Give Me that Old-Time Profession! (3) More professions of yore. (This is the third in a series. The first one—including the general introduction to the series—is here; part 2 part 4, part 5, part 6)  The Fig vendor.
Not just
any fig, but what Italians call the "Indian fig." (I'm not
sure if it is even a fig.) This fruit (is it even a fruit?) is what I
grew
up calling a "prickly pear," the thing that grows on a "prickly pear
cactus." Let me do some research: Opuntia
ficus-indica. Good.
"Indian fig" and "prickly pear" are both
legitimate English usages. Good. Uh-oh—a fig (aka syconium) is a "false-fruit!"
Great. A
fruit is the "mature ovary of a flowering plant." OK—I think. A
cactus is
a
kind of
thistle. (I should have stayed awake in Botany 101.) The fruit of this
plant (is it a plant?) is also called "tuna." (I'm just copying here,
pardner.) Do not confuse this thing (is it a thing?) with another
"Indian fig" called Ficus benghalensis, which is a Banyan tree.I love prickly pears as long as someone else peels them for me. My most recent non-loving encounter with the Indian fig was when I showed off my considerable juggling skills at a local fruit-stand. Instead of reaching for apples or oranges, I chose the fruit-thing with thousands of almost invisible sharp filaments called—I imagine—"prickles." I spent many painful days deprickling my palms. That never would have happened if I had been jugging plain figs. Or even Banyan trees.  Old clothes vendor. This
one is probably gone forever as a profession. Most people give old
clothes to local charities such as the Sisters of Calcutta, who run a
shelter in the historic center of town. Recently, the city put in
place, alongside the rows of segregated trash bins (for metal, plastic,
paper, etc.), a number of bins for articles of clothing. They have
disappeared, probably because too many people were rummaging through
them for usable items to wear—not a bad idea, in
principle, except that they left the items they didn't want just lying
on street. The city's solution was to remove the bins. Flea markets
still abound in Naples and used clothes often wind up there. It may
very well have been the flea-marketeers, rather than people in genuine
need, doing all that rummaging.
(also indexed under
"Neo-Realism")  The Shoe-shine
boy. The
label on the card reads Pulizza-Stivali,
a boot-cleaner, or what used to be called a "boot-black."
Interestingly,
the most common name in Naples for this profession—which
has almost disappeared—is the dialect word sciuscià, a word of English origin.
It was the local pronunciation of the word "shoeshine" and came into
Neapolitan dialect when the Allies moved into Naples in late 1943. The
word is also the name of a prominent 1947 film
in the genre of Italian Neo-Realism.
To my knowledge, there is only one
itinerant sciuscià left in Naples, an elderly
gentleman who sets up his box outside of the via Toledo (aka via Roma)
entrance to the Galleria Umberto
almost every day and seems to do a good business. There are still a few
established shops with proper chairs as well as magazines to read while
you
wait, but those places are disappearing, too. The Viggianesi.
Street musicians, of course, still exist all over the
world. The term "viggianesi," however, to mean "street musicians" was
another tough one. Almost no one still recognizes this
term except as a demonym meaning "persons from Viggiano," a town well
south of Salerno; it is inland and in the Basilicata region of Italy at
3,000
feet amidst the Lucanian Appenine mountains. It turns out that the inhabitants of Viggiano have a very long tradition of seasonal emigration as musicians, typically with harps! I have never seen street musicians in Naples with anything close to the instrumentation shown in this drawing. The most common instrumentalists are solo accordions; there is also a smattering of solo violinists, As far as groups go, I have seen small jazz groups, a roving band of Peruvian Pan-pipe players (say that one five times fast!) and even, recently, a klezmer band. At Christmas time, there are also the typical Neapolitan zampognari.  It must have been around
1900 when a group of "Viggianesi" street
musicians last appeared on the streets of Naples, a logical market for
anyone from the economically depressed areas of southern Italy seeking
to make a bit of money in the big city. Apparently, the tradition of
exporting musicians was so strong in Viggiano that some houses there
still bear witness to that tradition in that some façades
(photo, right) bear bas-reliefs of musical
instruments. (Notice the "folk grip" of the violinist, or "fiddler" in
the above drawing;
also, I don't know why the harp is traditional there.) to main index) Links to part 1 part 2 part 4 part 5 part 6 |