[4] The narrator ended this story with the following stanza:—
Si faceva le nozze
Con pane e tozze,
E polla vermiciosa,
E viva la sposa!
This is one of those rough verses with which such stories abound, and they have been rendered rougher than they originally were by substituting words which serve to retain the jingle after those conveying the sense are forgotten, like many of our own nursery-rhymes. The literal rendering of this one would be, ‘So the marriage was celebrated with bread and hunches of bread, and a chicken stuffed with vermicelli. Long live the bride!’ ‘Vermiciosa’ is not a dictionary word; ‘vermicoloso’ is the nearest, and probably a corruption of the same. Of course, primarily it means ‘full of worms;’ but as all the forms of words compounded out of the diminutive of ‘verme,’ a worm, may be applied to the fine kind of maccaroni which bears the same name, I am more inclined to think a fowl stuffed or served up with maccaroni is meant here—if it have any meaning at all beyond the purpose of a rhyme—rather than ‘a wormy fowl,’ the literal interpretation.
I have met this same ‘tag’ again and again in the mouths of various narrators at the end of stories which end in a marriage. Another such, familiarly used by every Roman narrator, is:—
‘Stretta la foglia,
Larga la via (often, ‘Stretta la via’),
Dite la vostra, Larga la foglia,