postteca201008 (PDF - 3.8 Mb) - Girodivite

Post/teca
to burrow its way into the national character, and take up its dignified position in the crook of
Neville Chamberlain’s elbow.
In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the ombrellai of Piedmont were a relatively
closed community of highly specialist craftsmen. They engaged child-apprentices from among the
poorest families of the region. Upon signing up, the apprenticed ombrellaio received a pair of
shoes, somewhere to sleep, two square meals a day, and, of course, an umbrella. He said
goodbye to his family for at least a period of four or five years—effectively, for good—and as well
as learning to make umbrellas, he hiked from town to town selling braces of them to wholesalers,
agents, and traders for export, mostly through Genoa.
As with so many other northern Italian industries (most famously the glass factories of Venice) the
relevant production techniques, recipes, and other trade secrets were jealously guarded and
protected with much paranoia, even ruthlessness. To that end the ombrellai used an in-house
language known as Tarùsc, which seems to have existed in one form or another among the hilldwelling
people of Piedmont and the southern cantons of Switzerland since at least pre-Roman
times. And while it came to be associated almost exclusively with the ombrellai, it was also used for
related purposes by smugglers, thieves, spies—indeed a comparatively large proportion of the
population whose occupations were covert.
According to local folklore, il Tarùsc was a very shy, small bad-tempered gnome who lived on the
slopes of Mottarone and Motta Rossa. He was surly, difficult, and misanthropic. Nevertheless from
him the ombrellai learned the art of making the shapeliest, lightest, most lissome and elegant
umbrellas in all the world. And in the process Tarùsc taught the ombrellai how to speak his own
strange tongue. He had a long red beard; wore green clothes, red shoes, and a tricorn hat that
doubled as a knapsack. His extreme shyness did not prevent Tarùsc from engaging in spiteful little
pranks, such as tripping people on mountain paths, wolf-whistling, and other impertinent behavior.
If you found yourself targeted in this way, the only solution was to scatter a sack of rice as near as
possible to the site of the affront, so that gathering it all up again, grain by meticulous grain, he was
distracted all through the night, long enough to forget all about you and move on to his next
hapless victim.
That was of course the unofficial story. In fact, the language called Tarùsc was documented in the
seventies by the ethnographer P. E. Manni da Massino, just in the nick of time, before the last old
men who still spoke it died out. His view was that Tarùsc drew upon five distinct sources: (1) Italian,
that is to say the reasonably stable dialects of Lombardy, Piedmont, Liguria, and the southern
cantons of Switzerland, and was therefore built, in turn, upon the ancient bedrock of (2) Latin; (3)
German, that form of it that seeped across the Dolomites from southern Austria, and across the
Swiss Alps from Bavaria; (4) French, thanks to the traditional alliances that regularly formed and
re-formed in the same period between France and Savoy, and (5) Spanish, because of Philip II’s
sixteenth-century annexation of the Duchy of Milan.
But Manni also concluded from his not always helpful informants that by the mid-nineteenth
century there must have been various strains of Tarùsc that were sufficiently different from one
another to cause a headache in the umbrella-making community. A linguistic fork in the road
divided Tarùsc alla stresiana (the form of Tarùsc that was spoken in Stresa), for example, from
Tarùsc alla massinese (Massino), and forms of Tarùsc that were spoken in the approximately forty
other Piedmontese towns and villages where umbrellas and parasols were made.
Manni never got as far as plotting any plausible grammar of Tarùsc. He made some progress with
his old men, but they were inclined to be grumpy, suspicious, and maddeningly reluctant to share
any expressions that related directly to the craft of umbrella-making, because obviously their
314