A lovely, little, regionally-printed almanac of poems, prognostications and a calendar for the year 1796, called ‘Smiscianzeta schiesoniana’, a mish-mash of sketches. For each month are listed the festivals and saints days, interspersed with predictions for the coming year, framed as humorous stories in verse. The title ‘A chi toca toca’ means ‘Whose turn is it?’ and appears to relate to the full-page woodcut opposite of a chaotic game of blind man’s buff (in Italian, mosca cieca), in which a man, blindfolded, wields a bat in the direction of his friends who are falling over themselves to run away.
An exceptional, ephemeral source of local, vernacular history and folklore, almanacs like this one are unusual survivals, particularly bound individually as here. Especially notable is the fact that it is in Venetian, spoken principally in the Veneto region of northern Italy, of which Vicenza is a regional capital. The verb èsser (essere/to be) with distinctive conjugation ‘xe’ is littered throughout, along with variant nouns and spellings of nouns - ‘gnente’ (niente/nothing), ‘muger’ (moglie/wife), ‘zenaro’ (gennaio/January), for example. ‘For centuries [Venetian] was considered as a proper language, used both for spoken and written communications, fully recognizable and with a flourishing literature’ (Tomasin); publications like this one demonstrate its use at a local level as well as a literary one, at the end of the eighteenth century.
Almanacs were a popular form, widely printed in Venice and surrounding areas from the seventeenth century onwards, but ephemeral; we have identified just one other copy of this particular title and year at the Biblioteca Civica Angelo Mai, in Bergamo. It is listed with another from the preceding year with variant title and different printer (Vendramini Mosca). We have found just one mention of another surviving edition: ‘Schieson Visentin’ for 1775 (Parenzo, p.79), and only two nineteenth-century ‘Schiesons’ listed on OPAC SBN. The first titular use of ‘schieson’, sketches, or ‘schiesoncin’, sketchbook was at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and continued to denote those almanacs with less serious, more light-hearted content.
A. Parenzo, Almanacchi Veneti (Venice: Ferdinando Ongania, 1897). L. Tomasin, ‘The origin and evolution of the Venetian dialect’ [Comune de Venezia, online access].
