The other day I was reminiscing with some friends about games we used to play during the Christmas and New Years holidays in the good old pre-electronic games days. Probably one of the most popular cooperative games was, and hopefully still is, la tombola (with the accent on TOM-bola), which is more or less the same as Bingo.
I won’t attempt to explain the rules here, you can easily find them on the Internet by doing a search for ‘tombola regole del gioco’. However I thought it would be worth mentioning some of the vocabulary that we use when playing:
| il tabellone |
the board, which contains all the numbers from 1 to 90 |
| la cartella |
the score card, which contains 15 random numbers between 1 and 90 |
| fare ambo |
double, to get two numbers in the same row |
| fare terno |
tern, to get three numbers in the same row |
| fare quaterna |
to get four numbers in the same row |
| fare cinquina |
to get five numbers in the same row |
| fare tombola |
to get all the numbers on the ‘cartella’ |
In Napoli they have a system called la smorfia, in which each one of the ninety numbers is associated with an image. When they call a number they add the appropriate image, for example: "48, morto che parla" ("48, a talking dead person"), or "90, la paura" ("90, the fear"). You will find the complete list on this link: http://vicolostretto.net/la_tombola_napoletana.html
Once upon a time, before they invented plastic tombola sets with little shutters to mark the numbers, we used to use dried beans or the small pieces of pasta. We would position a bean or a piece of pasta on the top of the numbers as they were called and then, inevitably, somebody would sneeze or kick the table and all the markers would roll away. We would spend the next ten minutes shouting: "È uscito il 33? è uscito il 2?" ecc. ("Has number 33 been called? Has number 2 been called?" etc.), then carry on as normal until the next starnuto (sneeze) or calcio (kick), which, more often than not, wasn’t accidental!
Buon Anno a tutti i miei lettori!
Comments:
Edoardo:
Buon anno anche per te Serena. Grazie tante per tuo buonissimo blog. Edoardo
Yvonne:
I do enjoy your blog, and learning more about the Italian culture.
Grazie! Felice anno nuova. (Sorry if that is not the correct spelling.)