Vin in quarta — plate 60
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
El vin dele Casade, e dei Mercanti Nu travasemo ala stagion, che và, E lo portemo a vender per contanti.
Translation
The wine from the great houses and from the merchants
We decant it according to the passing season
And we take it to sell for cash
Notes
The title vino in quarta means wine in quarters.
Quarters of what? Figuring out measures and weights of past countries is not easy.
However, in the Republic of Venice, a common measure of liquids was a barila (barrel), which was six secchie (buckets) or twenty-four bozze (jugs). Each bozza was sixteen goti (glasses).
A barila was 64.39 litres, so a secchia was 10.73 litres, and a bozza 2.7 litres. A goto (a glass) was then 0.167 litre.
Given this, a quarter of a barila comes out as six bozze (jugs) which is around 16 litres, which doesn’t seem unreasonable for the volume of the mastela (bucket) the guy is bent over in the engraving.
See Boerio (1829), entries BARILA, SECHIA, BOZZA and GOTO. For the detailed measures, see Martini (1883), p. 818.
For the makers of the wooden barile, mastele, secchie etc., see plate 57 — Botter — Cooper.
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Bibliography
Boerio, Giuseppe. Dizionario del dialetto veneziano. Venezia : coi tipi di Andrea Santini e figlio, 1829.
Martini, Angelo. Manuale di metrologia, ossia, Misure, pesi e monete in uso attualmente e anticamente presso tutti i popoli. Torino, Ermanno Loescher, 1883.
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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