Title: Marrying Someone from Your Own Town
General Information about Item:
- Verbal Folklore: Proverb
- Italian, English
- Italy
Informant Data:
- Nancy Canepa has been an Italian professor at Dartmouth College since 1989. She is descended from Italian immigrants on her father’s side. Her paternal grandmother is from the Lombardy region of Italy, and her paternal grandfather is from the Liguria coast. She has attended two Italian weddings. Her husband is from the Apulia region of Italy.
Contextual Data:
- Social/Cultural Context: Up until recently, it was common for Italians to marry someone from their hometown. If someone married an outsider instead of a local, then members of his/her community would be distrustful of the outsider, usually because that person would have different customs or a different dialect than their own.
Item:
- Moglie e buoi dei paesi tuoi is an Italian proverb that warns people not to marry someone from outside of their town. It means your wife, like your livestock, should come from your own town. Literal translation: “A wife, an ox, of your own town.”
Associated File (audio):
Transcript of Associated File:
- “Well there are a whole bunch of proverbs about endogamous marriages, in other words marriage- marrying outside of your community, which of course today you know is perfectly, um, common and probably more common than marrying someone from your little village. But in the past, uh, marriages usually took place with someone from the same community and when, um, when it was someone from outside of the community, uh, that person could be looked on with a little bit of suspicion, just because, uh, he – you know it was usually the male that would come from outside – no one knew anything about him… and you know, again in pre-industrial times. And so there are proverbs that, for example there’s one that goes ‘Moglie e buoi dei paesi tuoi’ – ‘A wife, an oxen, of your own town.’ So, in other words, when you’re choosing your wife or your oxen – interesting parallel there – choose them from, you know, a reality you’re familiar with, your own town.”
Informant’s Comments:
- The informant said that, while in modern Italy it is common to marry someone from outside of your community, people in pre-industrial Italy looked upon exogamy with suspicion. According to the informant, the people of a pre-industrial Italian town would be suspicious if someone whom they knew nothing about came to their town.
Collector’s Comments:
- Because Italy didn’t become a unified country until the 19th century, it is very regionally diverse – each region has its own customs, cuisines, and dialect. People in rural areas of Italy would probably be unfamiliar with the customs of someone from a different region or town. Therefore, the proverb that the informant described warns young people that they might not know everything they should know about someone they met outside of their town.
Collector’s Name: Peter Loomis
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