On the Li family Daoists’ 2012 sojourn in Venice in 2012 we were guests of the Fondazione Cini, staying virtually alone on the tranquil little island of Isola San Giorgio, just across from bustling San Marco.

Chatting with our Cini hosts, the fragrant Chiara and Sabrina, they told me that when Venetians come across each other by chance they like to exclaim

“Fatalità!” (pronounced “Fataità!”)—“Fate!”

A quaint English equivalent might be “Fancy bumping into you!”

Fatalità! Venetian dwellers with the Li band, or “Selling the Daode jing at the door of Confucius”  在孔子門前賣道德經。

I gather “Fatalità!” is more commonly an interjection, as when telling a story (“And what should happen but…”) or (in reacting) “Fancy that!”. It can also be a humorous way of accepting fate, almost like the English “Typical!” or “That’s life!”.

Without regard to expense or the feelings of the public, the erudite Rod Conway Morris, himself a long-term chronicler of Venetian mores, has obligingly ferreted out a little discussion by Sandro Mattiazzi (Veneziani: Figli del Leone Alata, 2002), with pleasantly arcane examples of a quarrel between gondoliers and a dispute during the war with the Turks, both defused by the timely exclamation.

Fatalità is chance [caso], the fortuitous event that is yet the result of a necessity great or small, and is typical of the Venetian mentality. […] Don’t despair if you can’t find the way to your hotel, or if you’ve left your bag on top of some well. Chance, which has aided the Venetians for almost two thousand years, will surely come to your aid.  Fatalità means that by randomly following another tourist you will arrive at your lost hotel, where perhaps you will find your bag on the porter’s desk. [my translation]

“Fate!” recalls fado, or (as I explained to Li Manshan) the Chinese ming 命… Those terms aren’t part of any such greeting, though in classical Chinese chen 臣 equates with the hackneyed “Ciao!”—itself borrowed from Venetian, and cognate with slave and Slav (for an erudite discussion, see here). Or the English “your humble servant”, mercifully abbreviated from “I trust I shall have the honour to remain your humble servant”, which is of course the correct form of address for foreigners to employ when staggering out of an East End pub at closing time.

Following an arcane exchange in The Times (“Have these people got no Holmes to go to?”—Myles. Mind you, I can’t talk) wherein it is established that Gautier’s Tra la, tra la, la-la-laire is not in fact a reference to the call of the inevitable ubiquitous gondolier, Rod observed in a letter (whose date of 1st April 2016 he assures me is merely coincidental—remember, the word “gullible” doesn’t appear in the OED):

The traditional gondolier’s cry (especially when rounding blind corners in canals) is “O-i!” This is also sometimes used by the inhabitants of the city as a jocular greeting.

I respectfully submit, m’Lud, that had they gone on to use the honorific form of address, the greeting might have become “O-i vo-i!”, evoking Venice’s Jewish heritage (I’ll spare you my fantasy reconstruction of the temporal and spatial vowel-shift). And given the city’s Turkish connection, I’m also still hoping Rod will further unearth the greeting “Ey-up!“—which, in turn, became the correct form of address when entering a kebab shop in Barnsley (cf. my haiku on Morris dancing). The joys of multiculturalism…

Inspired by Rod’s stimulating review, if you read in the gazette of the imbroglio over an arsenal of contraband artichokes; and if you’ve ever been quarantined after zany scampi and pistachio marzipan in the ghetto, or worn sequined pantaloons to a regatta—actually, even if you haven’t, which (let’s face it) is more likely—then you should tip your imaginary hat to the Venetian language. For a borrowing from Turkish, see The kiosk in Turkey and Europe; for Indian influences, see Tickety-boo.

Time for another gin.