out in gold.
Ahead of Father’s Day, the former model also visited a new mural honoring her husband and late daughter Gianna “Gigi” Bryant. Philadelphia artist Ernel Martinez painted the art in one of the two new basketball courts built on behalf of Kobe and Gianna.
Vanessa and Kobe got married in April 2001, and then welcomed four daughters. Following the death of her husband and child in 2020, Vanessa Bryant, is keeping Kobe Bryant’s legacy alive, wanting to make the world of sports more equitable.
She founded The Mamba & Mambacita Sports Foundation in order to provide equal opportunities for child athletes. “It was important to Kobe, exemplified by Gigi and something that Natalia, Bianka, Capri and I will always fight for,” said Bryant. “That’s why in our camps, the girls and boys run drills together. They play on the same team together,” said Bryant.