My other side

I was asked by email if I knew anything about the history on my Italian side. Not from books is my answer. Bodios (and my grandmother on that side, Sylvia Arzeni) came most recently from Ispra on the east shore of Lake Maggiore a few miles south of the Swiss border; a village called Bodio sits on the river that flows into the north end of the lake, in Switzerland. I am always interested in info from the region. There is a sub- Alpine tunnel there, and here is a pic of, well, a car wreck.


My grandparents' generation spoke "real" Italian and often German, but at home a "patois" (their word) that resembled the French that folks of the same age spoke in Provence when I was there in the 90's, including "ng" endings like the Medieval French you see in Villon's poems- all use "pang" rather than panno or pain for bread, "ving" ("buon ving") for wine instead of vino or vin. My contemporary cousins seem to speak Italian and French-- the second is what I have used to communicate with them.

The old ones, some who have been in Massachusetts and Vermont for two generations longer than my own immediate line, were good stone masons and brilliant bird-eating poverty cooks, but unlike the rowdy venturesome Scots on my mother's side they tended to stay in their Alpine valleys, where I suspect they have been since the glaciers receded. If they don't have that odd Mongol gene that some Lombards carry I suspect this is our most famous ancestor.