[2] The ‘Via di Panìco’ is so called, according to Rufini, because on a bit of ancient sculpture built into the wall of one of the houses where it had been dug up as is so commonly done in Rome, the people thought they saw the likeness of some ears of millet, panìco, and birds pecking them. [↑]
[3] Just as at Oxford, men say ‘the High’ and ‘the Corn,’ &c, it is very common in Rome to use the name of a street omitting the word Via. [↑]
[4] ‘Friggitoria,’ an open shop where all manner of fried dishes very popular among the lower classes, and varying according to the time of year, are made and sold; three or four or more enormous pans of oil and of lard are kept boiling, and at one season fish, at another rice-balls, at another artichokes, &c. &c, always previously dipped into light batter, are cooked therein to a bright gold colour. On St. Joseph’s Day, as it always falls in Lent, a meagre festa-dish is made of balls of batter fried in oil, in as universal request as our pancakes on Shrove Tuesday. A writer in the ‘Giovedi’ mentions two popular traditions on the connexion between the ‘frittelle’ or ‘frittatelli’ and St. Joseph. One is that St. Joseph was wont to make such a dish for his meal by frying them with the shavings from his bench, in the same dangerous way that you may see those of his trade heating their glue in any carpenter’s shop in Rome. The other, that on occasion of the Visitation, the B. Virgin and St. Elizabeth remained so long in ecstatic conversation that the dinner was forgotten, and St. Joseph took the liberty allowed to so near a relation of possessing himself of a frying-pan and preparing a dish of ‘frittelle.’
The writer already quoted narrates in another paper that the ‘friggitori’ formerly plied their trade in the open air, but one day a cat escaping from the attentions of an admirer she did not choose to encourage, sprang from a low roof adjoining, right into the frying-pan of a ‘friggitore’ full as it was of boiling oil and spluttering ‘frittelle’; the cat overturned the frying-pan, setting herself on fire, and carrying a panic together with a stream of flaming oil into the midst of the crowd in waiting for their ‘frittelle.’ Since that day the ‘friggitore’ fries under cover, though still in open shops. [↑]
[5] Great part of the fun of the story consisted of jokes upon these technicalities which it would be too tedious to reproduce and explain. [↑]
[6] ‘Brutto vecchiaccio!’ ugly, horrid old man. [↑]
I COCORNI.
This story of Sor Cassandro led to others of the same nature, but without sufficient interest in the detail to put in print, though they seemed to illustrate the fact that an imaginative people will rapidly turn the most ordinary circumstances into a myth. For instance, one concerned a family named Cocorni, who seem to have been nothing more than successful grocers, the Twinings of Rome, and here is a specimen of the language used about them:—‘When his daughter was old enough to marry, Cocorni would hear of no proposal for her. “No,” said he; “no one marries my daughter but he who comes in a carriage and four to fetch her.” And it really did happen that one came in a carriage and four and took her away;’ as if it were such a great matter that it implied something supernatural.