L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, JULY 9, 2026 www.italoamericano.org 28 L'Italo-Americano o n l y n o w a n d t h e n s p i l l s onto a football field when t h e t w o c l u b s h a p p e n t o meet. B u t o f t e n t h e m o c k e r y needs no stadium at all, only a rhyme. In the Veneto, gen- erations of children have learned a singsong verse that fixes a label on each city in turn: the Venetians grand l o r d s , t h e P a d u a n s g r e a t scholars, the Veronese all mad, the Trevigiani good for bread and tripe, and, most memorably, the vicentini m a g n a g a t i , t h e " c a t - eaters" of Vicenza. The nick- name clings to a grim old legend of the plague year of 1698, when Venice is said to h a v e s h i p p e d c a t s i n t o Vicenza to kill the rats, and hungry cooks were rumored to have returned the favor at the table. No one in Vicenza b e l i e v e s i t , a n d e v e r y o n e o u t s i d e i t r e p e a t s i t ; t h e v i c e n t i n i h a v e l o n g b e e n heartily tired of the joke, which is, of course, exactly w h y t h e i r n e i g h b o r s w i l l never let it drop. Elsewhere, the old quarrels are dressed in armor and paraded, just no did not die; they simply changed costume, trading the sword for the football chant, the festival float, and the well-aimed joke. Nowhere is this clearer than on the Tuscan coast, where Pisa and Livorno h a v e l o a t h e d e a c h o t h e r , cheerfully, for centuries. The grudge started during the Medici era, when Pisa was a proud old maritime republic and the Florentine grand dukes built up the little fish- ing village of Livorno into a great port. The once-mighty Pisans have never forgiven the upstart down the coast for outgrowing them, and t h e t w o c i t i e s h a v e b e e n trading insults for genera- t i o n s . T h e P i s a n s s a y t h e dream of a Pisan is to wake at noon, look out to sea, and no longer see Livorno; the L i v o r n e s i r e p l y t h a t t h e y would sooner have a death in the family than a Pisan at the door. Most of the time, the war is fought entirely in words like these – in the bar, in the market, in the affec- tionate contempt each city teaches its children – and like in Barletta, in Puglia, when the town spends three days each year re-enacting a 1503 duel in which thirteen I t a l i a n k n i g h t s u n h o r s e d thirteen French ones for the h o n o r o f t h e b e l p a e s e , a medieval grudge kept warm with trumpets and costumes instead of crossbows. And when Italians run out of battles and boundaries to fight over, they will happily fight over food. The most delicious of these feuds con- cerns tiramisù, that dessert of coffee-soaked savoiardi a n d m a s c a r p o n e n o w b e l o v e d t h e w o r l d o v e r . Veneto insists it was born in T r e v i s o , a t a r e s t a u r a n t called Alle Beccherie, in the l a t e 1 9 6 0 s ; n e i g h b o r i n g Friuli-Venezia Giulia insists just as hotly that it was being served in Udine first, and points to recipes it says pre- date the Treviso claim. In 2 0 1 7 , F r i u l i g o t t i r a m i s ù entered on its official list of r e g i o n a l d i s h e s , a n d t h e Veneto reacted roughly the way Bologna reacted to los- ing its bucket. And by the way, even the tortellino is c o n t e s t e d : B o l o g n a a n d Modena, the old enemies of the bucket war, still argue over which of them (or the village of Castelfranco Emil- ia between them) first folded the little navel-shaped pasta t h a t l e g e n d t r a c e s t o t h e shape of Venus herself. It would be easy to see all this as pettiness, and now and then, at a football match gone sour, it curdles into something uglier that no one s h o u l d d e f e n d . B u t a t i t s best, and it is usually at its best, campanilismo is one of t h e m o s t h u m a n t h i n g s about Italy. It is love, really, wearing the mask of a quar- rel: love of a particular sky- line, a particular dialect, a particular way of making a sauce, defended with a pas- sion out of all proportion to the stakes, precisely because the stakes were never the p o i n t . A p e o p l e w h o w i l l guard a wooden bucket for seven centuries are not a people short of things to care a b o u t , t h e y h a v e s i m p l y d e c i d e d t h a t w h e r e y o u come from is worth remem- bering. Often with a joke never far from the lips. which, more or less, they h a d . T h e p o e m b e c a m e a classic of the comic genre, later even an opera, and it fixed the bucket forever as the emblem of a truth every Italian understands in the bone: that the fiercest rival- ries are rarely about any- thing as sensible as land or m o n e y . T h e y a r e a b o u t campanilismo – literally, attachment to one's own bell tower, the campanile – the fierce, ancient, half-joking loyalty an Italian feels to his own town against the town down the road. Italy is stitched together from such loyalties, because it was for so long not a coun- try at all but a patchwork of city-states that spent cen- turies fighting one another. Unification came only in the nineteenth century, and it papered over rather than e r a s e d t h o s e o l d e r a l l e - giances. Ask many Italians where they are from, and they will name their city, or even their neighborhood, long before they think to say "Italy." And the rivalries that once sent armies to Zappoli- I n a hall of the town h a l l i n M o d e n a , k e p t b e h i n d g l a s s and treated with the r e v e r e n c e u s u a l l y reserved for saints' relics, h a n g s a n o l d w o o d e n bucket. It is not a beautiful object, a plain oaken pail, t h e k i n d t h a t o n c e d r e w water from a well, and it is not even the real one any- more; the genuine article is locked away for safekeeping, a n d a c o p y s w i n g s i n t h e t o w e r o f t h e G h i r l a n d i n a overhead. Yet Modena has g u a r d e d t h i s b u c k e t f o r s e v e n h u n d r e d y e a r s , because it was taken from Bologna, and in these parts a thing taken from Bologna is a thing worth keeping for- ever. The bucket is the trophy of one of the strangest wars i n E u r o p e a n h i s t o r y , t h e G u e r r a d e l l a S e c c h i a R a p i t a , t h e W a r o f t h e S t o l e n B u c k e t . I n 1 3 2 5 , Guelph Bologna and Ghi- belline Modena, already at each other's throats over ter- ritory and the endless quar- r e l b e t w e e n p o p e a n d emperor, came to open bat- tle at Zappolino, in Bolog- nese country. The numbers were wildly lopsided: some- thing like thirty-two thou- sand Bolognese against per- h a p s s e v e n t h o u s a n d Modenese. And the Mode- nese won, routing the larger army and chasing it back behind the walls of Bologna, w i t h s o m e t w o t h o u s a n d men dead between the two sides. On their way home, so the story goes, the victors lifted a bucket from a well outside the city gates and carried it off, and it is the bucket, not the battle, that Modena chose to remember. Three centuries later, a M o d e n e s e p o e t n a m e d Alessandro Tassoni made the whole affair immortal, with his mock-epic La sec- chia rapita, published in 1622, which told the story of the war in the grand, thun- dering style of Homer and Virgil, straight-faced and gloriously absurd, as if two great civilizations had bled f o r t h e h o n o r o f a p a i l – The War of the Stolen Bucket, and other feuds Italy won't give up FRANCESCA BEZZONE A playful mural recalls the centuries-old rivalry between Modena and Bologna, inspired by the famous War of the Bucket, one of Italy's best-known expressions of campanilismo (Image generated using Adobe Illustrator AI) LIFE PEOPLE PLACES HERITAGE TRADITIONS

• Cover