Here are snaps of some of the items on sale. Don’t miss out on the tents outside which are a prime source for exercise bikes, among other items!
We visited it again a few days ago. Did I buy anything this time?
Apart from one or two days of respite it has been weather for the ducks. It’s the sort of weather to read, watch Netflix or, to avoid the worst symptoms of cabin fever, play what in Italy are called ”giochi sociali” – i.e. games where you don’t have to exercise prehensile thumbs and avoid conversation to play.( Incidentally in Italy this year, giochi sociali have outsold all those games consoles).
Our favourite is “Scrabble” and, of course, chess. When particularly mentally lazy we enjoy Chinese chequers too.
We enjoy “Travel Scrabble” even if not travelling because the letters are well secured to the board and thus don’t tend to fly around. We are not brilliant Scrabble players and the days when a seven-letter word (the maximum length allowed in our version) appears on the board are truly red-letter ones.
Incidentally, “Scrabble” was invented in 1938 by an architect named Alfred Mosher Butts. Butts worked out how many points should be given for each letter by counting how often particular letters are used in the English language. The original game was called “Criss-Crosswords”. But Butts was not a successful salesperson and in 1948 James Brunot, a lawyer, bought the game’s rights. Brunot simplified the rules and renamed the game “Scrabble”.
There is a similar word game called “Scarabeo” which is an Italian variant of “Scrabble” and was created in the late fifties by Aldo Pasetti.
However, an exact Italian version of “Scrabble” has now come out and tournaments in this country are played using Scrabble (with Italian words of course!)
Parenthetically, Pasetti was accused by “Scrabble” of breach of copyright, but was acquitted by Milan’s Court of Appeal in 1961. So now it’s perfectly legal to play the “Scrabble” Italian –style. If there’s a travel version of this game (which surely must have different letter frequencies in Italy) then we’ll buy it for next Christmas!
It would be nice to have a “Scrabble” tournament among aspiring Italian language learners instituted in Bagni di Lucca (already famous for its historical games such as “Biribisso” and also for its summer open-air Burraco tournaments).
The only snag about “Scrabble” (apart from finding the last letters one picks from the bag are X and Z and that there’s no location free on the board in which to place them) is losing the blasted letters. EBay has helped in the past but we did find we were four letters short. How frustrating!
However, if one is bored by the weather there’s nothing to beat a good board game! And that’s what we managed to find at the Diecimo second hand shop and picked up an excellent vintage Scrabble in the deluxe version, the type that can often sell for over euros fifty. Clearly the set must have been left by an English family. (How can they possibly live without a Scrabble set now?)
However, the sheets where one can plot one’s game had a line written, enigmatically, in Italian.
Anyway we did enjoy our Scrabble game later that day and found the game board’s turntable particularly useful.
Ti Riuso will also take items for sale if they are suitable and in a clean condition.. The seller must present his or her ‘documenti’ including fiscal number and the items are duly noted in a database and a receipt issued. The seller can set the price for the item and the mercantino takes a commission. It’s worth investigating if your Italian attic is getting a bit full or if you want to return to enjoy post-Brexit Britain.