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Updated: May 15, 2025
Many and many a tradesman who is well to do in the world has a little vigna outside the gates, where he raises vegetables and grapes and other fruits; and every festa-day you will be sure to find him and his family out in his little villetta, wandering about the grounds or sitting beneath his arbors, smoking and chatting with his children around him.
Walking is especially distasteful to them; and on a Sunday and festa-day you will see hundreds of carriages filled with working people, though the fares are by no means cheap. Whole families will starve themselves for weeks before the Carnival, and leave themselves penniless at the end, to get costumes and carriages to drive down the "Corso" with on the gala days.
Not long ago, there was a festa-day, in honour of the VIRGIN'S MOTHER, when the young men of the neighbourhood, having worn green wreaths of the vine in some procession or other, bathed in them, by scores. It looked very odd and pretty. Soon afterwards, there was another festa-day, in honour of St. Nazaro.
In consequence of this connection of Saint John with the city, great numbers of the common people are christened Giovanni Baptista, which latter name is pronounced in the Genoese patois 'Batcheetcha, like a sneeze. To hear everybody calling everybody else Batcheetcha, on a Sunday, or festa-day, when there are crowds in the streets, is not a little singular and amusing to a stranger.
May is the month of the Madonna, and on every festa-day you will see at the corners of the streets a little improvised shrine, or it may be only a festooned print of the Madonna hung against the walls of some house or against the back of a chair, and tended by two or three children, who hold out to you a plate, as you pass, and beg for charity, sometimes, I confess, in the most pertinacious way, the money thus raised to be expended in oil for the lamps before the Madonna shrines in the streets.
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