Whilst slowly getting Stuff migrated back into the Office/Guest Room, I ran across a July 2000 e-mail from my mom. I’d inquired about an old Italian lullaby she’d sung me when I was a kid (presumably passed down through the family). She knew only the phonetics for it (per the e-mail), but was going to ask Nona.
I don’t know if she did, but that inspired me to see if I could do some quick Internet research and figure out (a) what the song was, and (b) what it meant.
After a lot of digging, I came up with a small list of sources for lullabies (in Italian, Ninna Nanna songs, which is also a reference to nursery rhymes) that were close to what I remembered.
This one‘s the closest:
Nanna cuneta
La mamma è andata a messa
Papà l’è andato ai campi
Coi cavallini bianchi
Bianca è la sella
Viva la bimba bella!
Which translates, very roughly (I don’t speak Italian, except for a couple of vulgarities):
Nanna cuneta
Mama has gone to church.
Papa has gone to the fields
With little white horses
The saddle is white
Long live the beautiful baby.
A couple of things. First off, most annoyingly, I can’t find an online translator to translate cuneta. It might be cunetta, but that means “bump” and I can’t quite make that work. In Spanish it means gutter, but … I would think it’s a mistaken spelling here — but it’s off a freaking Italian website, so …
Also, the last two lines weren’t part of the lullaby that was sung to us. Instead, after the bianchi we got a soothing sing-song:
Nanna, nanna,
Mm-mmm, Mm-mmm …
Nanna meams “sleep,” by the way.
Now, there’s a similar lullaby I also found:
Nanna culletta
la mamma è andata a messa
il papà è andato a Torino
a comprare un burattino.
In this case, Mama is still going to Mass, but Papa is going to Turin to buy … a puppet? Culletta is interesting here — culetta (one L) would be a female donkey, but more likely it’s related to the verb cullare, to cradle or rock (i.e., “Sleep, cradled one”).
There’s also this little ditty:
Tutù tutù musseta,
la mamma è andata a messa,
il papà è andato nei campi
con tre cavalli bianchi;
bianca la sella,
bianca la gonnella,
bianco il girasole,
prendi un po’ di sole;
sole, solicello,
casca giù l’anello;
pesca e ripesca
ho preso un pesciolino
vestito di turchino!
Note lines 2-4. Mama’s going to church (again), and Papa’s going to the fields/countryside (some more) — but the phrase Papà è andato nei campi is actually closer to the phonetic transliteration my mom did of the song than Papà l’è andato ai campi — and more importantly, I’m sure (and the transliteration agrees) that “my” version had con tre cavalli bianchi (“with three white horses”) rather than coi cavallini bianchi.
Given the linguistic diversity up and down the Italian peninsula, it doesn’t surprise me to find such an array of the same imagery expressed in parallel (but not identical) language.
So aside from an inability to learn what cuneta means, I think I have my lullaby:
Nanna cuneta,
La mamma è andata a messa,
Papà è andato nei campi
con tre cavalli bianchi,
Nanna, nanna,
Mmmmm, Mmmmm …