Annie Hider writes of the Bracchi's in Growing Up in the City:

"Carlo Bracchi was an 'opportunist' Italian immigrant who settled in 'Li'l Lons' in 1883 and went on to build an extremely successful life for his family. By the 1890s, Carlo had progressed from sellling ice cream in the Eastern Market to building a two story house and a manufacturing business in Cumberland Place. Later, he brought out his brother Constantino from Italy, and after 1918, his six nephews and nieces.

Bracchi's factory was fully mechanised, although some of the procedures seem rather dangerous today. The freezer room had 12 inch thick walls filled with sawdust for insulation and Ammonia was used to cool the liquid ice cream. If a spill occurred, as it often did, the workers had to cover their faces with wet hankerchiefs. The ice cream was churned in huge machines like concrete mixers, which were operated by a system of overhead pulleys and leather belts. Carlo was granted a patent for this system in 1922.

As well as manufacturing ice cream, the factory also produced blocks of ice for the use in home ice chests or 'Coolgardies', gelati, butter and margarine ['coco butter'].

Trucks were used to deliver Bracchi's icecream but they are best remembered for their 'fancy little' hand carts and horse drawn carts. The 6' x 4' carts had poles on each side and were painted in bright red, blue and green and the horses wore tassels around their necks. Carts were stored at a vacant block in McCormack Place, next to Sister Graces, which doubled as a wood yard!

'People could take out a Hackney Carrige licence for 1s a year and then you just hired a cart and got going'.
'I remember on a Saturday morning the carts would all pull up outside Cumberland Place. The driver would get 'down' into the cart and the ice cream would be kept in deep containers in dry ice. There were two containers and the man would dip down and scoop it up into a cone. It was always white. It had a rather 'icy feel' about it, not like Gelati but not very creamy. Later there were also some sort of long green icy poles, the dye came out'.
'We used run outside and buy it by the block when Kate was alive'.
Marie Owen and Len Dearsley "

Alan Mayne and Tim Murray in the Journal of Popular Culture, Summer 1999, also make reference to the Bracchi family in an article titled "'In Little Lon...Wiv Ginger Mick':Telling the Forgotten History of a Vanished Community".

"Carlo Bracchi lived in Little Lon from 1884 until his death in 1932. An Italian, he had been born in Cremona in 1865, and migrated to Melbourne when he was in his late teens. Carlo settled immediately in Little Lon, making a living selling ice-cream by handcart. Forging a new life would not have been easy for Carlo, but in gravitating to Little Lon he had not been washed up with other human wreckage upon a barren slumland shore. "Making good" called for strategy, and by moving to Little Lon he joined a network of other Italian immigrants who had settled in the neighborhood during the early 1880s. Theirs was not an inward-looking Little Italy. Carlo, for example, married an Australian, and he marked Australian federation in 1901 by becoming "naturalized" as a British subject. Nonetheless, intermarriage between the Italians of Little Lon (in 1921 Carlo's son Stanley married Mimi Cerbasi, the daughter of his friend, the musician Thomas Cerbasi) cemented bonds of affection and support through which the newcomers inserted themselves into Australian society. And as confidence thereby swelled, Carlo brought out his brother Constantino from Italy to join him, followed by his six nephews and nieces.

Notwithstanding the stereotypes of slum-minded lethargy and aimlessness, Carlo and his circle were enterprising entrepreneurs. His friend Frank Curico hawked balloons in the street, on the look out for opportunities that he could turn to his advantage, and eventually becoming a well known musician. Carlo, meanwhile, prospered at ice-cream selling. In the early 1890s, he built a two-storey ice cream factory and iceworks, with attached home, in Cumberland Place. He expanded his business during the 1920s to manufacture butter and margarine. The slum genre characterized slumlands as regions of obsolescence and decay, yet Carlo's expanding business was quintessentially modern. Its products were marketed by brightly colored carts and later motor tracks. The factory was fully mechanized. Its production methods were innovative, the family taking out patents in 1922 for an improved churning mechanism. were innovative, the family taking out patents in 1922 for an improved churning mechanism. After Carlo's death in 1932, his family carried on the business until selling out in 1939 (Italian Historical Society, Donato)."

Mayne and Murray also mention in this article that the popularisation of the slum myth that characterised 'Little Lon' was partly perpetuated by well know poet and journalist, C.J.Dennis. Dennis' The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke and The Moods of Ginger Mick were both set in the 'Little Lon' area.

Dennis worked on these books with well known Australian artist, Hal Gye.