For centuries Venice was one of the great crossroads of the Mediterranean: merchants, ambassadors, sailors and travellers came and went from the lagoon to every corner of the known world. Along with goods, words travelled too. And some of those born in (or passing through) the calli ended up in the vocabulary of half the world, often without the people who use them knowing where they come from.
Here are the most surprising ones. And since Venetians love to embellish a good story, at the end we'll also do a bit of myth-busting.
Ciao
It's perhaps the best-known Italian word in the world, and it comes from the Venetian s-ciào, meaning "slave". It was the short form of a deferential greeting, s-ciào vostro: "I am your servant", "at your service". Over time its meaning softened until it became the most informal greeting there is. From the Veneto it spread to the rest of northern Italy and then to the whole peninsula (the first written records of "ciao" date from the early 19th century), and from there into German, Spanish, Portuguese, Slovene and the rest of the world.
Arsenal
The Republic's great shipyard was called arzanà in Venetian (Dante mentions it in the Inferno: "Quale nell'arzanà de' Viniziani", "As in the Arsenal of the Venetians"), from an Arabic term meaning "place of manufacture". Thanks to the fame of the Venetian Arsenal, the word entered every European language: arsenal in English, French, Spanish and German.
Gazette
In the 16th century, news sheets circulated in Venice, and their name seems to be linked to a small copper coin, the gazeta: probably the price of the sheet. Another theory connects it to the gazza, the magpie, the chatterbox bird par excellence: perhaps fittingly, given the content. Either way, the name spread to newspapers all over Europe: the French and English gazette, the Spanish gaceta.
Lazaretto and quarantine
In 1423 Venice set up the first permanent hospital for plague victims on a lagoon island called Santa Maria di Nazareth. From Nazareth, probably blended with the name of St Lazarus, protector of lepers, came lazzaretto: lazaret in French and English.
Quarantine has a more shared history. The idea of isolating ships and travellers arriving from plague-stricken areas was born in Ragusa (today's Dubrovnik) in 1377, with a period of thirty days. The practice then spread to other Mediterranean ports, and the period was extended to forty days. The word, however, comes from Italian, and specifically from the Venetian form quarentena: the idea was Ragusan, but the name that went around the world is Venetian.
Sequin
The Republic's gold coin was originally called a ducat. To distinguish it from silver ducats, the gold one became the ducato de zecca, after the Zecca, the mint where it was struck, and eventually simply the zecchino. It was so widespread in trade that it reached France as sequin, and from there English. In the 19th century, women throughout the eastern Mediterranean would sew or hang pierced zecchini on their clothes, necklaces and earrings. That's why today sequin no longer means a coin, but those small shiny discs on clothing: the direct heirs of Venetian gold.
Ballot
Venetian elections, starting with that of the doge, were carried out through complex systems of drawing lots and secret voting that used small balls, the ballotte. Hence the Italian ballottaggio (run-off) and the English ballot. In other words, every time a British or American voter casts a ballot, they're using a Venetian word.
Regatta
The races between gondoliers and boatmen that livened up the Grand Canal were called regate. The English borrowed the word in the 17th century precisely to describe the Venetian spectacle, and today regatta means any boat race anywhere in the world.
Pants
Among the masks of the Commedia dell'arte, the old Venetian merchant Pantalone wore tight-fitting breeches that reached down to his feet, a cross between trousers and stockings. In the 17th century the French named that kind of garment after him, pantalon; English turned it into pantaloons, later shortened in the United States to pants.
Lido and scampi: "half" Venetian
Lido is an ordinary Italian word for "shore", from the Latin litus. What made the name famous, though, was the Lido of Venice, home to one of the first modern beach resorts in Europe: that's how, in British English, lido came to mean a public open-air swimming pool.
Scampi, on the other hand, is a word of uncertain origin, but probably Venetian or at least from the Adriatic. In the UK it's now in everyday use, especially for the breaded and fried version: not exactly the recipe I'd recommend in the lagoon.
Myths to bust
Venetians are, rightly, proud of their history, but sometimes they add a little of their own. Here are a few stories you'll often hear that don't quite stand up to the documentary evidence.
"Ghetto comes from geto, the foundry." Not quite. It's certain that the word was born in Venice, and it's certain that the area of Cannaregio where the Jewish community was confined in 1516 had once housed foundries. But there's a problem: in Venetian, geto is pronounced with a soft g (as in "gin"), while ghetto has a hard g (as in "go"). It has been suggested that the pronunciation changed in the mouths of German-speaking Jews, but that's only a hypothesis, and other scholars think it's a shortening of borghetto, "little borough".
"The Venetians invented quarantine." The name, yes; the idea, no. As we've seen, the first documented mandatory isolation was in Ragusa in 1377. Many sources, even authoritative ones, attribute that law to Venice, or claim that Ragusa was Venetian at the time. In fact the city had left the Serenissima's rule back in 1358.
"The ombra is named after the shadow of the bell tower." It's one of the most beautiful and most often told explanations: wine sellers in St Mark's Square supposedly moved their stalls to follow the shadow (ombra) of the bell tower to keep the wine cool. Hence the word "ombra", used in the lagoon for a glass of wine. Lovely, yes, but there's no firm documentary evidence. Take it for what it is: a story to tell at the counter of a bacaro, glass in hand.
Next time you greet someone with a "ciao", remember that you're speaking a little bit of Venetian.