BATTAGLIA1925-006 - ethnographic attestation
Children of Pirano (Piran)
Slovenia - Pirano - Piran, Istria - Southeast Europe
Play / practical
rullo Italian / local Istrian and Venetian names
rullo — 'roll / drum-roll'; Battaglia (after Premoli) links it to rullare, 'to move round in a circle', and the drum-sound likened to thunder.
By the time Battaglia came asking, no boy in Pirano whirled the rullo any longer; only the old remembered it as common, some eighty years before — a rectangular tablet with rounded corners, pierced at the top for a knotted cord, its name likening its voice to a drum-roll. The salt town's children still spun the two-string gurlo button on its loop, but the true roarer had slipped out of use before anyone thought to write it down.
Oggi questo gioco e completamente ignorato: era, invece, comune - mi dissero - un'ottantina di anni or sono... Era noto col nome di 'rullo'.
Today this game is completely unknown: it was, however, common — they told me — about eighty years ago... It was known by the name 'rullo'.
Battaglia 1925:204
- Object
- Rectangular tablet rounded at the corners, 15-30 cm, pierced at the upper end for a cord fastened with a simple knot.
- Function
- Obsolete children's toy: common about eighty years before 1925, completely forgotten as a game by Battaglia's day.
- Map confidence
- high - Piran old-town centroid.
- Source location
- printed p. 204
- Toy / secular survival