Impizza Ferali — plate 41
The Arti che vanno per via nella città di Venezia (1753, 1770, 1785, etc.), by Gaetano Zompini (1700–1778), contains sixty engravings of common, mostly poor people, peddling their trades on the streets of Venice in the mid-1700s.
Text
Quando scomenza el scuro ogni contrada Gha qua, e là i so ferali; e mi li impizzo, E tuta la Cità xe inluminada.
Translation
When darkness begins, every district
Has here, and there its lanterns; and I light them,
And the entire City is illuminated.
Notes
While Venice didn’t have a lot of public illumination in the mid-1700s, there were lanterns here and there, where they were needed to keep the streets safe.
The impizza ferali lighted these lanterns in the evening. The verb impizzar means to light a candle or a lamp, and a feral is a lamp or lantern. The one who lighted the lamp, was an impizzador, but Zompini went for the more descriptime name.
Many wealthy people employed a lantern bearer — see plate 7 — Codega.
See Boerio (1829), entries IMPIZZADÓR, IMPIZZAR, FERAL, and also CÒDEGA, ILUMINADOR.
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Related articles
Bibliography
Boerio, Giuseppe. Dizionario del dialetto veneziano. Venezia : coi tipi di Andrea Santini e figlio, 1829.
Zompini, Gaetano. Le arti che vanno per via nella città di Venezia inventate ed incise da Gaetano Zompini, Aggiuntavi una memoria di detto autore. Venezia, 1785.
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