inque_. This love of nicknames,
or _soprannomi_, as they are called, is, by the way, an odd peculiarity
of the Italians, and it often occurs that persons are known only
thereby. Examples of these, among the celebrated names of Italy, are so
frequent as to form a rule in favor of the surname rather than of the
real name, and in many cases the former has utterly obliterated the
latter. Thus, Squint Eye, (_Guercino_,) Dirty Tom, (_Masaccio_,) The
Little Dyer, (_Tintoretto_,) Great George, (_Giorgione_,) The
Garland-Maker, (_Ghirlandaio_,) Luke of the Madder, (_Luca della
Robbia_,) The Little Spaniard, (_Spagnoletto_,) and The Tailor's Son,
(_Del Sarto_,) would scarcely be known under their real names of
Barbieri, Tommaso, Guido, Robusti, Barbarelli, Corradi, Ribera, and
Vannuchi. The list might be very much enlarged, but let it suffice to
add the following well-known names, all of which are nicknames derived
from their places of birth: Perugino, Veronese, Aretino, Pisano, Giulio
Romano, Correggio, Parmegiano.

The other day a curious instance of this occurred to me in taking the
testimony of a Roman coachman. On being called upon to give the names of
some of his companions, with whom he had been in daily and intimate
intercourse for more than two years, he could give only their
_soprannomi_; their real names he did not know, and had never heard. A
little, gay, odd genius, whom I took into my service during a
_villeggiatura_ at Siena, would not answer to his real name, Lorenzo,
but remonstrated on being so called, and said he was only _Pipetta_,
(The Little Pipe,) a nickname given to him when a child, from his
precocity in smoking, and of which he was as tenacious as if it were a
title of honor. "You prefer, then, to be called Pipetta?" I asked.
"_Felicissimo! si_," was his answer. Not a foreigner comes to Rome that
his name does not "suffer a sea-change into something rich and
strange." Our break-jaw Saxon names are discarded, and a new christening
takes place. One friend I had who was called _Il Malinconico_,--another,
_La Barbarossa_,--another, _Il bel Signore_; but generally they are
called after the number of the house or the name of the street in which
they live,--_La Signora bella Bionda di Palazzo Albani_,--_Il Signore
Quattordici Capo le Case_,--_Monsieur_ and _Madama Terzo Piano, Corso_.

But to return from this digression.--At every country festival may be
seen a peculiar form of the lottery called _Tombola_; an